Today I visited London to meet David and Anna Coulling at the Moneyshow event called Traders Expo London in the Grand Connaught Rooms in central London. My daughter Grace came along with me as we flew out on Thursday evening in a Piper Archer 3 aircraft from Lelystad (EHLE) to London Southend Airport (EGMC). On the way to the UK we had a lot of headwind. The 45 to 50 kt headwind lowered our groundspeed to about 75 kt effectively making out flighttime 3 hours before we landed at Southend Airport.
We could not fly a lot higher than FL80 due to the freezing level being at around that altitude and expecting to meet some weather enroute.
As you can see on the satellite radar image, we initially did not encounter the weather as it was just north of us. However, while approaching the British coastline, we did end up in IMC (instrument meteorological conditions) weather in the rain and clouds with outside air temperatures just above freezing and it being pitch-dark outside.
The Holiday Inn hotel was less than 100 meter away from the General Aviation Terminal building on the airport and we used this hotel as our basis for visiting London. During breakfast we had a view on the runway and even our aircraft parked below.
The next day we took the train from Southend Airport straight into central London. In the train we met a group of women all dressed up for a Christmas party organized by the company they all worked for. After the group photo at the London train/metro station, we went onwards to the Traders Expo London in the Grand Connaught Rooms.
While I spend most of the afternoon there meeting up with David and Anna Coulling, Grace spend her time looking around in the city.
Anna Coulling
The books and webinars of Anna Coulling are fundamental to trading forex. Her website www.annacoulling.com provides you with good information to get you started. Anna and her husband David gave a presentation of their approach during the Traders Expo event. After that presentation, we spend some hours together discussing forex and other stuff while enjoying the typical English tea.
Through David and Anna I got to meet Lewis (left on the picture above with David and Anna in the middle). Lewis is a fulltime trader and started right after graduating from Cambridge in Physics. It is an amazing story as he explains that he needed to turn 500 pounds into 1500 pounds each month at that time to make ends meet. He did manage that fully with trading forex, but now “only” makes a return of about 30-40% per month on his trades.
Ideas
Some of the ideas I brought home from the Moneyshow and chat with David, Anna and Lewis are the following:
- Try changing the time to trade from now trading in the afternoon (New York session) to trading from 06:00 UTC onwards as this is the transition period from Asia to Europe & London. The Asian session comes to a close and the European session is about to unwind;
- Forget about placing ‘market orders’ and replace them with ‘limit orders’;
- Place the ‘limit orders’ and their stop-loss based on the chart view;
- Start using the VPOC (volume point of control) indicator as it might help identify the most significant congestion areas of the chart as it helps to frame the price action in readiness for any break away, and volume of course will confirm the validity of any move.
Billy Elliot Musical
That evening I spend precious time together with Grace. We visited the musical Billy Elliot which was great! Late that night we took the train back from central London to Southend Airport to our hotel.
Flight back home
The flight back home took us only 1 hour and 15 minutes with speeds up to 166 kt (close to 300 km/hr) and this time due to a great tailwind pushing us over the North Sea inbound The Netherlands.
On the way back we also encountered some weather (the yellow/orange part above), so you can see that our actual track (the orange line on the left image above) was to circumvent the weather which worked well.