Simple Trader 🇨🇾

Private Investor/Trader, managing SIPP, ISA & SB accounts.
'simplicity is the ultimate sophistication'

[Julia Hartley-Brewer @JuliaHB1]

Isn't this you happily shaking hands with the Syrian President, Ahmed al-Sharaa, who led an Al-Qaeda linked terror group which carried out multiple beheadings? Just checking on your tolerance levels for this sort of stuff @Keir_Starmer

[nicholas slater @patviera]

Kemi is absolute class.

If she’s not PM it will be a travesty .

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Well said

[Liam Halligan @LiamHalligan]

Conventional wisdom says that leaving the European Union has harmed the British economy.

Listen to almost any Brexit debate – over the airwaves or on the professional conference circuit – and it’s invariably taken for granted being outside the EU has done serious economic damage.

Now we're in June, and as the 23rd approaches – the ten-year anniversary of that hotly-contested, era-defining referendum – this message will be rammed home again and again.

But it simply isn’t true.

My latest "Economic Agenda" column in @Telegraph

🧵1/7

https://t.co/3x1C903R8n

[Allison Pearson @AllisonPearson]

Shut up.
Moron Miliband.
YOU are responsible for insane energy prices because of your green taxes.
Net zero will destroy what remains of our economy.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Things people did in 1965 without thinking about them.

Skipping breakfast when they weren't hungry. Now: "intermittent fasting." Requires an app, a podcast, a wearable, and a £40 hardback explaining what your great-grandfather did for free on a Tuesday.

Drinking water from the tap. Now: reverse-osmosis filtered, remineralised, sold in glass bottles at £4.50 a litre because the tap is, apparently, suspect.

Going outside without sunscreen. Now: "irresponsible UV exposure." SPF 30 daily, year-round, including overcast February mornings in Glasgow, where the UV index is roughly that of a filing cabinet.

Walking somewhere. Now: a logged step count, a target heart rate zone, carbon-plated trainers, and a recovery protocol for the walk to Sainsbury's.

Cold houses in winter. Now: "thermal stress." Replaced with a smart thermostat holding 22°C year-round, then sold back at £3,200 as a cold plunge tub to deliberately recreate the conditions everyone hated in 1973.

Eating three eggs for breakfast. Now: "dietary cholesterol risk." Triggers a lipid panel and a frank conversation about your "egg habit," conducted by a doctor who hasn't been told the 2015 retraction happened.

Eating butter. Now: "saturated fat exposure." Triggers a leaflet for a plant spread containing fourteen ingredients, none of them dairy and none of them recent.

Children playing outside until the streetlights came on. Now: "unsupervised outdoor risk." Requires a GPS tracker, a registered childminder, and a parental anxiety app, none of which existed when your mother was, at nine, climbing a tree two miles from home with a penknife in her pocket.

Three meals a day at a table with the family. Now: a "structured eating window" and a "social connection intervention," delivered by a £140-an-hour behavioural psychologist suggesting you eat dinner with your wife.

A 55-year-old man lifting his own shopping into the boot. Now: a "functional fitness goal," six-week programme, personal trainer named Jason.

The default conditions of 1965 produced a population that was, on every available measure, leaner, fitter, more fertile, better slept, and considerably less anxious than the population of 2026.

The cure isn't a product. The cure is the protocol they were already running. Tap water. Real butter. Three eggs. Sunlight on skin. Walking because you needed to be somewhere. Cold houses in winter and open windows in summer. Dinner at a table. A child outdoors until dark. None of it was branded. None of it was monetised. All of it worked.

Take it back. It costs nothing. It was yours the whole time.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

In every village in Britain, until approximately 1965, there was a small wooden object on a bench in a shed off the high street, and on top of it the entire footwear of the village was repaired.

The object was a last. A foot-shaped block of beech or hornbeam, set on an iron column, around which the cobbler stretched the leather upper of a shoe to stitch the sole back on, replace the heel, patch the toe cap, or rebuild the welt.

The cobbler's job was repair, not manufacture. A pair of leather boots taken in for resoling in 1956 came back in two days, for a few shillings. The same boots went through this three or four times in their working life. A pair of shoes lasted twenty years because the cobbler was on the high street.

The cobbler closed when the shoes became unrepairable. The polyurethane sole, glued not stitched, could not be replaced. The plastic upper could not be re-stitched. The shoe was a single-use object, and the bench had nothing to do.

The Society of Master Shoe Repairers still exists. Its members, perhaps a thousand-odd across the country, mostly run combined shops doing key cutting, watch batteries, engraving, and zip replacements, with the actual cobbling subsidised by everything else they have learned to do to keep the lights on.

