Monthly Archives: August 2012

Quiet Start To The Week, But A Great End. 317 Pips In Total.

The week started off very quiet indeed, no trades on Monday at all. We got one trade on Tuesday for 11 pips, and 2 trades on Wednesday for 39 pips combined. We then had a nice day yesterday with 3 trades for 105 pips in total. Today was a great day. We had 4 trades, 3 winners and one loser. Total pips today was 162. what a great end to a pretty poor week. Total pips for the week is 317.

All our trades are posted on our main site at http://www.tradeforexmakemoney.co.uk and are displayed here via an RSS feed, so if you want more information on each trade just click on a link in the feed on the right hand side of the site.

Have a great weekend all, and i hope next week is just as profitable. :-)

The Quietest Trading Week

Well we have just started the quietest trading week apart from Christmas week, and the markets have not disappointed us. We have a bank holiday in the UK today, and so far the market has been very quiet, and very boring. Some small set ups, but nothing worth taking.

When the markets are this quiet i rarely trade, i prefer to keep my powder dry as they say. I think the rest of today will be the same so we will probably finish early today. Yes i am working on a bank holiday. :-)
I work every day the Forex markets are open, unless i am on holiday. If the markets are open, then there are opportunities to trade, and that is what i do.

There should be a bit more action tomorrow, so hopefully we will get a few decent trades to report. If you are trading today, have a good one. :-)

Quantitative Easing Is On The Cards?

For those of you that do not know what quantitative easing is, its basically when a govt prints more money to help the economy of that country. The Fed had a meeting last week that put the possibility of more QE for the US a distinct possibility. QE has a major effect on currencies. If the US govt decide to go ahead with QE it will weaken the US dollar, which will in turn strengthen other currencies like the Euro, and the YEN. So taking Euro Dollar short positions, or Dollar YEN longs is a risky strategy while QE is on the cards.

As the announcement was out last week, most of the news is already factored into the price of the Dollar, but if QE goes ahead, you could see a big Dollar weakening move temporarily, so tread carefully and don’t over expose yourself in the coming weeks.

The Benefits of Forex Mentoring

What are the benefits of Forex Mentoring? There are many benefits of Forex Mentoring if you choose the right mentor. The main benefits are to accelerate your learning and give you the confidence you need to enter and exit trades at the correct time, which in my opinion is the key to making consistent profits from trading Forex.

How many times do you enter a trade and the market moves against you? How many times do you say to yourself, if only id have waited a bit longer i could have got in at a much better price?

How many times are you entering trades and getting stopped out. If this is all too familiar to you then you should not be trading in my opinion. You are not understanding how the markets work correctly, and until you do, you will continue to lose money and get frustrated with your trading.

Let me tell you, i have been in this position, i have made losses and been frustrated with my trading, and many times have considered calling it a day, so you are not on your own. I would say that 90% of successful Forex traders have been in this position at some point. Forex trading is a very hard job to learn, and its very frustrating because of the potential to make a lot of money very quickly.

The majority of people do not invest the correct amount of time required to learn how to trade Forex correctly. They see the dollar signs and think ok i want some of that, and start trading. Professional traders love these people, they feed on them, they eat them up for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Professional Forex traders earn a very good living at the expense of bad traders.

Despite what you may have been told, or may have read, Forex is a win lose business. If you win, someone else loses, its as simple as that. If you pull 10k out of the Forex market next week, you have taken that 10k off another trader, or a number of other traders. They may be bankers, hedge fund managers, or retail traders. To be honest they are more likely to be retail traders. :-)

So do you want to be a winner or a loser? Easy question to answer, you want to be a winner right? If you want to be a winner, you need to stop giving your money to professional traders, and learn how to trade like they do. Statistically 95% of Forex traders lose money, the 5% that make money are the pro’s.

Whats the difference between a Doctor, an Accountant, a Solicitor, an Architect, a Vet, a Plumber or a Builder. Apart from the job they do there is no difference at all. They were not born into their profession, they were trained to do their profession, and they were trained for a minimum of 4 years, and they were trained by an expert in their chosen field. Would you consider paying £1000, £2000, £5000 even, to enter a competition in which you would have to compete against any of these professionals, and the winner takes all. Would you consider entering a house building competition with a builder, i doubt you would. So why are you entering a Forex trading competition with professional Forex traders, if you have not been trained by a professional Forex trader? More often than not professional Forex traders have been trained by other traders. The best traders in the world are not self taught, all the best traders have been trained and mentored by someone.

