Trade of the week: up +20.35% in 2025 (+19% average over 7 years)

(Partial video transcript)

Previous trading outcome

Axel Rudolph: Hello and welcome to "Trade of the week" on Monday 8th December, 2025. And last week I went long EUR/GBP, and I did so because, if you look at my chart, we were bouncing off the May to December uptrend line, as you can see here. So we went long at £0.8775, and that's this horizontal line here. And at first it looked good.

But then as it sometimes is the case, the market did what it wants to do and didn't do what I wanted it to do. So anyway, the British pound appreciated very strongly and EUR/GBP fell through our stop loss-level. So, we had a tight stop on here trying to hit an upside target just below these highs here. We got close to these, but we didn't get filled and instead we got stopped out. So these things happen. So we had a loss on this position and lost 2%.

This week's analysis strategy

Now, what I would like to do today is not to come up with another "Trade of the week", because we're heading towards the end of the year and sometimes it's a good idea to actually rest, reset, analyse what went well this year, what didn't go so well, and so forth. And so, we are going to look at our stats, and what you should do is have a very simple Excel spreadsheet or something else where you basically track your positions. And I'll show you exactly how I do this here at IG next week.

I'll show you exactly all of our "Trade of the weeks", the P&Ls, what we look at reward-risk ratios, the spread, the target, how much capital risk, and those sort of things. But for this week, what I would like to do is just focus on our performance. And like last year, we were only right half of the time. Actually, this year we were less right than wrong, as you can see on mu spreadsheet. And I say ‘we’ because it's Chris Beauchamp and I who do these "Trade of the weeks", and, we basically had 18 winning trades and 21 losing trades - so more losing trades than winning trades.

Last year, it was slightly skewed towards the positive side. This year, slightly negative, and we had eight neutral trades. Now what that means, is we get in on a position, it goes in our direction, and then what we do is we move our stop to our entry level, thereby having a free trade on. So that's why eight of these got stopped out at break even. Or I actually think with one of these trades actually because this week I said I don't have a good set up so let's not trade, because you don't always have to trade.

Anyway, looking at the stats, we are up 20% for the year. So on a £10,000.00 account we would have just over £2,000.00, risking £200.00 per trade, so 2% of our capital. And as you can see on my Excel spreadsheet chart in the video, we had five losing months and then we had seven winning months. But you can see that for the winning months, some of them are much bigger than the losing months. And you can see that here on the right hand side also on this graph on the spreadsheet in the video, the orange line is our P&L, the green ones are the positive months, and the red ones are the negative months. So these are the stats. And, as I say, I'm going to go into how I set it up and all of that next week.

But for this week, let's just look at our performance in total. This is over the last seven years for "Trade of the week". I'm only responsible for the last three years here since 2023, but you can clearly see on the graph in the video that on average we're making 19% returns per year on average, risking 2% of capital. And last year we were up 31%. This year we were actually up 33% before I had a pretty bad losing streak. But we're still up 20% for the year.

So you can see that by managing your risk and being disciplined, you can consistently get double digit returns. But you need to be very disciplined in your approach. And, if you want to learn more about these sort of things here at IG, we also do webinars and you can join those at any time. And we can show you how Chris, Angeline and I approach investing and trading. Thanks for watching "Trade of the week" and I hope to see you again next week.