2 weeks to go, still up, just!

Well, I guess one of the plus points is that I am UP this year at least. Not quite the million quid I was after though.

It's pretty clear to see from the P+L that FX and Equity Indices hurt me.

In FX, it was exclusively Cable (GBP/USD) which killed me, I traded from the short side all year, as it rose ~20 big figures. I used options on it also. Would be easy to say that I misjudged the trend, but most of the gain was from mid-April to mid-May (1.75 to 1.90) then over the last month its up another 6 points. So maybe the solution is a stop-loss system, and then keeping myself out of the market for a few weeks, or at least betting smaller size. If I'd used stop-losses, and bet small then added to WINNING positions only, I'd have minimized losses (£26,000 in total). My problem was that I was SCARED to not have the short position on in size if the market was going to move!

Equity Index problem looks the same, sticking to a losing position all year instead of realising an early loss and walking away. Down £28,600 this year trading SP500 and DOW 30, both index and options. Although it did give me more comfort having my individual stock long positions on despite being bearish most of the year, and I'm up £21,900 on those stock picks.

The better stock picks...up £4,500 on GM, up £2,000 on Heinz, up £3,000 on Cisco, up £6,000 on Pipex, and the best one, up £14,000 on British Telecom.

In commodities, I missed the bull run in Gold despite being an early believer, I kept missing my entry, and only had one small trade on. But the main winner was on Crude, where I shorted it around $73-74 a barrel, and bought it back 9-10 points lower, despite having some hairy moments when it ramped up to $80. Very very nearly pulled the trigger on cutting losses on that one.

And in rates, did some good trading in Treasuries (up £8000), Bunds (up £2500), and chucked in about £1000 each on Gilts and EURIBOR futures.

Lets hope (yes HOPE) for an equity setback coming into Xmas, and I'll be using the festive season to think how I should be positioning for 2007. That will be my year!

Any thoughts, comments or ideas, feel free to post!