As a daytrader I often hop in and out of trades in minutes or hours – a style that suites me very well. I do, however, notice that I’m missing a lot of the larger trends, and in an effort of trying to catch these I’ve decided to start with a little experiment by opening a new live account and using that for swing trading exclusively. And as I like sharing, I will post the contents of that account here.

For this experiment I have opened an account at a CFD & Forex broker, allowing me to trade currencies, stocks and commodities. The decision to go with a CFD broker is taken because it allows me to easily short stocks, to trade very small (as opposed to futures which are usually very large) and because it allows me to trade on margin.

I have seen several very successful daytraders enter into similar experiments and fail miserably. Therefor, I’m starting out with a very small starting balance of 10.000 EUR. If it turns out I’m actually good at this it will grow automatically, if I suck I won’t loose so much that I need to start looking for a ‘real’ day job.

Some rules:
Starting balance: 10.000 EUR
Risk per trade: 1%
Max number of open positions at a time: 5 (not counting positions that have a stop loss at break-even or better)