Traders' Roundtable

I was interested in comments on using the Turtle System to trade stocks.
More specifically I have an account to trade that is restricted from trading on margin. From my research using the Turtle System leveraging using margin seems to be necessary.
Any comments or suggestions on how to apply the Turtle System to an account not using any margin would be appreciated.

thanks,

Bryon,

In stocks, lack of margin just means you can only bet your own money. Given that margin is normally 1 for 1 this reduces your returns to one half but also your drawdowns to one half.

If that return is too low then you could consider closing your stock account and opening a UK spreadbetting account. With spreadbetting you get considerably more than 1:1 margin and get trade the major UK, US and European stocks. If you do this though be careful not to overuse margin .... and you avoid this by betting a percentage of your equity (see discussions here and on tradersclub about fixed fraction of equity betting) rather than raising your bet size too much just because your margin is so much better.

Please excuse me if you already new this.

John

Kiwi

thanks for your response and suggestions.
and no i didn't already kwow that so many thanks.

Bryon

Hi Bernd

No i can't go short with this account. There are some difficult restrictions with this particular account. It is a Canadian retirement savings account, that can't use margin, can't take on short postitions and can only hold 30%
in foreign securities.
I can't seem to figure out a good way to trade this account because of these restrictions.

thanks for your comments Bernd, any more would be appreciated.


Bryon

Bryon,

If you're allowed to trade US mutual funds in the account, you may want to take a look at www.profunds.com, if you're interested in short positions on the market. Their funds provide leveraged and non leveraged exposure to most of the US indicies (both long and short).

This doesn't solve your problem of wanting to trade the turtle system, but it may be worth a look.

Jason

Hi Jason

thanks for your response.
I will look into that.

Bryon