ADVANCED TRADING STRATEGIES:
COURSE SUMMARY

Now that you have finished our Advanced Trading Strategies course, let’s do a brief recap of all the knowledge you’ve gained.

When we trade the financial markets, we do so with the aim of making a profit. Doing so is easier said than done; it is, therefore, essential to understand what you are doing and to have a well-reasoned plan behind your trading decisions.

To try and help you in your trading journey, we have covered a variety of trading terms, techniques and pointers.

You should now understand the following terminology:

• Leverage: the margin required for a position is only a fraction of the underlying value of the asset
• Trend-following: a strategy attempting to identify and profit from a persistent directional movement in a market
• Countertrending: a “sell high, buy low” approach suited to markets that are trading in a range
• Market-neutral strategy: a trading approach that seeks to minimise market risk by trading more than one position simultaneously

What elements can impact trading decisions?

You should also be familiar now with some of the elements that can inform a trading decision, such as:

• Market conditions: recognising what type of behaviour the market is exhibiting
• Trading style: whether you intend to follow the trend or look for reversals
• Risk management: how position sizing is a key component of a trading system
• Order selection: why you might use a stop or a limit
• Exit planning: the importance of selecting a stop level

What are the advantages of CFDs?

You should now have a good understanding of what CFDs are and how they work. CFDs can offer a number of advantages to a trader, including a choice of leverage which also comes with a high risk of loss; the ability to go short as well as long; and no stamp duty to pay when trading shares*.

What trading strategies are available?

We’ve discussed how you can use stop and limit orders, both to open new positions or to close existing ones, and how they offer the convenience of automatically executing a trade should the market meet your specified price condition. We’ve also introduced some potential strategies that orders can help to facilitate, such as using a limit to attempt to improve your entry level, or using a stop as a way of enforcing trading discipline.  

We also talked about how market conditions can change and how a flexible approach allows a trader to match their actions to price behaviour. We discussed how trend-following attempts to “go with the flow” in the hope that a market will continue to move in a certain direction, and how countertrending is essentially an opposite approach that looks to profit from prices reversing.

You should now be familiar with the concept of a market-neutral strategy and a specific type of this strategy called pairs trading.

We looked at the concept of correlated financial instruments and ran through an example of how a pairs trade might work in theory, relying on an assumption that the price relationship between two correlated instruments is likely to revert to the mean in the future.

Finally, we went through the component parts of a mechanical trading system. We saw that to be a complete system, we need a variety of rules, including what markets to trade, how much to trade, when to enter, when to cut a loss and when to take a profit.

*Tax laws are subject to change and depend on your jurisdiction and individual circumstances. Please check with a tax advisor if in doubt.