Sunday, March 8, 2009

Take a Currency Trading Course

Almost all forex trading courses available today fall into the self-study or seminar categories. Both have important strengths and weaknesses. The self-study camp is generally comprised of web-based courses, CD-ROMs, workbooks, or any combination thereof. While self-motivated and highly disciplined traders might find self-study courses to be perfectly satisfactory, many traders require the structure of a more formal learning environment and would benefit greatly from individual instruction. Seminars, hosted by various brokers and financial market educators around the country, typically run 1-3 days in length. Most walk traders through at least a fair range of important topics in a more or less methodical way. The drawback, of course, is that in addition to the cost of the seminar, traders must absorb travel and accommodation expenses. And at many seminars, the number of attendees makes personal instruction impossible.
Happily, the latest trading courses make use of online technologies to offer a complete curriculum, a perfect mix of convenience and structure, and all the benefits of a classroom environment and one-on-one instruction -- at an economical price. A complete trading course can be put online and broken down into daily lessons (for example, one lesson per day for a full month). Though the trader must log into the website to view each day's lesson, he may do so at any time that's convenient. After each lesson, students have the opportunity to post questions for course instructors and to discuss ideas with fellow students in a virtual classroom. Brief daily assignments and quizzes -- and even individualized feedback from instructors based on the assignments -- all play an important role in reinforcing material and help traders learn each day's lessons. And when a complete online course is combined with a practice trading account, the trader has a risk-free opportunity to apply the lessons and strategies learned, and instructors can offer pointers, tips, and suggestions to help refine and improve trades. This new type of course represents a quantum leap forward in trading education.

How to Get Started Trading Currencies

Many futures and stock traders are aware of the excitement surrounding the currency market. However, because foreign exchange trading was until only recently limited to multinational corporations, money-center banks, and the largest investment firms, forex remains a new and unfamiliar market to many self-directed, retail traders. As a consequence, despite the undeniable advantages that the forex market offers, some online traders are no doubt apprehensive and reluctant to participate. With the passage of time, the benefits will undoubtedly become more widely known and better understood, and more traders will almost certainly migrate from the equity and futures markets. In the meantime, interested traders can take steps to bring themselves up to speed and learn more about this exciting market

Forex trading strategy

Trading successfully is by no means a simple matter. It requires time, market knowledge, market understanding, trading strategy and a large amount of self restraint. ACM does not currently manage accounts, nor does it give trading advice, that is the job of money managers and introducing brokers. As market professionals, we can however point the novice in the right direction and indicate what are correct trading tactics and considerations and what is total nonsense.
Anyone who says you can consistently make money in foreign exchange markets is being untruthful. Foreign exchange by nature, is a volatile market. The practice of online currency trading by way of margin increases that volatility exponentially. We are therefore talking about a very 'fast market' which is naturally inconsistent. Following that precept, it is logical to say that in order to make a successful trade, a trader has to take into account technical and fundamental data and make an informed decision based on his perception of market sentiment and market expectation. Timing a trade correctly is probably the most important variable in trading successfully but invariably there will be times where a traders' timing will be off. Don't expect to generate returns on every trade.
Let's enumerate what a trader needs to do in order to put the best chances for profitable trades on his side:
Trade with money you can afford to lose:Trading fx markets is speculative and can result in loss, it is also exciting, exhilarating and can be addictive. The more you are 'involved with your money the harder it is to make a clear-headed decision. Money you have earned is precious, but money you need to survive should never be traded.
Identify the state of the market:What is the market doing? Is it trending upwards, downwards, is it in a trading range. Is it strong or weak, did it begin long ago or does it look like a new trend that's forming. Getting a clear picture of the market situation is laying the groundwork for a successful trade.
Determine what time frame you're trading on:Many traders get in the market without thinking when they would like to get out, after all the goal is to make money. This is true but when trading, one must extrapolate in his mind's eye the movement that one expects to happen. Within this extrapolation, resides a price evolution during a certain period of time. Attached to this is the idea of exit price. The importance of this is to mentally put your trade in perspective and although it is clearly impossible to know exactly when you will exit the market, it is important to define from the outset if you'll be 'scalping' (trying to get a few points off the market) trading intra-day, or going longer term. This will also determine what chart period you're looking at. If you trade many times a day, there's no point basing your technical analysis on a daily graph, you'll probably want to analyse 30 minute or hour graphs. Additionally it is important to know the different time periods when various financial centers enter and exit the market as this creates more or less volatility and liquidity and can influence market movements.
Time your trade:You can be right about a potential market movement but be too early or too late when you enter the trade. Timing considerations are twofold, an expected market figure like CPI, retail sales or a federal reserve decision can consolidate a movement that's already underway. Timing your move means knowing what's expected and taking into account all considerations before trading. Technical analysis can help you identify when and at what price a move may occur. We will look at technical analysis in more detail later.
If in doubt, stay out:If you're unsure about a trade and find you're hesitating, stay on the sidelines.
Trade logical transaction sizes:Margin trading allows the fx trader a very large amount of leverage, trading at full margin capacity (in ACM's case 1% or 0.5%) can make for some very large profits or losses on an account. Scaling your trades so that you may re-enter the market or make transactions on other currencies is generally wiser. In short, don't trade amounts that can potentially wipe you out and don't put all your eggs in one basket. ACM offers the same rates regardless of transaction sizes so a customer has nothing to lose by starting small.
Gauge market sentiment:Market sentiment is what most of the market is perceived to be feeling about the market and therefore what it is doing or will do. This is basically about trend. You may have heard the term 'the trend is your friend', this basically means that if you're in the right direction with a Strong trend you will make successful trades. This of course is very simplistic, a trend is capable of reversal at any time. Technical and fundamental data can indicate however if the trend has begun long ago and if it is strong or weak.
Market expectation:Market expection relates to what most people are expecting as far as upcoming news is concerned. If people are expecting an interest rate to rise and it does, then there usually will not be much of a movement because the information will already have been 'discounted' by the market, alternatively if the adverse happens, markets will usually react violently.
Use what other traders use:In a perfect world, every trader would be looking at a 14 day RSI and making trading decisions based on that. If that was the case, when RSI would go under the 30 level, everyone would buy and by consequence the price would rise. Needless to say, the world is not perfect and not all market participants follow the same technical indicators, draw the same trendlines and identify the same support & resistance levels. The great diversity of opinions and techniques used translates directly into price diversity. Traders however have a tendency to use a limited variety of technical tools. The most common are 9 and 14 day RSI, obvious trendlines and support levels, fibonnacci retracement, MACD and 9, 20 & 40 day exponential moving averages. The closer you get to what most traders are looking at, the more precise your estimations will be. The reason for this is simple arithmetic, larger numbers of buyers than sellers at a certain price will move the market up from that price and vice-versa.

Disadvantages of forex trading

Leverage. With huge leverage available to forex traders the danger is that positions which carry too much risk for the account size can be taken on, leading to margin calls. Effective money management rules must be adhered to.
Brokers. Retail traders must use a broker rather than dealing directly in the interbank market. The broker will be the counterparty in all transactions and is, effectively, making the market. They can, therefore, widen spreads or even refuse to trade during volatile trading conditions. To avoid dealing with brokers an alternative to forex is to use futures. See online futures trading for more details.
Spreads. As the retail trader must use a broker to trade, they cannot deal at the interbank rates. A broker will generally quote a fixed spread of 3-20 pips depending on the currency pair. The underlying interbank rate might be as little as 1 pip.
Forex is a very large market but for most retail traders dealing with brokers the odds are shifted against them. Online futures trading provides a much more level playing field for most traders who want to take part in forex trading.