Trading Secrets: 20 hard and fast rules to help you beat the stock market (Financial Times Series)

Have you ever wondered how the top City traders make big profits from share trading? Do you know why the best investors know exactly when the market is going to rise or fall? And do you wish you could do the same?

By following 20 hard and fast rules,Trading Secrets shows you how you can make the same high returns as experienced investors and traders. Using historical, economic and technical trend analysis from the last fifty years, it identifies the ways for you to capitalise on such events as the clocks going back or moving forward, religious holidays, major sporting events and even the US presidential election.

Written for both experienced investors and also those with little knowledge of the stock market, Simon Thompson’s practical investing guide offers trading strategies that you can use over the short-term or the long-term. For instance, do you know how daylight changes affect how the stock market performs and, more importantly, how to make big gains by trading on this knowledge? Or do you know which sector has massively outperformed the market in the first quarter of the year – posting a quarterly return of 12 per cent – in all bar four years in the past three decades?

Trading Secrets uncovers all and more importantly explains why these trends occur, so that you can be confident your investments will pay off, even when the market is falling.

Simon Thompson has been Companies Editor of Investors Chronicle, the UK’s leading magazine for private investors, since August 2000 and a finance journalist with The Financial Group in London over 10 years. His weekly Companies column for the Investors Chronicle is read by 35,000 online and magazine subscribers every week and is one of the most read sections of the magazine.

Simon has an excellent track record at market timing, including calling the top of the Dow Jones Industrial Average within four days of the index hitting an all-time high in July 2007. His bearish view of the stock market has proved spot on with the four index short trades recommended in his Companies column producing an average profit of 44 per cent in 2008.

Simon also has an outstanding record at stockpicking. Between 2004 and 2007 he gave 67 stock and index recommendations in his companies column in the Investors Chronicle of which 90 per cent showed a profit and an average gain of 33 per cent. In 2005, Simon had a 100 per cent track record with all sixteen of his recommendations in his column that year recording a profit.