A lot of people have made excellent profits trading specific shares via spreadbets, CFD's or even through traditional channels where the actual shares are purchased, but I've personally found this year to be one of the toughest for making regular and consistent profits from short-term share trading.

It's not just me either. I frequent various share forums and I know of several experienced and previously profitable traders who have really struggled this year, and some who have been completely wiped out.

The markets have been so choppy and volatile this year that we've had a lot of wild swings and unpredictable moves which makes it extremely difficult because it triggers any stop losses you may have set.

I've also found that because of this increased volatility my usual technical analysis, which has made me a lot of money over the years, hasn't been as successful because it has proved useless in a lot of instances.

This hasn't been helped in my opinion by a lot of hedge funds piling into individual shares and distorting a company's true value. Because hedge funds have so much capital they can move the markets at will and so smaller shares are an easy target for them.

Of course looking back at the year so far, it's inevitable that trading will have been slightly more difficult as the markets have been a lot less bullish, unlike the last 3 years or so when we've been in a strong bull market, but we certainly haven't been helped by so much uncertainty surrounding the markets, and the other influencing factors that I've already mentioned.

I personally find it a lot easier to trade the forex markets and the individual indices intraday which I've mastered pretty well over the years, as well as longer term share investing, but short term share trading has become too difficult in the current market climate.