The maths is straightforward. A pair of Goodyear-welted brogues from Northampton costs about three hundred pounds. Resoled three times at fifty pounds a go, the pair lasts thirty years. Total: four hundred and fifty pounds. Annualised: fifteen pounds.

The Sports Direct trainers from Vietnam, replaced every six months for thirty years, cost one thousand three hundred and twenty pounds, generate sixty pairs of landfill, and look worse from week three onward.

The trade has not died. It is sitting on a bench in Northampton, sharpening a knife, waiting for the customer to finish the calculation.

[Cat Brown 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🚜🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇮🇪 @MrsBr0wn_82]

🚨🇬🇧 Net Zero just got exposed again and it's worse than we thought.

I've been saying it for years now. Net zero isn't about saving the planet it's a massive scam and a giant money laundering operation dressed up as green virtue.

The latest proof just dropped from a Freedom of Information release.

An internal UK Government dossier quietly admits that Ed Milibands beloved wind turbines and solar farms wreck biodiversity destroy landscapes mess with water resources and even cause pollution plus emissions during construction and running.

Yet here we are with Miliband as Energy Secretary ramming through approval after approval for these big projects overriding local councils and green belt land all to hit his 2030 targets.

The fact the Miliband family has their fingers all over these net zero deals feels proper dodge.

While they push this agenda the countryside gets trashed food producing farmland gets covered and ordinary people pay the price in higher bills and lost landscapes.

Wake up folks. This was never about the environment.

#NetZeroScam #ClimateHoax #GreenAgenda #Miliband #EnergyCrisis #WakeUpBritain

[Christian Flanders @CFlanders7]

Will note that I’ve spoken to many of traders who genuinely believed they’re the only one getting stopped out at the lows, revenge trading, FOMO’ing at the highs, and breaking their own rules.

They think they’re the only ones who feel like absolute shit when a trade goes against them. That gut-punch feeling when you’re in a position you never should’ve taken as it goes against you. That sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach Sunday night or Monday morning when you open your platform and see your names gapping down.

Here’s the truth: We’re all human. These feelings aren’t unique to you. Every single one of us feels it.

I’ve met traders who struggled and underperformed for 20+ years before they finally put it all together and broke through. I’ve also met a handful of absolute prodigies who speed-ran the learning curve, put in insane hours, and scaled to ridiculous levels incredibly fast. Those are rare.

Then there are the ones who stay stuck for years, repeating the exact same mistakes, unable to change their behavior no matter how much pain it causes.

And I’ve met very smart, competent professionals who sit in front of a trading screen with real money on the line and fall apart emotionally. Logic goes out the window.

Thinking you’re going to master this game in just a few years is unrealistic. It looks so simple in hindsight: “Buy here, sell there, easy profit.” But once you’re in it, you realize there’s a lot more to it.

It took me 9 years to get where I am — 7 of those were brutal. And that was after a decade playing professional poker and following markets since my early 20s.

A lot of you relate to my posts because this style of trading is constant stop-outs and trades reversing on. That’s never going to change. But once you truly accept it as part of the game, the pain starts to disappear.

If you expect to win, every loss hurts. When you accept randomness, the emotional sting fades.

When you believe you need to predict the future, every loss feels like a personal failure. When you understand that anything can happen and wins/losses are randomly distributed, being wrong stops defining your worth.

The pain in trading comes from the gap between what you expect and what actually happens. Close that gap by dropping the expectations, and you can trade in a much calmer, clearer state.

Mark Douglas said it best in Trading in the Zone:
Anything can happen.
You don’t need to know what will happen next to make money.
There is a random distribution between wins and losses for any set of variables.
An edge is simply a higher probability of one thing happening over another.
Every moment in the market is unique.

[Paul Embery @PaulEmbery]

A student from India who does not hold British citizenship and is here on a temporary visa has just been elected to the Scottish parliament to serve a four-year term (salary £80,000 per year). How in God’s name can something like this be allowed to happen? Our democracy is sick.

[Allison Pearson @AllisonPearson]

From today, the Government and Opposition will no longer represent the British people.

An extraordinary thought.

We really need a general election

[Rachel B @waychee1]

John Healy, Defence Secretary thinks we are all just fed up with the pace of change. "Are you living in cloud cuckoo land?" says Ellie Costello. He also raises how unsafe we feel online. Gimme strength 🙄 This government are so out of their depth & out of touch with the people.

