tactical trader

In my one to one coaching work I meet a lot of people who have been ripped off by the scumbags who know how hard it is to make money and how easy it is to sell people the dream.

If I had the time and the resources I would mount a campaign to wipe as many of these people off the face of the trading planet as I could. Unfortunately I can only warn as many people as I can through posts like these and my other writings but if anyone fancies joining me in the crusade let me know - we may be able to get a team together to share the workload.

The reason I mention this now is that I was heartened to discover that two Daily Mirror journalists were recently found guilty of market abuse. These two criminals were tipping stocks then selling them as their readers bought.

Here’s the DTI press release:

Two of the three men accused of using the Daily Mirror ‘City Slickers’ column to inflate share prices were found guilty last Wednesday at Southwark Crown Court, following a DTI prosecution. A third pleaded guilty at an earlier hearing.

The jury found that former Daily Mirror financial journalist James Hipwell and private investor Terry Shepherd conspired together with Anil Bhoyrul a former Daily Mirror financial journalist to use the City Slickers column to boost the value of their investments between August 1999 and February 2000.

Competition Minister Gerry Sutcliffe said: “Today’s verdict should send out a clear message that the Government will take action against those who break the law for their own financial gain. The DTI is committed to establishing and maintaining fair markets.”

Terry Shepherd, a former day-trader who was in regular contact with Hipwell and Bhoyrul benefited from the ‘tips’ they featured in the column. He encouraged and assisted their activities by publishing advance notice of the tips on internet bulletin boards and, in the latter days, contributed ideas for tips.

Anil Bhoyrul pleaded guilty to the conspiracy on 11 August 2005, but Court restrictions prevented that plea being reported until today. Hipwell and Shepherd denied the charges against them.

The investigation began in January 2000 when the London Stock Exchange alerted the DTI’s Companies Investigation Branch to a ‘very significant rise’ in the shares of Viglen Technology plc. The Secretary of State duly appointed inspectors to ascertain whether there may have been a contravention of the insider dealing legislation.

As a result of their findings, a criminal investigation was undertaken by Investigation Officers of the DTI Investigation Officers Section. They discovered a pattern of “purchase, tip and sale” of shares and evidence of an agreement between the Bhoyrul, Hipwell and Shepherd to use the City Slickers column to manipulate the market.

Between August 1999 and February 2000, James Hipwell made more than £40,000, Anil Bhoyrul around £14,000 and Terry Shepherd made around £17,000.

Sentencing will take place after the 17th January.

Incredibly some people are urging leniency as this is a victimless crime, what on earth are these people talking about? How can stealing money from innocent people in this way be described as victimless?

There is absolutely no doubt that in this whole sorry scernario there were thousands of losers and two clear winners. These men deliberately lied to make people part with their money, I do not care how you dress this up it is theft and should be dealt with accordingly.

The trading and investing markets are awash with scams and schemes that are designed to do only one thing, relieve hapless investors of their money and years of regulation has had precious little effect. The message is clear, as ever do your own research and do not believe these people.

I've been monitoring yesterday's changes and all appears to be working well (touch wood!). I've made a couple more updates this afternoon - they are:

• Added distance in kilometres to the information window displayed when you click on a marker

• Added a 'View location' link to the member profile page. This link will only be shown if the member's location can be determined and they have allowed their personal information to be shown. Clicking on the link will open the Trader Locator, center the map on the member's location and zoom in.

While you're playing with the maps, here are some locations that are worth a visit to get used to how the map works (turn the map to satellite mode for the full effect):

• New York Stock Exchange and Wall Street

• London Stock Exchange

• Davis-Monthan Air Base - now that's a lotta planes!

Have fun

Over the past few months I’ve been reading about new developments in web technology with buzzwords like Ajax and Web 2.0 cropping up frequently. I’ve also been following the development of the Google Maps service too, partly because I’ve always been interested in maps, but also because it makes use of these new technologies.

So a couple of weeks ago I decided to start a small project to try them out – the result is the new global Trader Locator.

The Trader Locator uses the Google Maps service to show you where in the world other members and guests visiting the website come from. You can get a more detailed description of what it does and how it does it here, but you really need to start playing with it do see what it can do for yourself!

Other updates

I’ve also made some other updates and tweaks to the site today, including:

• the home and what’s new pages now show the number of people online as part of the Trader Locator link

• revised Terms and Conditions containing the use of IP addresses for geolocation

• fixed delete private message functionality so that after deleting a sent item you are redirected back to the sent items (before you would be redirected to the received items)

• members in the USA and UK will have their post codes validated more strictly to ensure they are valid - USA post codes can either be 5 digit zip codes (e.g. 90210) or ZIP+4 code (e.g. 90210-1234) and UK post codes are checked against the BS7666 standard.

