SPA3 is the most popular product in our suite and provides what many of our customers believe to be a great balance of effort and results. On average you'll make between four and seven trades a month, holding each stock for an average of around eight weeks. So you'll see results in a reasonably short amount of time, without needing to spend more than an 15 minutes a day to keep your portfolio on track.

Benefits

  • Offers daily process, rules, rigour and structure to achieve objectivity and consistency.
  • Proven to yield returns of 10-15 compounded percentage points p.a. better than the ALL-ORDS over 5 years trading both low and high market risk conditions. Significantly outperforms the ALL-ORDS, ALL-ORDS Accumulation Index and the majority managed funds.
  • Simplify your trading, save time and increase productivity so that active investment doesn't intrude on the rest of your life.
  • Robust framework, researched and proven. SPA3 has been successfully traded by private investors in Australia since 1998.
  • No time is wasted on researching technical indicators and trading concepts as these have been researched for you.
  • Provides access to overseas markets.

Key features

  • Well defined structured processes to map out how you manage an active investment portfolio.
  • Green buy and red sell alerts are shown on all charts. Pyramiding and lightening alerts provide further sophistication.
  • Scan any market, sector, portfolio or watchlist within seconds.
  • Choose your own liquidity requirement within predefined parameters to eliminate illiquid stocks with your customised scan and alerts.
  • Determines whether market and sector risk is high or low.
  • Manages the risks and your capital allocation for you depending on the market and sector risks, your chosen profile and trading capital.
  • All indicators, settings and concepts are explained in thorough detail so that the user has total trust and confidence. Pre-defined indicator settings can be modified and further researched
  • SPA3 TradeMaster portfolio management tool for money and risk management, portfolio analysis and detailed trading statistics.
  • Tailor your own methodology with the already proven SPA3 concepts using SPA3 research tools.

Suitable for

  • Suitable for anyone new to trading who wants to minimise their risk of losing capital while learning how to trade.
  • Novice traders who are looking to enter the market for the first time.
  • Experienced traders who want an already proven methodology for immediate implementation.
  • Those interested in trading with capital bases from $50,000-$1,500,000 looking to take their first step toward active investment.
  • Participants who trade with a self managed superfund or as a sole trader.
  • Buy and hold investors not satisfied with their returns.
  • Those willing to put in some effort to improve their share returns.

Brokerage

It is very important to understand the impact of brokerage and GST costs on a portfolio. Most vendors don't tell you this because they don't have the research tools, know how or credibility to quote otherwise. Beware of vendors that:

  • put together 'hypothetical' portfolios and quote returns that sound unrealistic
  • exclude brokerage from their 'sample' portfolio returns and trade lists
  • quote portfolio returns using trade lists and suggest you reduce the overall profit by a brokerage amount. It isn't that simple and lacks credibility.

Why? This is because the trading costs reduce the available investment capital and therefore the position size of the next trade. The compounding effects of reduced position sizes linked to the frequency of trading is increased further with shorter-term methodologies.

The table shown above illustrates the situation using a portfolio with $150,000 starting capital. The portfolio without brokerage yielded a profit of $240,523 over 7 years whereas the portfolio with brokerage yielded a profit of $171,191. This overstates total profit by 29%.

Unlike ShareFinder, it is a common industry practice to quote profits without brokerage. Be careful as even by taking a total profit figure (eg. $240,523) and subtracting a hypothetical total brokerage amount by multiplying the total number of transactions by brokerage (eg. 1432 x $19.95 = $28,568.40) you are not observing realistic statistics.

So in other words it is unrealistic to derive total profit by subtracting $28,568.40 from $240,523 to reach $211,954.60 total profit. Total profit of $171,191, however, realistically incorporates brokerage, reducing position sizes including lower profits through the effect of the loss of compounding of money that you don't have working for you in the market.

ShareFinder will always quote portfolio returns net of trading costs for all of our methodologies.

Remember that the shorter the time frame that trades are open the greater the impact brokerage will have on returns. Our example above uses an approach where trades are open for an average of 8 weeks. If trades are open, on average, for less than 8 weeks then the affect on returns excluding brokerage compared to including brokerage could wipe out most if not all profits over a large sample of trades!!