Tag Archives: Long Short Equity

Trading for Beginners: How to Start Without Getting Wiped Out by the Next Bear Market

May 30, 2026 8:58 pm |
Trading for beginners

 

Between 2020 and 2024, the number of UK adults using an investment platform jumped from 4.4 million to 7.9 million — an 80% leap in just four years (Investment Trends / FCA data). At the same time, mandatory FCA risk disclosures show that 71% to 79% of retail CFD traders lose money at the UK’s largest brokers (IG 71%, CMC 76%, eToro 77%, Plus500 79%).

Two numbers, one uncomfortable question for anyone asking how to get into trading: if so many people are piling in, why are so many losing — and what are the survivors doing differently?

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Beating the S&P 500 Without Market Direction: Inside Equity Market Neutral Trading

January 20, 2026 9:22 am |

Most traders intuitively understand that returns mean very little without context. What ultimately matters is how those returns are generated, the drawdowns required to earn them, and whether the strategy survives hostile market environments.

That is precisely why equity market neutral (EMN) trading strategies have been a core allocation for institutional capital for decades—and why they are now becoming accessible to sophisticated retail traders.

In this post, we’ll walk through a real institutional dataset, compare it directly to the S&P 500, and then run a simple but powerful thought experiment: what happens if a retail trader applies modest leverage—available today at Interactive Brokers—to an institutional EMN return stream?

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