Sunday, September 28, 2008

Forex In One, Two, Three And Four Easy Steps

Number 1. CONCEPT. Forex traders should know by now that the forex trading market is about trying to make big out of something small. This is in terms of earning big profits through smaller risks. Nobody is forex can control how this giant market is moving. Besides they would not start to understand it in the first place because the forex market is really really complicated and ever-changing.

People remain in the forex trading industry because they thought that the probability of making profit is bigger than the probability of getting losses. This thinking would have proven effective if the trader is aware that they need to execute stop lost in this concept. Really understanding this point in the course of the transaction and relying on the forex traders’ own initiative rules and discipline will surely prevent losses from happening.

Number 2. STOP LOSS AND TAKE PROFIT POINT. Many of the forex traders not using these two factors effectively and efficiently does not really make any money in forex trading. the traders usually buy a currency they think will rise, but eventually fell. In the anticipation that it will begin rising soon, the forex trader do not use stop loss. The loss then becomes larger and larger and the trader still waiting and hoping.

The common result when the foreign currency starts rising is there are more losses acquired to make up for the profits. Another result would be getting the currency out of the market so fast that the best opportunities are missed in the process. Forex traders often makes these mistakes over and over again especially if they do not consider these two important points.

Number 3. MARGIN ALLOCATION AND PROPORTIONAL DISTRIBUTION LAW. Combined forex orders are allowed only at a specific margin. But it cannot be used all in one shot. So if forex traders buy up but the trend fall out of the expectation, the trader will find himself in a passive condition.

It is still best to stop loss after buying a position once there is a sudden shift in the forex market. For markets with consistent movement, there will be more profits to utilize to supplement the margin. The profit has a tendency to continue to rise too.

Number 4. CHOOSING THE PROPER TIME TO BEST EXECUTE THE ORDER. Fundamental analysis of the forex market is the key. Even technical analysts prefer this method. Forex traders must use fundamental analysis to determine when is the best time to enter the forex market and trading.

Forex traders must also use their own preferred forex views and charts to be able to execute an order. It is important to note that every forex trader has to formulate their own regulations and source of information that they can check upon whenever the need for it arise. It is also important to note that these things may affect how the trade will result to.

Another way is to try and analyze the market by looking at the movement of the forex currency. Analyze the rising and falling of the currency and see, even guess the probability of things that might happen next. When there are forecasts of good things to come, the forex trader should grab that opportunity to choose the right currency to invest on.

These are the four forex strategy that is used by many traders nowadays. These four important points have been proven to bring in more positive results in forex trading. There have already been lots of other advices that are also effective but these are the newly developed ones that can cater to the changes that the forex market is going through.

It is important to note that these forex points and strategies should not be the only ones a forex trader can use in their trade. there are still many of the old and the new ones that forex trades can use in their trading. All in all, the final decision would still depend upon the say of the trader.

There is also these other factors called luck and fortune. Sometimes they do tend to play some joke in the forex trading community and can bring down even the best of the best traders to their knees.