[Bennie🕊️ @Bennieeexyz]

I took my dad to the mall the other day to buy some new shoes (he is 92). We decided to grab a bite at the food court. I noticed he was watching a teenager sitting next

to him. The teenager had spiked hair in all different colors: green, red, orange, and blue. My dad kept staring at him. The teenager would look and find him staring every time.

When the teenager had had enough, he sarcastically asked, 'What's the matter old man, never done anything wild in your life? Knowing my Dad, I quickly swallowed my food so that I would not choke on his response, knowing he would have a good one, and in classic style he did not bat an eye in his response.

"Got drunk once, and had sex with a peacock. I was just wondering if you were my son."

[Joshi Herrmann @joshi]

On Friday night, we got a bizarre legal threat from Shabana Mahmood's special advisor: if we didn't agree to pull our planned story by 9pm, we would face a high court injunction.

I suspect he thought he could bully @brumdispatch because it's a local publication. He was wrong!

[Jordan @jzrdan]

Apologising once again for trying to pull the wool over people's eyes...

It's clear as day that he is a conman and shouldn't be allowed anywhere near politics.

[Bernie @Artemisfornow]

A leaked 2004 Home Office memo to the Telegraph shows Tony Blair’s team admitting mass migration was a growing concern for people, so they hatched a secret plan to make it more “popular.”

Blair’s team pushed a different PR approach, to reframe dissent as racism… in order to smother debate and complaints.

They knew, they did it anyway… even when you voted against it repeatedly🔥

[Laurence Hulse @laurence_hulse]

And there it is. Private assets now deemed a quasi extension of the welfare state.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

You could shear a sheep in May.

It takes ten minutes. She is grateful. The fleece keeps you warm for forty years. When you're done, you bury it, and it becomes soil within three years.

Or, for ethical reasons, you could choose one of the alternatives.

Cotton. Requires 10,000 litres of water per jumper. The Aral Sea is now mostly dust because the Soviet Union diverted its rivers to grow it. But the jumper is "natural."

Polyester. Crude oil, extruded into thread. Sheds 700,000 microplastic fibres per wash. Lasts in landfill until approximately the year 2226. But "vegan."

Acrylic. Petrochemical, manufactured using a solvent the EU has classified as a reproductive hazard. Marketed as "cruelty-free." The cruelty is in the supply chain.

Bamboo. The plant is innocent. The fabric is bamboo viscose, dissolved in carbon disulphide in a Chinese chemical plant whose workers have elevated rates of psychosis. But it has a leaf on the label.

Hemp. Genuinely fine. Most of what is sold as hemp is a polyester blend, sold at four times the price.

Recycled polyester. Still sheds microplastics. Still ends up in landfill. Made from plastic bottles that could have been recycled into more bottles. The fashion industry has been quiet about this.

Vegan leather. Plastic. Reliably. Always.

Lab-grown fibres. Genetically modified bacteria fed on glucose syrup in a steel tank, in a factory powered by natural gas, packaged in plastic, shipped from California. Funded by venture capital. Not yet profitable.

Or you could shear the sheep in May. She'd appreciate it. The jumper would last forty years. The grass would grow back the same.

But of course, the sheep is the unethical option.

[Konstantin Kisin @KonstantinKisin]

It's amazing that the entire British media and political establishment will spend weeks obsessing over how exactly a paedophile's best friend was appointed by our government, while completely ignoring the fact that the government is destroying our economy through Net Zero, bankrupting the country through welfarism and punitive taxation and disarming the country by failing to fund the military despite repeated warnings from senior military figures.

This obsession with trivia is partly human nature, of course. But it's also a dereliction of duty and a reflection of just how unserious our entire political class has become.

[Lord Cruddas of Shoreditch @peteratcmc]

So apart from trying to give away the Chagos islands.
Recognising Palestine.
13 ministerial resignations.
Showing full confidence in Morgan McSweeney, Peter Mandelson, Sue Gray and Lord Ali.
Blaming the far right for an island of strangers.
16 Policy U turns and rising.
Having no operable warships.
Not smashing the gangs.
Approving a huge Chinese embassy in London.
Spending 23 seconds laying a wreath in Southport only to rush back to a drinks party.
Raising income tax.
Raising inheritance tax.
Raising national insurance.
Raising capital gains tax.
Raising council tax.
Raising value added tax.
Raising mansion tax.
Increasing welfare spending and the minimum wage whilst freezing tax allowances.
Scrapping jury trials.
The only boat he has stopped is HMS dragon from crossing the channel.

What has Starmer really achieved apart from breakfast clubs and the decay of our country?