Archive for May, 2010:

Large Errors To Watch Out For

1. Lack of patience

Patience is one of the most important qualities that any currency exchange trader needs to develop and it is especially true of scalpers who sit watching the market, sometimes for hours at a time. You didn’t have the patience to wait for the signal set by your system. Over trading in this manner almost always leads to losses in the long term. Patience is also needed in another situation : when you missed a trading opportunity. May be that you went to snatch a coffee and when you get back, your dream trading situation has been and gone. The enticement is to jump in and chase after the price, but it can easily rebound on you. Better to attend patiently for the subsequent real trading opportunity. 2. This isn’t true. Most scalping systems don’t make many pips on each trade. It is tempting to let a trade run when you should be closing out, expecting to get bigger profits than your system allows for, but doing this will potentially just leave you losing the little profit that you virtually gained. The target should be to make comparatively steady profits, accepting some losses but avoid the mistakes that lead to big losses. That way you’ve got a chance of ending up with a profit on the base line. So remember, any profit is good profit. So if you checked option 2, you should not risk more than two percent of your total funds per trade in currency exchange scalping.

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Forex Defined

What’s forex? This is a difficult question. There are so many sites and TV advertisements that mention forex nowadays. You almost certainly know it’s a way you can make money, but what exactly does it involve?

The word foreign exchange is short for FOReign EXchange. You will see it shortened even further to FX or 4X. It involves exchanging different currencies in the expectation of making a profit when the currency rates change. Say you were planning to go overseas. Let’s say you are an American and you are planning a visit to Europe. The currency of most states in Europe is the euro, so you would like to exchange USD from your bank for euros so you would have some cash to spend while you are there. You may buy $500 worth of EUR two weeks before your trip.

But then, something comes up at the last moment and you can’t go to Europe after all. So you change the cash back into dollars and put it back in your bank. Now, in the two weeks you had those EUR, the value of the euro against the dollar will have changed at least a little bit. Generally it does not change a heap and due to the bank’s commission, you would find you get back less than your original $500. Then you would have made a decent profit from foreign exchange. However, folk who start forex trading do not do it by purchasing foreign currency bills from their bank. You do not ever have the currency delivered, you just purchase or sell according to whether you suspect the price will go up or go down, and then trade back out when you have either a major profit or a loss.

Obviously, this is a dangerous business, but because you can deal in lots that are a hundred, 200 or maybe four hundred times your own balance, it has the potential to make you a lot of money. This is what draws the majority to forex trading, and why understanding what is forex can be handy in the modern world..

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How To Use Candlestick Charts

Knowing how to read candlestick charts is needed for both stock trading and foreign currency trading. Candlesticks are a record of price movements that will help a trader to identify trends and spot imminent breakouts and reversals or retracements. Many traders are able to develop worthwhile trading systems virtually wholly on the premise of candlestick charts, and many more systems depend on them as a first or primary signal. The chart is made of a series of blocks or candles, each one showing the open, close, high and low prices over a period. These can be prices of anything: stocks, commodities, currencies or whatever. The open and close prices could be the costs for a day’s trading but in most cases you have control over the period and you can set your chart to show a candle for each hour, for 5 minutes or whatever. If you’re coming up with systems around this kind of chart you’ll probably want to test your signals over more than one time period before you open a trade. In this example the open price is the base of the candle’s wide block and the close price is the top of the block. If the price fell in the period, the body of the candle will be shaded, either black or a color. In all cases, the high during the period is the pinnacle of the vertical line or wick stretching upward from the pinnacle of the block. You could have green or blue for a bullish period when the price was rising and red for a bearish period when the price was falling.

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Auto Trading in the Foreign Exchange Market

Robotic trading is everywhere in the forex market nowadays. Of course, automation is skyrocketing in a massive number of other areas too. However, if you look at stock exchange trading, for example, there is not nearly so much use of bots for trading as in the foreign exchange market. Why is this? We can only think it’s because stock trading methods aren’t so straightforward to program into software. Put simply, there must be something about foreign exchange trading that makes it simpler to create and automate successful systems. Installing it can take time; choosing the settings is a role that requires some awareness of the currency market and the way to manage your risk; and even the best robot will often make losses as well as profits.

Nevertheless, it definitely does mean the typical person needing to get into speculative trading has more options in currency exchange than in stocks or commodity trading. You do have to understand the basics to earn cash with automated foreign exchange trading but at least you do not have to spend many years developing and tweaking a manual system. You can start right out testing your robot in a demo account. Even seasoned traders can’t let their robot loose on the live market from the beginning. They might have made a little mistake in setting up the software which might result in two times as much risk as they intended, for instance. Or the robot won’t be the one for them.

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Foreign Exchange Brokers – How They Work

Most forex brokers offering accounts to retail traders operate in one of two ways. It is unlikely that you’ll be signing up with a broker who has their own dealing desk. More likely, you will be having a look at either an ECN broker or a market maker. The spread on the ECN is tiny, sometimes almost non existent, so brokers using this network will usually either add two pips to the real spread or charge commission or fees per deal. You can often improve prices from an ECN broker but take a detailed look at their fee structure and consider what it would mean for you on a normal deal. They’re also usually well regulated.

On the downside, the variable spread can imply more uncertainty when setting stop losses and limit orders. ECN brokers also have a tendency to offer fewer charts and can have a less user friendly trading platform because they aren’t in particular planning to attract newbies. They generally tend to presume that you know what you are doing and have a paid subscription to do your technical analysis somewhere else..

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