No surprises on April Fool's Day. Wed Apr 1

It's the start of a new quarter and I've been busy tidying up accounts so it's now nearly 1pm. The market has shaken off its disappointment that the US rally wasn't stronger and is now up 11 points. The moves have been reasonable for me. Of my shorts, ipl is slightly down and although bxb has rallied 16 to 496, so far the rally looks more like a retracement that should fail below the breakdown level. Of my longs fxj, fmg and tah are up nicely and cnm and tah are steady.

I started the tidying up process yesterday. I'd realised a while ago that I copy over my spreadsheets for each new day and there's a lot of unnecessary data being copied across every morning. So yesterday I started archiving the old trades and sorting through them and what I noticed is that relative to now my trading over the last 3 or 4 years was much more patient. I think that after having traded poorly during the early part of the bear market I'd lost the courage of my convictions. There was some value in this as it motivated me to do a lot of work on re-examining my approach and complacency had certainly set in, but now my primary challenge is to maintain my self belief as I'm very confident that I can get a good percentage of winners.

I've done some buying this morning. I added to existing fmg and lnc positions as they both look like they have further to go. I re-entered gmg and gpt also. I had recently sold out of these two but I'm still very positive and I decided to get in again on some strength and to give these trades the opportunity to pan out as I'm expecting them to. The buy price for gmg was 35.5 and 44 for gpt.

The other new position was to buy wpl at 3872. The weekly chart shows a trending stock consolidating.

The daily chart shows that there was a breakout of a small consolidation 8 days ago just above 3800. On the weekly it was just after the doji bar, 3 bars back. At the time, I missed it. What I noticed this morning is that after 3 days of sharp falls the stock had opened lower and reversed through yesterday's high having fallen to that earlier breakout level. It's a bullish engulfing candlestick at present and I think there could be a sharp rally from here. I quite like to get a second chance at a breakout after it's run back to support so I thought this worth taking.

3.22 The market has been chopping around but one stock of mine is going particularly well. Gmg has just pushed through recent daily highs and is not far from the highest level of the last 5 weeks, 42.

4.13 Nothing much more to report. It was a slightly irritating day as bxb squeezed up to 498 and my longs in fmg and lnc sold off after strong openings when I'd added a little to my longs early. The market closed little changed which was a good performance given that overnight futures markets in the US are down about 1.5%.