Some of the best traders in the world work on Wall Street, or in the City of London, and they work for large banks, or hedge funds, and they earn millions per year. When you trade Forex you are competing with these guys. To be the best, you have to be trained by the best. These super traders started out making tea for other super traders, they sat there and watched these super traders make millions, day in day out for years, before they were allowed to trade their own real money accounts. They paid their dues, they did their apprenticeships. They were trained and mentored by other traders.

Now you don’t have to be a super trader to make a very good living from Forex trading, but you do have to know what they know, you do have to trade how they trade. You do have to be trained as they were trained. Next time you visit the Doctors or the Dentist, ask yourself if this person has been trained by another Doctor, or another Dentist, or have they just rented a room and put an advert in a local newspaper?

If you want to be a successful Forex trader, you need to be trained and mentored by another successful trader, its a simple as that. :-)

What is Forex Trading?

Forex is an acronym of Foreign Exchange. Forex Trading is the speculative trading of one currency against another. When you trade Forex you trade in currency pairs. When you trade a currency pair, you buy one currency and sell another at the same time. For example, if you wanted to sell Euros because you thought the value of the Euro was going to fall, you would normally sell Euros and buy Dollars as the Dollar is the base currency for most currency pairs. You don’t have to trade Euro Dollar, you can trade the Euro against many currencies, including the Pound, the Yen or the Australian Dollar.

When you trade a currency pair you have to pay a spread. The spread is the difference between the buying price and the selling price. The spread can vary from pair to pair. The most frequently traded pairs have the smallest spread. The most frequently traded pair is Euro Dollar which makes up more than a third of all the transactions on the Foreign Exchange markets. So the spread on Euro Dollar is very tight. When you are trading currencies it is best to trade the major pairs so you have a tighter spread, and the price action does not have to move very far before you are in profit.

The major currency pairs are as follows:

EUR/USD Euro v US Dollar
USD/JPY US Dollar v Japanese Yen
GBP/USD Great British Pound v US Dollar
AUD/USD Australian Dollar v US Dollar
USD/CHF US Dollar v Swiss Franc
USD/CAD US Dollar v Canadian Dollar
EUR/JPY Euro v Japanese Yen
EUR/GBP Euro v Great British Pound

The object of Forex trading is to make money obviously. You make money by making pips. Pip stands for Point In Percentage and is a small percentage or a fraction of the price of the currency you are trading in. The way you make money is by putting a monetary value on each pip. For example. I trade in the UK and my account is denominated in British Pounds. The smallest amount per pip i can trade is 50 pence. The largest is £10,000. Say i thought the value of the Euro would rise and i wanted to enter a long trade (up) and had a price target of 40 pips, and a stop loss of 10 pips. I can risk £100 per pip to make a potential £4000. If the price moved against me an went down (short) i would lose £100 for every pip the market moved against me, plus my spread of course. So if the price moved 10 pips against me, and i closed my trade, i would lose £1000 plus my spread, which would be around 1 pip. So in total i would lose £1100. So basically i am risking £1100 to make £4000. This is just an example trade, and every trade is different, sometimes you risk more to make more, or risk less to make less. I trade low risk high probability set ups, so the odds are always in my favor. :-)

When you open a trade you have to decide how long you wish to have that trade open for. I am a day trader, and most of my trades are opened and closed the same day, sometimes within a few minutes. Occasionally i will roll a trade over until the next day, but more often than not i am in and out within the day. Some traders day trade, some traders trade weekly or monthly time frames, there really is no limit to the amount of time you can hold a trade for, but you will be charged a fee by your broker for rolling trades over until the next day. If you decide that you want to trade longer time frames, weeks and months rather than days, you would be better off trading a future trade rather than a spot trade. A spot trade gives you a tighter spread, but you have to pay rollover charges, but a future is a slightly bigger spread, but there are no rollover charges. You need to decide before you trade, what type of trader you want to be.

I can trade higher time frames as well as day trading but i prefer to day trade. Some people prefer to day trade, some people prefer to trade higher time frames, each to their own. My Forex mentoring program is better suited to day trading, but i can teach you to trade higher time frames if that is what suits you better.

If you want to fast track your learning process, please consider my training and mentoring program. More information here.

Have a great day. :-)