Getting started

Faceless Bureaucrat: The two day course was everything it promised to be.  I arrived having watched all the DVDs, having opened my spreadbetting account with MFGlobal and having purchased my eSignal charting software.  I was ready to rock.

I confess that I was nervous on arrival.  I had tried to psyche myself up to boost my confidence but my usual rallying cry - hey I'm a senior manager in the NHS, I can handle anything - wasn't sufficient when I opened the door to see who else was going to be on the course.  The room was packed with young men and most of them looked very business like.  Wheelers and dealers, I thought.  My heart sank a little as I felt quite out of place, being a woman of a certain age which shall as yet remain undisclosed in order to preserve the frisson of sexiness I have tried to establish with this blog.  NHS managers? Sexy?! Come off it....

Well I tried.

Anyway, fortunately I spotted another woman of about my age who I had met on the free seminar and could become a co-conspirator.  Judith is a lovely lady and as we chatted it emerged she had, in her earlier years, done a degree in maths and psychology which sounds like a perfect combination to equip one for trading (although I guess economics would come in handy too).  I did psychology for my degree and my parents both did maths degrees so I felt a camaraderie developing here.

Judith and I sat together and helped one another (she was definitely better at the maths than me) and marvelled at tutor Craig's ability to keep us engrossed throughout the two long days.

So now I am ready to trade.  However, the first step is to do the analysis of the sectors and the stocks themselves.  I need to establish whether the FTSE is up or down first.  If it's up (and it seems to be) then I should be looking to go long (buy) on stocks and I should find sectors that are clearly trending up and then look for stocks that are also going up within those sectors.  Craig told us to do this analysis and then develop a watchlist of the sectors and stocks to trade in.  He did say that he had a watchlist of his own which he could have shared but it was important we do the work ourselves and get used to doing the analysis.

So this is my work for the weekend, lots of analysis.  I have already decided that imposing some discipline on myself is required.  I need to have some checklists to complete so that I am objectively assessing these sectors and stocks and also prior to placing any trades.  This should jolly well force me to work through it properly rather than just jumping in and trading willy nilly.

Oh the joy!  Faceless bureaucrat loves devising checklists of all description.  I shall spend a few happy hours doing this before getting on with the analysis.  I also read somewhere that I should have a trading plan with rewards and punishments for either properly following my plan or rebelliously diverging from it.  That should be fun to put together too.  And perhaps then I will be ready to actually start trading....