Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Currency Trading Beginner Tips

These are some of my favorite currency trader beginner tips. I've used these when I was starting out to break out from that newbie person into a more confident and profitable trader. This is a great opportunity for you to learn the necessary skills to become that better trader.

What do I need?

You need to have an overall game plan to do well. A game plan offers you the thoughtless process to action. You don't have to figure out what you're going to do, you just have to act according to the game plan. This allows you to focus more of your energy on the tasks that end up generating profits for yourself. Another great thing to note is that to grow you need to be able to evaluate how affective a technique is, so you need to test things over and over again. This is what a game plan does.

You should also get your hands on trading software like Forex Killer. This software packages acts like having your own employee. They take care of trades, so when you're away from the computer, you can be confident that you won't lose all your money. It also searches for profitable trends for you to exploit.

What should my margins be?

Well, it really depends on your skill. Starting out, everyone starts small. It is the best way to learn, without risking much. The problem is that you don't get a fair look at your skill from the results. Margins are so small, that the brokers cut actually is a significant amount of what you're making. This means your profits are a lot less than they would be if your margins were good. Obviously, start out small, but learn to grow to larger trades in time.

I'm currently giving a 7 day free forex course. Newbies and experienced are all welcome. If you're interested in participating, check out the Casual Forex Trader.

BusinessWeek Online - In just two short months, Robert Applebaum has become something of a spokesman for a generation of people burdened with student loan debt. Applebaum, a 35-year-old attorney in New York, started a Facebook group in January called "Cancel Student Loan Debt to Stimulate the Economy," fed up with news reports about bank executives spending millions to redecorate their offices and receiving hefty bonuses. "I wanted to rant, so instead of sending an e-mail to a couple of my friends, I decided to start a Facebook group," says Applebaum, who finished law school owing $80,000 in student loans. ...

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Friday, March 13, 2009

Forex Factory - How To Prepare For Your Trading Session

The Forex Factory web site is a very popular site among developing Forex traders as shown by an Alexa rating of around 5,400 most visited sites on the web. Any site within the first 100,000 gets serious traffic!

Forex Factory provides 3 main services listed in my personal order of importance:

  • Calendar
  • News
  • Forum

Calendar

The main attraction of the Forex Factory calendar of upcoming economic reports and fundamental announcements is that it is so visual and easy to read.

A color coding system gives an indication at a glance as to how volatile the announcement is expected to be:

  • Yellow - Low Impact
  • Orange - Medium Impact
  • Red - High Impact

Another good feature of this calendar is the ability to customize the time to your own time zone. So instead of having to add or subtract a certain number of hours from GMT to arrive at the time of the economic report in your country, you can set the calendar according to your time zone and see the time accurately displayed.

This feature saves some confusion and prevents a newer trader from leaving a trade in around a volatile news report because of getting the time mixed up!

News

A number of news reports are featured daily from authorities and advisors in the financial markets.

Within a few minutes the trader can come up to speed on the latest economic factors that might impact the market.

Forums

The Forums at Forex Factory have a huge appeal as indicated by the thousands of users online each day.

The forums are divided into various themes including:

General Discussion

Trading Systems

Broker Discussion

Forex Beginner Questions and Answers

How To Get The Best From Forex Factory

For me, the calendar is by far the most useful feature at Forex Factory. I consult it each day in preparation for the next trading session and make sure I am out of the market around volatile news releases (flagged by the red icon) and also many times the medium impact reports (flagged by the orange icon).
The News feature is also useful to get a broad overview of market sentiment. At the same time caution is needed if you use technical analysis as your main trading tool as the comments and opinions of others can sometimes blur your own analysis and lead to flawed trade entries.

You may have detected a perfectly good trade setup and the trade is going well. Then as it starts to stall the comments of a news analyst come to mind and you exit prematurely from what could have been a very profitable trade.

So it is good to view the News objectively and coordinate it with your own technical analysis.

