B&B Days

In the financial world, you have your good days, your not so good days, and your Bradford & Bingley days. Right now, B&B is trading at 37.25. To remind you here, I bought at 112.92. As of late, I've been having more B&B days than I've been having good days.

On the good days scale, I recently managed to cancel one of my forex trades, which I really think was an achievement. I had made the decision to move funds I held in USD back to GBP as I believe that the pound is nearly as low as it can go versus the dollar... or that the dollar has some recessing to do for itself which will even out the rate... either way I foresaw the bottom of the tank being reached and decided that I should protect my US assets and move them to a more secure currency.

The thinking was pretty sound... but as with most of my recent judgements, I seem to have missed the bottom of the tank when I traded at around 1.845. A couple of hours later, the rate had fallen to 1.817. This might not seem like a lot, but on every pound, the difference can add up.

To give you an example, if I was transfering just $1000, I would be looking at a return of 542GBP with the first rate and 550GBPish with the latter. So an average of 8GBP per $1000. Pretty substantial when added over thousands.

After I placed the trade, there was a confirmation issue with one of my EFT accounts. I used this as the grounds on which to cancel my trade... saying that I needed a more immediate trade and had used another broker. As you can imagine this did not go down well with the broker and after a few "binding contact" conversations involving me grovelling pretty heavily; they canceled the trade. This was a pretty good result. I guess when you are being hit with 67% losses on investments like B&B... small results like this seem sweeter somehow.