Essential Forex Trading Tips to Help you Succeed Right From the Start

It is true that there are some people who make a lot of money in forex trading but there are also a lot of people who lose large amounts. To make at least a reasonable profit, you must know these five forex trading tricks.

Forex trading is all about risk management. Even though every venture is risky, forex trading is essentially so. Therefore you need to assess the amount of money that you want to put in the market so that you do not get devastated if you lose in the market. Even though forex trading is a great place to earn large sums of money in the shortest possible time, it is also a place where you can lose out on a lot of money equally quickly too. It is therefore important to be able to assess and manage risk appropriately.

Do not set the take profit order higher than the stop loss order. Do not fall prey to the greed factor hoping to maximize the profits from a sale everytime. Get the money coming in faster by opting for a lower take profit option.

It is a good strategy to stay away from high leverages if you can. This will help you in reducing the amount of risk and help you take advantage of the forex markets. This does not mean that leveages are not good but you need to be careful.

Many trading platforms allow the opportunity of social trading. Social trading involves the practice of seeing what the top rated traders are doing so that you can copy them and benefit from their knowledge. This is also a great place to actually check out whether the thought process that you had was right or not. It is definitely a great thing to adopt if you are too busy to analyze the charts and graphs. No doubt that social trading is the smartest way to enter the forex trading world.

Confidence is a great asset for all forex traders. It is confidence that keeps you afloat when you are anxious about what the markets will be like after a major fall. While absolute success with each trade is not possible, it is possible to win with confidence, perseverance and analysis skills. There is no reason why you should not be able to succeed in forex trading when others can.

Source : forexarticlecollection

Read More

Why It's Important to Accurately Time Your Trade

Timing is everything in forex. Time it right, you win. Get your timing wrong, your money goes up in smoke.

In a fast paced market with periods of intense volatility like the forex market, timing is essential. There is a saying that “the trend is your friend till it ends”. I will say that the “trend is your enemy if you get in too late”.

Traders are advised to “trade fundamentally, enter technically.” This implies that traders are expected to follow the direction of a high impact news item. But in doing so, traders must use their technical analysis to enter at the right time.

What happens if entries are not timed properly? These are the scenarios that could occur.

1)      Some high impact news hits the news wires and it favors a long trade. You go long, but you discover that the market has spiked by almost 80 pips about a second after news release. Your entry is still pending, waiting for the broker to fulfill it. Too late. Prices are too far gone and you are asked to “REQUOTE”. Not wanting to miss out, you re-enter the market not minding the prices, and your order is instantly fulfilled. Suddenly, the price starts to retrace wildly, and you are stopped out, just in time for the price to resume its move northwards. It’s almost like the market maker was watching you to do you in.



2)      The second scenario is a bit like the first, but instead of a requote, your order is filled at a price so far away from market price, it will take a miracle move in the trade direction to break even, let alone make a profit. Slippage sucks.

Let’s explain the two scenarios. In a high impact news trade, the news feeds are received by the institutional investors before anyone else via premium news services like Bloomberg and Reuters, who charge thousands of dollars a month for this. A team of veteran traders will be waiting to analyze the news and hit the trade buttons fast. The sheer volume of such trades sends the currency price candlesticks spiking. Sometimes the spikes happen even before the retail traders get the same news. As such, any trade entered by a retail trader at this point will most likely not be fulfilled; requotes follow. If a trader enters the trade at this time, he will meet the institutional guys offloading their positions to take profits, and he will get hit by the unavoidable retracement that follows.

The two scenarios are a case of wrong timing at work.

How Can You Accurately Time Your Trades to Avoid Losses?

For news trades, it is pretty obvious here that you should not try mixing it with the big dogs. You will get blown out by the two scenarios I painted again and again. Only enter news trades when the initial madness has died down. Soon, the market will respond in a slower and more purposeful direction to the news trade, as we see here from the Non-Farm Payroll report of June 3, 2011.

Secondly, use pivot points in addition to your other technical indicators to determine if you are still within touching distance of a profit. If a long trade is closer to a resistance than a support level, the chances of that trading making a profit is lower than if the entry was closer to the support level.

There are many tips, but hang on to these two for now.

Read More

Six Tips for Long Term Investment

The long term investor needs to follow a strategy that is compatible with long term investment success.

A long term investor requires that the investment is safe, that his capital is secure and that there is a reasonable risk free return on the investment. Banks offer a reasonably risk free investment however the interest rate is very low. The Stock market has much higher returns but there is an aspect of risk which deters some investors. For all this the stock market can proffer the long term investor the opportunity to invest with manageable risk and a good return.

Six Tips for Long Term Investment:

A key long term strategy for a long term investor is to diversify their investments into various instruments such as stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. Most investment advisors recommend that not more than 10% of an investment portfolio should have more than one stock or other similar investment. Investments should be spread over geographical areas of the world such as Asia, America, Europe and also emerging markets. In addition several market or industrial sectors should be used so as to avoid the risk of a sector collapsing and a huge lose of capital.

Investors tend to be lone wolves and don’t take advice easily however even though you might not take the advice at least listen to it some of it might make sense. Try and invest in the companies whose products you like. Try to analyze the companies you are interested in and see if you like their business strategies. There are many resources on the internet that can help you understand investments. Also although an investments past performance is no guarantee that in the future it will perform well it can be prudent to choose investments that have been strong performers over the last couple of years.