Forums - Be A Little Cautious

For newer traders the discussion forums can be helpful in bouncing ideas off other newer traders. One of the main benefits is encouragement and motivation from hearing how others are getting on.

However, as to whether you can get good trading tips and strategies from the forums is in my mind a little doubtful.

After I attended a Forex seminar run by a licensed professional who trades the Forex every day and is a fund manager, I noted his comment that the really successful Forex traders rarely have time to visit online forums and participate in discussions. They are too busy making money on the Forex!

So as long as you approach forum discussions with the realization that most participants are also in the learning stage, you can evaluate their comments and suggestions accordingly.

There is no doubt Forex Factory (forexfactory.com) provides an excellent group of services for newer Forex traders. Definitely use the calendar to the full and depending on your level of expertise, use the News and Forums features to gain a better perspective of daily market activity.

For a free pivot point calculator, Fibonacci calculator and the best free economic calendars click here:

http://www.vitalstop.com/Forex/tools.html

For a free candle & chart pattern recognition reference tool click here:

http://www.vitalstop.com/Forex/Candle-Chart-Patterns

How do you trade the non-farm payroll report? Read this:

http://www.vitalstop.com/Forex/Advisor/forex-strategy-non-farm-payroll.htm

This undated photo released by the Metropolitan Corrections Center(MCC) shows a cell at the New York facility similar to the one where disgraced Wall Street financier Bernard Madoff was sent to. Madoff awoke Friday -- at 6:00 am on the first day of his new life as Prisoner 61727-054 after pleading guilty to massive fraud.(AFP/MCC-HO/File)Reuters - Investors are dubious that Wall Street's best week since November means the stock market has found a bottom.

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Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Understanding The Day Trading Community

The concept of trading has taken a diversified meaning, especially in the present world in which trading is the basic work culture. Traditional trading is no more in the market. The world wide web has taken over everything that matters a lot, and we are completely in the hands of potential websites. The most effective consequence made by the internet invasion is the prevailing online trading community. If you become a member of a trade related website then you can be known as a community member of trading website. In the present times, we can find many traders getting engage in a Day Trading Community.

Nowadays, we have traders who do buying and selling of stocks or any monetary products within the same day. Here, bartering starts in the morning and ends completely in the evening. There is nothing left over consequence for the next day. Such kind of trading which happens within the same day through the internet services are generally termed as a Day Trading Community or simply known as an Online Community. There is huge traffic in such communities as more and more people are joining them.

If your personal computer is connected to world wide web service then you can also become a day trader. For this, you will have to become a member of day trading community. When you have become a member of it then start reading so as to gain sufficient knowledge on day trading. In such communities you can solve all your various trade related queries with the help of some blog and chatting tools. There are many financial experts and people who are already doing businesses successfully. Some of the instances of such day trading communities are stock, forex, mutual funds day trading etc.

Hence, we have come to know how day trading community is making progress day by day.

This article written by David Jose is on Day Trading Community. David Jose has been a avert writer on various online trading communities. His work has been published in several places across the web. At present David Jose is contributing towards making MTP a well known and popular online trading community.

Reuters - Merrill Lynch & Co may have misled Congress in representing last November that it planned to pay out bonuses at year end, when in fact it decided to accelerate those payouts, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said on Wednesday.

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Sunday, March 8, 2009

Day Trading - Getting Ahead Early

When you turn on your computer in preparation for the trading day, the one and only thing you should care about is finishing up on the day. I personally do not subscribe to the idea of only trade the charts and everything will take care of themselves. You have to make a conscious decision of whether you want to finish up or down for the day. You are the only person that controls if this becomes a thought or a reality.

10-Run Rule
My mom recently sent me an article from my high school baseball games from my senior year when we won our conference championship. In the clipping it described how we ran through our division dishing out 3 10-run rule spankings. I thought to myself, every day trader needs a 10 run rule. This 10-run rule is the point you set per day that tells you that the game is over. If you do not know your 10-run rule, a ugly day will turn into a debacle and you are not ready to trade on a professional level.