Important: you might need to clear out your browser cache for some of the updates to appear correctly.

That should be it for this month. I’m hoping to get the much adored emoticons back in late January along with a few more bits and pieces.

I came across an interesting article on the BBC website yesterday: Tis the season to make lolly.

The pro trader gets a pretty good deal: if you lose on your trades you get a nice big salary; but if you win on your trades you get a nice big salary and a nice big bonus. Plus you do all your trading with somebody else's money!

Aside from the talk of big bonuses there some good quotes, including this one (the emphasis is mine):

Bad days can affect you but it's all relative. A friend of mine is a senior trader with targets 10 times mine and much bigger risk limits. The other week he lost £1m which was 20% of his P&L [profit and loss, which determines the bonus] for the year. He's made a good chunk of it back but that was a bad week. For me, a £10,000 loss would be a bad week. It's a different style of trading.

For a lot of Tactical Traders it'd be described as a bit more than a "bad week".

And this from the reader comments:

...someone earning a £1m bonus will immediately hand 40% of it to the taxman. That's £400,000, or the equivalent of about 25 trainee nurses' salaries. Let those who pay more tax than that every year criticise, and the rest keep their petty politics of envy to themselves.

So I guess it's bonus time for the tax man too!

After reading the article I asked Steve about my Christmas bonus, but he claims that since I was appointed "Chief Market Strategist" for Tactical Trader I don't qualify for a trading profits related bonus...so it looks like I'll be doing my Christmas shopping at the local Pound Store again this year!

A swift blog entry to apologise for the lack of input from myself recently.

I am currently without a computer and without internet access! It's worse than being ill, and it's worse than being without your car. It's like losing a limb!

Anyway, all going well, i should be back up and hooked up online by next week..

On the CFD front i have opened an account with IG Markets Pro to have a dabble - looking good so far and in amongst my career strategising then i should have time to finish my write up before christmas!

CTI350

I’ve had a few questions about what’s happening with CTI350 as I didn’t post it much last week. First, it’s nice to know that people are interested in seeing what it has to say, and second, no I’ve not decided to stop the experiment just because it had a bad run!

CTI350 redeemed itself a little last week by getting 3 out of 5 days correct, this follows a run of 6 days in a row where it was wrong. I’d like to see if another period of tight close-close ranges causes a similar bad run in future. Over the past two weeks the close-close range has been increasing, so hopefully I’ll have a better success rate this week.

Website updates

I’ve been spending a bit of time on some website updates over the last few days (to give my head a rest from all the research and strategising I’ve been doing since the start of November!)

Most of the updates are minor tweaks, but there are also a couple of new features that I’ve been having some fun with. Chris will also be updating the server software sometime in the next week which may cause a short period of down time.

Wade Cook, a trading guru known for his options trading seminars, books and tapes, has been charged with eight counts of tax fraud, conspiracy and obstruction of justice. His wife Laura has also been charged, with prosecutors accusing the couple of concealing almost $8.9 million in royalties between 1998 and 2000.

Wade Cook, author of The Wall Street Money Machine, Wealth 101 and Business by the Bible, has run seminars on stock market investing, options trading, asset protection and, perhaps ironically, the avoidance of income tax.

In tax returns filed for 1998, 1999 and 2000, prosecutors claim the couple concealed nearly $8.9 million in royalties from Wade Cook’s books and seminars using a fictitious limited partnership said to be owned by a tax-exempt entity called a charitable remainder trust.

For more information about Wade Cook, along with information on prior fraud charges made against him, I recommend you read Wade Cook Revisited on The Motley Fool.

A number of people have asked me to post trades I am considering or active in. I thought I would make a start with some things from our US equity strategy, it seems to me the most sensible thing is to post items that are added/deleted from my current watchlist so you can take a look at them and form your own opinions.

The first is a firm called Agrium (AGU) a leading global producer of things like agricultural nutrients and other industrial products. Agrium currently produces three main groups of nutrients, nitrogen, potash and phospate and has solid fundamentals. At the time of writing the price is at 20.20 following a fall from 24.50, I am thinking this is a temporary blip and that the uptrend will resume with an initial price target of at least 24.00 and a medium target, depending on the method I use, of 28.00.

The second is Invitrogen (IVGN) which at first sight does not look that great. Not only is it in the dreaded biotech sector but also huge long term debts and a recent earnings warning. So have I gone mad? I don't think so as there is still strong demand for what they do and the charts look good with a 10% rise in November alone. This would be a short term buy as I have no interest in holding biotechs for the longer period, too many painful memories.

So, that is the first of my trading blogs which I hope are of some use but please don't forget that I make mistakes like everyone else does so make your own mind up.