Less complicated that it looks

Someone emailed me about my 'momentum' strategy with regard to commodities so I'll briefly outline what I'm testing. I have it all automated in a spreadsheet so it only takes me minutes each day to monitor.

When I decide to start monitoring a commodity, I make a note of its buy and sell price in columns B and C (see attached picture). The idea is to trade the commodity when it moves in price by 5% or more in either direction.

Each day, I'll make a note of the new prices and enter them in columns J and K. Lucky enough, I have screen reading software so I can simply copy and paste the data from the markets and I don't have to type in all the figures.

Column Q compares the original price of the commodity when I started monitoring it to the new price and tells me how much it has moved (in percent terms).

If and when a price moves by more than 5%, a message will pop up in column R telling me to 'Buy' or in column S telling me to 'Sell'. As you can see, Wheat has moved more than 5% down from the original price so hence the 'Sell' signal.

The rest of the columns are just the maths and other notes but it's a fairy simple way of monitoring price movements without having to manually compare prices each day (which is time consuming).

I also have a similar setup for Betfair trading where I get  a bot to send the live price feed to my spreadsheet.

Looks a bit complicated but it's handy!