Posts Tagged ‘trader’
Stock Trading Technical Analysis Secrets
Tuesday, May 4th, 2010Technical analysis of the stock market, or any other market such as Forex, futures, is how most traders and investors make their trading decisions. This is as opposed to fundamental analysis which most people more agree is pretty much done as a way of making trading decisions, unless of course you are Warren Buffet!.
You only have to think back to recent stock market scams like Enron to know that it is almost impossible for the average, and even very sophisticated fund manager or hedge fund trader to really know what the real financial state of a company is.
Just by reading the balance sheet and other quaterly reports they release gives you a very poor insight into the real health of the company. Whereas the technical charts of the company tend to give the real picture of what the market thinks of the value of the company. In the case of Enron even simple technical analysis told you to SELL when the stock was in the $80-90 range, this is why technical analysis of stocks is so popular.
So what are the secrets to technical analysis?, I’m about to tell you, here are my golden rules:
* Only use 3-5 simple technical analysis indicators
* Make sure that you understand how the indicators that you have selected work, what the parameter settings are and in what market conditions they are effective
* After selecting your indicators and parameter settings don’t mess with them.
The real secret to technical analysis is to become VERY familiar with your choosen indicators, and really this can only be done by watching and studying the market, so that you get to the point that you TRUST them.
The fact is that in any market, for each bar, there are only 5 pieces of information, the open, close, high, low and volume, yet there are now hundreds of indicators. Most of these indicators are displaying the same information and so are redundant.
For the record my set of indicators are:
* 4 Simple Moving Averages
* Bollinger Bands
* MACD
* Stochastics
But the way I use them is quite special, to learn more about how to become an expert at technical analysis visit:
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Forex Risk Control
Thursday, April 29th, 2010
Risk management is a topic that many forex traders do not take seriously enough. In fact, risk management is probably the single biggest factor that is over looked amongst forex currency traders and this is the biggest reason why 95% of them fail to make money over the long term. The reason that so many traders ignore managing their risk or developing a risk management scheme is simply because they don’t feel like they need to. Many forex currency traders think that their system or their trading method is so accurate that they don’t need to manage their risk because they believe they will win on a very large percentage of their trades. The truth is that this is a false belief and it is simply emotional trading and illogical thinking as a result of fear and or greed. Professional forex curency traders understand that at best they will win on 60-70% of their trades, they understand they will lose on any where between 30-50% of their trades. If you knew you were going to lose something 50% of the time why would you not attempt to manage your risk? The simple answer is because many novice forex traders do not understand the concept of position sizing and they are trading based off emotion.
Position sizing is simply adjusting the number of lots or contracts you trade in order to stay within a pre-defined risk threshold while placing your stop loss at a safe level. Let’s look into that sentence piece by piece. Many novice traders make the huge mistake of having a certain dollar amount in their mind that they are willing to risk before they enter a trade. They then will buy or sell a number of lots that is equal to or greater than that dollar amount of risk. After that they will arbitrarily put their stop loss in mainly because they have heard you should trade with a stop loss. This is not an effective risk management plan, in fact it is basically gambling but it is exactly how, or similar to how most forex traders enter a trade.
To effectively utilize the power of position sizing you must first understand that it is absolutely necessary for you to have a set risk percentage that you are emotionally ok with losing on any one trade. Most forex currency traders cannot operate emotion free after losing more than about 3% of their account value on any one trade. As such, risking 2% or less is the recommended amount for any trader and you will be hard pressed to find any professional short-term or swing forex trader risking more than that on anyone trade, this is because they understand the importance of risk management and have already lost enough money to know they cannot control the forex currency market. So now your risk is at 2% of say a $5,000 trading account. This means you can risk $100 on any one forex trade that meets your criteria for a valid trade setup.
So here is where position sizing, risk threshold and stop loss placement come in. Once you find a trade that meets your forex trading plan entry criteria you then need to find the safest place for your stop loss, after you find this level you calculate the distance between it and your entry level. Let’s assume this distance is 150 pips, this means you can still only risk $100 but you must now adjust your position size down to meet your risk threshold. An advantage to forex currency trading is that you can trade mini and micro-lots at many brokers which essentially means you have extreme flexibility in position sizing. So to meet your 2% risk amount and maintain your 150 pip stop loss distance you can only trade 0.66 micro lots, which means youre trading .66 cents per one pip. .66 x 150 = $99. It’s vital to stay just under your risk threshold if it comes down to being slightly under or slightly over; if you traded.67 cents per pip you would be risking .67×150=$100.50, which is over 2% risk, you want to avoid this as much as possible because it will induce an emotional reaction that will very likely snow ball into a huge emotional roller coaster of trading errors.
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Best Moving Average Secrets
Monday, April 26th, 2010One of the most popular technical analysis indicators is the simple moving average also known as SMA, if you learn how to use these correctly they can be a very useful tool to help you to make good trading decisions.
The 50 simple moving average, or 50 SMA, is simply the sum of the last 50 values for each period, divided by 50, this is a moving window, as time moves on so does the average. Notice that I used the term period because this indicator works on any time period in exactly the same way.
It can be used on monthly, weekly, daily, hourly, 30 minutes, 15 minute and on whatever time period you want to monitor and trade. Although the SMA is the most widley used there is also the exponential moving average or EMA. This is a weighted version of the formula using the mathematical exponent function to give more weight to the more recent values, this has the effect of making it a much faster average that many traders like.
The truth is that it probably does not matter if you used the SMA or the EMA, what does matter however is that you use one or the other and then be very consistent with it. Do not switch between them, it is more important that you trust your chosen indicator then a slight difference in its value.
The SMA is oftern used to determine what the trend of the stock is, depending on the value used it could be a short term, medium term or long term trend. An important point to note is that moving averages are really only useful when the stock is trending, if the moving average is flat, i.e. horizontal on your chart it can become very choppy, this is a good time to stay out of the market.
The general rule is that if the current price is above the SMA the trend is up, if below the trend is down. This is very important to know because it forms the basics of trend trading and trading with the trend.
For the short term trend many traders like using a 5-8 SMA or EMA, here is a trading secret, never trade again the direction of the short term tend, this is really just common sense when you think about it.
Moving averages can often act as support or resistance, many traders use the 15, 21 or 30 SMA for this purpose.
There are a number of other very important moving averages that you need to know about, these are the 50, 100 and 200 SMA, and this mostly applies to the daily and weekly charts. A lot of the big players in the markets, the mutual funds, investment banks etc use the 50 and 200 SMA as support and resistance, if they decide to buy or sell based on these you need to follow suite, the 100 to a lesser extent. These are very useful averages to watch if you trade EFT’s like an Oil ETF.
A useful tip is that when a stock breaks through one moving average it will often move all the way to the next, for example, if a stock breaks the 30 it may move to the 50 before finding some support or resistance.
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