Thursday, February 25, 2010

FINAL REVIEW

Profit Before Work is a trading system for the FTSE 100 market although the method could probably be used on any market and might be worthy of some research.

You get a 70 page manual plus online video tutorials including the author placing live trades so you can see how it’s done.

You use the free charts in IG index to spot the signal although any spread betting company or charting package would do the job.

The selling point of this particular method is that it can be used by those unfortunate souls that have to work for a living during the day. The idea is that you load up the chart just before 8am and then see if you can spot the trade signal just after 8 oclock. Apparently the trade can qualify anytime after 8am although it looks like it usually happens within a few minutes of the market opening.

Once you spot the trade, you place an order with the usual stop loss in place and go off to get on with your day.

Now, the authors preferred way to trade is to then check the chart at midday and move the stop taking 50% of the profit so far then letting the trade close by itself at 4pm taking whatever profit remains (unless it hit’s the stop in the afternoon). He recommends using a PDA if you don’t have internet access to do this.

However, he suggests that those unable to access the internet during the day might prefer to set a profit target for the day (limit) although he makes no suggestion as to what that might be.

Since this is aimed at people working during the day I tested this by setting a limit order and leaving it to run as I wanted to see how it actually performs for someone placing a trade in the morning and going to work without having to adjust stops during the day.

So, I set a profit target of 20 pips using the recommended stop of 15 pips and paper trading at £10 a pip (although beginners can trade at as little as 50p a pip which would mean a risk of £7.50 per trade).

After the first week it became apparent that I was missing out on the big movements by using a limit order so I decided on a new strategy of placing an order to close automatically at 4.30, taking whatever profit was on the table.

Using it this way means that you can still have a quick look in the morning, open a trade with a 15 pip stop loss and leave it to run. Then at the end of the day you just check to see how much you made. You would have either lost 15 pips or made a profit of whatever amount it was at 4.30.

I kept a record of the results from scalping 20 pips too, just for comparison, and these were the results after five weeks:

Scalping 20 pips / All Day

18/1 -15
19/1 +20
20/1 -15
21/1 -15
22/1 -15

-40 

25/1 +20 -15
26/1 -15 -15
27/1 +20 -15
28/1 +20 +116
29/1 -15 -15

30 (-10) 56 (56)

1/2 +20  +64
2/2 +20  -15
3/2 -15  -15
4/2 +20  +104
5/2 +20  +54

65 (55)  192 (248)

 8/2 -15 -15
 9/2 +20 -15
10/2 -15 -15
11/2 +20 -15
12/2 -15 -15

-5 (50)  -75 (173)

15/2 -15 -15
16/2 -15 -15
17/2 -15 -15
18/2 +20 +36
19/2 +20 +35

-5 (45)  26 (199)
Total Scalping Profit: £450
Total All Day Profit: £1990
 

As you can see, we have one more weeks worth of results for scalping 20 pips. Overall both strategies were profitable but clearly leaving a trade to run all day was far more profitable, simply because you can catch the days with big movements.

When you get this package, you get full support from the author including a useful weekly newsletter that goes over the weeks trades. What was interesting was that during my trial period it was actually a pretty poor period for the method. Obviously, as we all know, all methods have up and down weeks, especially trading systems, and the Profit Before Work system didn’t perform particularly well according to the author. Looking at previous results it’s clear that there is plenty of money to be made with this system and I can imagine that having a few more days a month with the big movements would really show some significant profits.

It would appear that this is a trading system that really can be used by people that are too busy during the day to monitor the charts. As long as you have a spare fifteen minutes or so in the morning around 8am then you can use Profit Before Work to make a pretty substantial second income.

This is marketed by Agora so the refund guarantee is rock solid. I’d recommend giving it a go.

You can get Profit Before Work here:

http://www.cash-master.com/profitbeforework.php

Filed under FTSE 100,Spread Betting by Graham