Sunday, September 21, 2008

Forex Made Easy For Everyone

Forex made easy is as simple as you would want it to be. The foreign exchange market is a worldwide market and according to some estimates is almost as big as thirty times the turnover of the US Equity markets. That is some figure to chew on. Forex is the commonly used term for foreign exchange. As a person who wants to invest in the forex market, one should understand the basics of how this currency market operates. Forex can be made easier for beginners to understand it and here's how.
Foreign exchange is the buying and the selling of foreign exchange in pairs of currencies. For example you buy US dollars and sell UK Sterling pounds or you sell German Marks and buy Japanese Yen. Why are currencies bought or sold? The answer is simple; Governments and Companies need foreign exchange for their purchase and payments for various commodities and services. This trade constitutes about 5% of all currency transactions, however the other 95% currency transactions are done for speculation and trade. In fact many companies will buy foreign currency when it is being traded at a lower rate to protect their financial investments. Another thing about foreign exchange market is that the rates are varying continuously and on daily basis. Therefore investors and financial managers track the forex rates and the forex market it on a daily basis.
Those who are involved in the forex trade know that almost 85% of the trading is done in only US Dollar, Japanese Yen, Euro, British Pound, Swiss Franc, Canadian Dollar and Australian Dollar. This is because they are the most liquid of foreign currencies (can be easily bought and sold. In fact the US Dollar is most recognizable foreign currency even in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam etc).
Being a truly 24/7 market, the currency trading markets opens in the financial centers of Sydney, Tokyo, London and New York in that sequence. Investors and speculators alike respond to the ever-changing situations and can buy and sell simultaneously the currencies. In fact many operate in two or more currency market using arbitrage to gain profits (buying in one market and selling in another market or vice versa to take advantage of the prices and book profits).
While dealing in forex, one should have a margin account. Quite simply put if you have US$ 1,000 and have a forex margin account which leverages 100:1 then you can buy US$ 100,000 since you only need 1% of the US$100,000 or US$1,000. Therefore it means that with margin account you have US$ 100,000 worth of real purchasing power in your hand.
Since the foreign currency market is fluctuating on a continuous basis, one should be able to understand the factors that affect this currency market. This is done through Technical Analysis and Fundamental Analysis. These two tools of trade are used in a variety of other markets such as equity markets, stock markets, mutual funds markets etc. Technical Analysis refers to reading, summarizing and analyzing data based on the data that is generated by the market. While fundamental Analysis refers to the factors, which influence the market economy, and in turn how it would affect the currency trading. Of course there are other economic and non economic factors which can suddenly affect the trading of the forex markets such as the 9/11 tragedy etc. One needs to have a shrewd acumen and a few number crunching abilities to strike gold in the forex market.

Sunday, September 14, 2008

How To Trade Successfully In The Forex Market

This article is about money management and trading psychology. This is the lesson that you never get with 99% of other Forex systems that you have come across.

I find it interesting that most of the systems out there don’t include this because if they actually were successful traders, they would know that this was the key to success and to leave it out makes an incomplete system that won’t work!! This tells me that the people that wrote them or are selling them aren’t traders at all. They are just in the business of selling HOPE!

Well, if you haven’t noticed yet, I am a trader, and I am different than the others. Don’t get me wrong, there are honest trainers out there, I learned from one and I am eternally grateful to him.

So let’s get on with this. First of all, this is my own interpretation of several sources, and the practices that have worked for me. Please read EVERYTHING you can find on trading psychology, and money management. There are a lot of slightly different views but overall, they are very similar and the main important points are all pretty much the same.

There are two main issues that cause 99% of the problems. Can you guess what they are? If you answered FEAR and GREED, you are correct. These two emotions are probably responsible for 99% of the worlds problems as well but that is beyond the scope of this course À .

So, now that we know what the big obstacles are, let’s try and figure out how to overcome them. In the course of my lessons, I have listed a few but I will put them all together here in one place so that it is easier to follow, and perhaps make it easier for you to develop your own system to help you trade better.

We can’t eliminate fear and greed. They will still be there in your heart and mind, but we can make some rules so that they don’t interfere with your trading success. We can come up with systems and procedures to follow, since we KNOW ahead of time that fear and greed are major problems. I’m sure you have heard the statistic that 95% of all speculative leveraged traders FAIL. This is absolutely true. Here is another statistic that I believe…100% of traders that don’t know how to overcome fear and greed will FAIL. So does that mean that if I can teach you how to overcome these problems that your chance of success is 100%? Of course not. But I can tell you that you cannot be successful if you don’t protect yourself from yourself.

In lessons 1-3 I have outlined a trading system. The first thing you must do, whether you follow my system, another system, or your own system is to follow the rules of the system WITHOUT FAIL. If your system calls for a certain entry point, do not enter until there is a signal to enter.

Systems are designed for a reason. That is why it is called a system. What do we learn from this? Patience. Perhaps the stupidest thing you can do is enter a trade on a hunch. This brings us to our first FACT:

The odds are in your favor before you enter a trade. This is true for most trading systems. Void of fear and greed, if you follow each system exactly, you will profit. Some systems may offer better profits than others, but overall you should be able to profit with any system, IF you have no fear and no greed.

This brings us to THE BIG SECRET. Other than omitting trading psychology, other systems also don’t tell you that you are playing a game of odds. Let’s say for example that we are playing “coin toss.” Theoretically, for 100 flips of the coin, 50 will come up heads, and 50 will come up tails. Of course, the first 100 may be 55/45, but the more you play, the closer to 50/50 the numbers will get. Our system for “coin toss” is as follows: We play for 20 hours, and flip the coin exactly 5 times each hour, and for every heads that comes up, we get paid $2, and for every tails that comes up we pay $1. This should be a profitable system. After our game we see that heads came up 50 times and tails came up 50 times. (Stay with me here). So at the end of 100 tosses, we have paid $50 and received $100. A profit of $50.

