tactical trader

Last week I started using Société Générale’s (SG) Virtual Warrant Portfolio to develop a warrant trading idea into a proper strategy. The site is giving me the ability to paper trade all of SG’s Covered Warrants using real market prices with market and limit orders and a £10 virtual commission. You start the month with £10,000 in your virtual account and, for the competitive, there is a daily ranking system that shows the current performance of the top nine virtual traders.

At the moment I’m in the early stages with my strategy but using the Virtual Portfolio I’ve been able to get a really good feel for how the prices move in relation to the underlying instrument. So far I’ve been looking at FTSE 100 stocks as there are various put and call covered warrants available for 41 of them.

My ranking went as high as 6 last week, but is sadly down again today! I did have some good gains last week, including a huge 78.57% gain on a Standard Chartered (SB03) call and a more modest 18.90% on a Royal Bank of Scotland (SB87) call. There have been a few losers too, including 22.49% on a Tesco (SA67) put and 5.36% on a Vodafone SC29 call.

My next step is to devise a proper entry strategy and look at the optimum number of warrants to purchase in a trade (so far I've varied from 200 to 10,000) and maybe hit the number 1 spot in a few weeks time!