Another tip is to keep an eye on your investments. Don’t invest and then forget about them. Even if you are investing for the long term you need to make sure that you have investments that are performing as you had expected against the market indices. Don’t be tempted to sell investments that are doing well to take your profit; you are in it for the long term so investments that are doing well should continue to grow. On the other hand investments that are not doing well should be sold and replaced. Remember that it is better to lose a little rather than wait in the hope that the investment will do better when in fact it continues to do badly and you lose more money.

Don’t be tempted to cash in your dividends as the return on an investment is a combination of reinvested dividends and stock appreciation. The yields might seem small but over a period of years they can make a big difference. Part of the analysis of your potential investments is looking at stocks that have a history of regular dividends.

One of the golden rules of investing is that when the market is down then that is the best time to buy stocks and when the stock index market is high its time to sell the stocks that are not performing so well and reinvest the proceeds in other instruments such as bonds or real estate.

Finally as you are investing for the long term it is important that you don’t reduce your funds through unnecessary fees and commissions. Keep your trading down to a minimum so as not to incur fees that reduce your funds. When the markets turn down don’t make the mistake of panic selling. The economy goes in cycles so a market that is down will soon move up again. Always bear in mind that a market that is low presents a buying opportunity.

Read More

Why Investors Fail [ Must Read ]

According to research more than 92% of traders close their accounts within 9 months and never come back trading again. This essentially means one thing – trading is not a get rich quick scheme. Yet, this should not be misinterpreted to mean that it is not a profession for newbies. Even the best traders lose money in their first months in the investment industry, and they made it big because they strived to overcome the challenges and went on to learn from their mistakes. Why then do so many investors fail? Here are a number of reasons:

1.    They trade for a quick buck. While traders can easily make money in the forex market, it can easily disappear. Many traders earn quick money but very few make it big because they do not fully understand how the market works. On the other hand, there are many others who end up broke because they failed to realize that forex trading is all about an properly timed trading strategy.

2.    They don’t have a plan. In any financial market, a trading plan (or strategy) is essential. Before an investor decides to trade real money, they must set specific amounts on capital they want to invest, and how much they are prepared to lose. Unfortunately, so many new traders do not realize the importance of this or they simply couldn’t be bothered.

3.    They don’t use stop losses. Not all trades will go well, and in this case, a trader must know when they can call it quits. By setting up stop losses, traders can prevent additional risk to their account and can limit their losses to a few hundred dollars.

4.    They do not test for entry and exit points. Trading works a lot like firing a missile – you have to test it so you can minimize the casualty. Random buying and selling just wont work.

5.    They get emotional. Most traders who profit in an uptrend will tend to keep their bets on that same position hoping to get a few more dollars. Unfortunately, at a time when information can be transmitted so fast, prices can change in just a few minutes and will cause a $1,000 portfolio to drop in value without notice.

www.forexmarket4you.com

Read More

Trading Psychology - Control your emotions

Trading is less a work, than a psychology, on which your success or failure on Forex market depends on. If you decided to switch to systematical trading, it does not unload emotional pressure at taking a trading decision entirely.

Frequently, Forex traders incline to the opinion that only complete absence of emotions can help while trading. Though, fear, suspense, greed, hope, belief, regret and happiness accompany the trading process inevitably. Suppressing emotions at the moment of feelings overwhelming you means disregarding the sixth sense, intuition, and finally, insight.

It is known that emotions are also transmitting a flow of information to us. We are guided by this information, act under impressions from it. But this is given to us in order to control our emotions and to change one sentiment for another.

There are a number of ways to control emotions:

Firstly, it is possible to change your emotions by switching to another object of your concentration. As a rule, this method is very effective. The thing which draws our careful attention becomes real for us. You can consider suffering losses, or vice versa render an opportunity of gaining profit.

Secondly, having changed your convictions and believes you can alter your emotions. Every belief that we attain during our life time is a sort of a filter for us, influencing all the information perceived. All views accumulated during our life affect the interpretations which we are admitting into our consciousness.

And finally, the third way to change our emotions is by modifying physiology. A change of breathing, mimics, body position, the tone and tempo of our voice, all this has a direct influence on the emotive part of not only a Forex trader, but of any person.

Attention concentration

A concentration of attention is one of the most significant constituents of our emotional condition. Because the thing you are focused on in the process of Forex trading becomes not only an object of happening reality, but also a perception of factual reality. All actions influence your interpretation of events and consequently, affect your emotions. All this manipulates your behaviour, and decisions get emotional connotation. In this case it is needed to define priorities: what are you waiting for? Are you entertaining a possibility of losses? Or are you expecting gains only?

Those who see only losses are likely to hesitate for too long entering the market or can even skip a trade. But once having decided to enter the market, they are gaining profit quickly.

Trading is an attempt to balance the opposites. A trader should focus on profit and loss and try to balance them. A trader should concentrate on probability of his methods, and on information provided by the market, as it is the only accurate and reliable one.

Physiology

It is proved that our body manages our emotions, and emotions affect the thoughts. The easiest and the most correct way to change emotional condition is to change your physiology - tempo and depth of your breath, voice or even your pose.

Pay attention to your position, the way you sit, breathe, whether the muscles of your face, shoulders and of all body are tense. If you feel discomfort, you should only sit cosily.

Absolutely simple physiological manipulation can serve an effective instrument to control your feelings.

Control your emotions, and this will definitely make a more successful trader out of you!

Read More