So let’s say that during our second game of coin toss, we decide that we are going to let the flipper(hint: the market is the flipper) keep flipping the coin for an hour while we take lunch but we are not going to pay or be paid for those flips. During our lunch hour, heads comes up 5 times in a row (which is theoretically possible, and not that unlikely). And now we are back from lunch, and we are down $10 for the hour. Now, theoretically the odds of 5 tails in a row coming up after 5 heads in a row are pretty good because for every ten tosses, you should have about 5 heads and five tails. So now we get 5 tails in a row and now we are down another $5, for a total of $15. So not counting the 5 tosses during lunch, this leaves 90 tosses that we still have to account for and let’s say that they were 45 heads and 45 tails. Our profit for these tosses is $45 (45x2 minus 45x1), now if we take away the $15 for the tosses we didn’t take, and that string of losers, we are left with a profit if $30. So lunch and 5 lousy spins cost us 40% of our profits.

Now this is theory but it absolutely applies to this market. If you are picky about what trades you want to take and what trades you don’t want to take, you are MESSING WITH THE ODDS. My point for this whole big story about “coin toss” is this: If the conditions are met, TAKE THE TRADE without hesitation. The odds are in your favor, but only if you take ALL of the trades that meet the conditions. When I say ALL trades I know the market is open 24 hours a day and you can’t possibly take every trade. You need to pick a time frame and stick to that same time frame everyday and take ALL trades during that time frame.

I can tell you that in the month before I realized this (my first month of trading real money actually), my total profit was 92 pips. I had an idea of what I was doing wrong so I was keeping track of the trades that I didn’t take along with the ones that I did. I included entry point, day, time, and whether the profit target was hit or if it was stopped out. Don’t get me wrong, I was extremely happy to be in profit after trading for only one month with real money. But then I went back and looked at the numbers for “what could have been.” Guess what? Had I taken every trade that met my conditions, my profit for the month would have been 355 pips! I was not happy. But soon I realized that I had messed with the odds. After realizing what I had done wrong (or not done right in this case) I began to have more confidence in my systems. The very next month my total profit was 515 pips, or a 560% improvement just for taking all of the trades that met the conditions. I think that is enough said about that.

Sorry to stay with the coin flip game here but it actually works very well in teaching these principles.

This brings us to:

FACT #2. You do not need to know what is going to happen to make money. If we know that we are going to make $2 fifty times and pay $1 fifty times as long as we flip the coin, are we going to play? Of course! Well, all trading systems have similar odds. From my testing, I know that this system on average will produce 9 wins of 20 pips for every 1 loss of 40 pips (that number may vary but that is the maximum loss I ever take). So we know ahead of time that 9 wins at 20 pips is 180 pips, and minus the loss of 40 pips, leaves us with 140 pips profit. Now keep in mind that you may be 8 and 2 this week and 10 and 0 next week. We never know when a loss is going to come. We may even lose every trade for a week, but not lose a trade for the next 9 weeks. Believe me it happens. You do not need to know exactly what is going to happen, you just need to take every trade that meets the conditions and then count your profits at the end of the month/week/year etc.

This section deals with money management as well as psychology. Back to coin toss for a minute. We know that each win brings us $2. And we know that for each win in this trading system we get 20 pips. We know that each tail that comes up costs us $1. And in our system we know that each loss is 40 pips. If we know what our loss is going to be ahead of time, we know what it is going to cost us to find out “what is going to happen.” From this we can decide how much we want to risk based on our account size.

FACT 3: You know how much it will cost to find out. I have decided not to ever risk more than 5% of my account on any one trade. So knowing that, I can figure out how many lots to trade ahead of time based on my account size. It may cost $250 in margin for a 1 lot position but this is not what we are risking, we are actually risking ten dollars times the number of pips in our stop. If our stop is 40 pips, we are risking $400. Now we know that we better have at least $8000 in our account to take a position of this size. If this trade turns out to be a loser, and our balance falls to $7600, we know that we can’t afford to take that trade again because a loss of $400 is more than 5% of our balance. We would need to adjust our number of lots down accordingly to keep our risk.

About the author

Ben Rose