Hi everyone,

Just a short post today to mention a Trading Competition MarketSpreads are running which might be of interest to some of you. There is a prize fund of €20,000 so that’s not to be sneezed at, especially in these recessionary times and a nasty budget in December on the way! And for those new to trading a competition like this it is probably a good way to get some trading practice in without risking your own money and possibly coming out with a nice Christmas present if your trades work out well! The competition runs until December 17th so you’ve plenty of time to enter and get on the leaderboard.

I’ve had a quick look at the competition details on their website and it seems straightforward enough, once you sign-up to take part MarketSpreads set you up with a separate demo account with €5,000 in it which you basically have to grow as high as you can by the time the competition ends on December 17th. Whoever grows their account the highest wins the top prize of €10,000. There is a separate prize of €6,500 for the new client who grows their account the highest. And there’s another €3,500 prize which will be awarded by MarketSpreads for exceptional or interesting trades that make good use of their platform – not too sure what you have to do to be in with a shout of winning this prize but I am sure someone will do something a bit out of the ordinary which will grab the attention of the MarketSpreads guys.

It’s worth noting that there is an upfront cost required to enter, if you are a new MarketSpreads client you need to open a live account and fund it with €250, however this will be refunded to you once the competition ends, so essentially it’s free for new clients to enter. Not quite so free for existing MarketSpreads clients however, they will have €250 deducted from their live account to enter but this will only be refunded if the balance in their competition demo account is higher than the 5K starting balance at the end of the competition (not too bad I guess given that most traders would expect to grow a €5K demo account to some degree over a couple of months, certainly in my experience of using demo accounts over the years trading always seem a lot easier when my own money is not at stake when I hit the Buy or Sell button!!).

To be in with a shout of winning you will probably need to be fairly aggressive in your trading strategy, to put some context on it last years winner grew his 5K starting balance to 37K in the 3 months the competition ran for. By my calculations this years competition will run for about 50 trading days, so you’ll need to get off to a quick start and consider using your (hopefully!) increasing balance to leverage up your trades as the weeks go by.

As for what to trade, well there is plenty of choice on the MarketSpreads platform, everything from equities, commodities, currencies and indices. Some thoughts to consider in deciding on your trades:

• Will the run-up in Gold prices continue for the next couple of months, with many analysts calling for Gold to $1500 by year end that might be a tasty trade to consider…or will the “bubble” burst and the money be made by those going short??
• What about the other hard commodities – will Silver, Platinum and Palladium continue to rise??
• On the currency front, will the quantitative easing by the Fed see the Dollar continue to weaken against pretty much every other currency? Will the Bank of Japan start selling more Yen on the markets like they did a couple of weeks ago in an effort to stop the continued rise in their currency?? What about the on-going sovereign debt worries of the Eurozone countries, how will that impact the Euro??
• If you are going to mainly trade currencies in this competition make sure and keep an eye out for when the various central banks are going to announce their latest interest rate decisions because they can often lead to wild swings in the currency pairs offering a great opportunity to grab some profits.
• As for equities, make sure you are aware of when results are due out, for example Q3 results from the US companies will start to kick-off properly in the next few days with Alcoa announcing. For the brave trader these results could offer some excellent (if rather risky!) trading opportunities to bag some profits if you are willing to long or short ahead of the earnings release…

If you have any other interesting trading ideas that you’d like to share use the comments box below (or maybe you just want to keep them to yourself until after the competition is over!). If you are interested in entering click here to go to the competition entry page, and remember the fun kicks off on Monday!

To all those who are taking part, best of luck!
Happy Trading :-),
SpreadTrader.ie