Take the first pitch
My coach Paul Bernstorf would tell me to work my count. Don't just go out there hacking at every pitch. In day trading, one needs to exercise this same sort of patience. Depending on how actively you trade the market, you will be presented with more than enough trading opportunities. So, take the first pitch, wait to see how the market is trading and how well your system is fairing in the current market environment.

Swing for singles
Whenever you start trading, the first thing you want to do is swing for small gains. Depending on your investment style and timeframe, you need to decide what small gains means to you. For me it is anywhere between .5% and 1.5%. My goal is for every $10,000 I use per trade, to get a minimum of $250 dollars in the bank before 2pm. From this point on I will not risk more than .75% per trade, thus allowing me to make three blunders and still walk away a winner for the day.

Swing for the fences
Once I have my $250 per $10,000 invested safely in the bank, I can now swing for the fences. This does not mean that I let my stops go, but rather when I'm in a winning trade, I look for larger price targets and are willing to give back more of my gains. The power of this is that I'm now allowing my gains from earlier in the day to compound while still ensuring I walk away a winner.

Final Box Score
Day traders make the mistake of always looking to hit the big one, or rather putting on too many trades in one day. Because you are day trading does not mean you can just toss aside common sense rules of how to make money. If you are down $100 dollars and you are in a trade that's up $210, take the money. Get in the black for the day. The worst thing you can do is to not get ahead. What will happen over the course of a month is losing days will make up 20% of the days, winning days 60%, and homerun days another 20%.

Al Hill is the co-founder of mysmp.com (My Stock Market Power) which provides education on all topics finance; including stocks, bonds, options, futures, forex, technical analysis, and more! Please visit http://www.mysmp.com for more free financial educational content.

AP - H&R Block Inc. is bracing for what could be a make-or-break final stretch of this year's income tax season.

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Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Day Trading - Trade, Don't Gamble

There is one thing in common among winners and losers in any gambling game- they will continue to gamble regardless of what happens. And what are the commonalities between gambling and day trading? Simple, there are losers and winners, most of them are gamblers.

Despite the fact that gambling and trading are two very different things; many traders seem to behave as gamblers instead of day traders. In gambling the winner would like to believe that he has an unstoppable streak of good luck and will try to ride his momentum until he gives all his winnings back to the casino. The loser, on the other hand, will try to get out of their bad luck by risking all his money in belief that he will be able to win back all the money he's lost. In trading unsuccessful traders work in this manner.

True trading is not like gambling though. Unfortunately, most traders who have not reached maturity tend to act in this manner and over trade for the same objective as a gambler.

Theoretically, day traders should be able to get over the practices of a gambler. He must try to evolve from this point until he becomes a strategist. This can only be achieved though through developing the necessary skills, the discriminatory attitude and the realization that the market moves in a certain way and this way should be discovered.

There are no secrets to day trading though. Everyone should realize that the behavior of the market is a bit predictable by using indicators and patterns which have existed before. Everyone should also recognize the truth that the market works in a psychological way and one must only develop keenness to this reality. Also, everyone should acknowledge that skills take time to develop and once they start to build-up, the trader will also start to become more efficient in the trade.

Over-trading does not work in this business. Those who practice this technique either have no sufficient knowledge in this field or have not out grown the common attitudes of the amateurs which depend highly on their priorities.

The most common reasons why amateurs over trade are a) they trade to confirm that they are good and that their system works, b) they are stretching their limits to prove that they can make profits whenever possible, c) they try to get off with the emotional burden especially when they are losing their trade by selling or re-entering the market if the signs are good enough for them, and d) just like the gambler they only want to take advantage of their luck to win back their losses.

Miodrag Trajkovic is an expert on information related to Day Trading, Day Trading Mistakes, Day Trading Strategies, Online Day Trading and Day Trading Systems. For more information visit his website http://daytrading.explore-me.com

Reuters - The Obama administration on Wednesday launched a $75 billion foreclosure relief plan, as new data showed one in five U.S. homeowners with mortgages owe more than their house is worth.

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