Financial Articles

OK, in our last installment I showed you how a sample of a Forex trading system with a high percentage of winning trades could still be a losing system overall.

The whole point of the exercise was to get you to take a closer look at the performance results of trading systems that you are interested in pursuing. Now that you know that it is possible to lose money trading a system with over 90% winners, you’ll be able to look at the next advertisement for a Forex trading system much more objectively.

Let’s take another look at our example:

Trading System A Performance

Number of trades = 1000
% of Winning trades = 92%
% of Losing trades = 8%
Average Winning trade = $180
Average Losing Trade = -$2100

A few quick calculations tells us that this trading system had Total Net Profit of -$2,400

The Total Net Profit is an important factor in any trading system although it doesn’t tell the full story.

Here’s how the Total Net Profit is calculated:

Total Net Profit = Gross Profit – Gross Loss

In our example above these figures would be:

$165,600 – $168,000 = -$2,400

As stated above the Total Net Profit for this trading system is negative. This is important to note. As you can see, if the only information you originally had access to was the percentage of winning trades you would have started to trade a losing trading system. Now with a little more information such as the Total Net Profit we are clearly able to see that all the glitters is not gold.

Please note that it is unlikely that anyone would be openly advertising the fact that even though their trading system has a high percentage of winning trades that it is a losing system.

In the next part of our series we’re going to take the performance data we currently have at our disposal and generate a very important number to know in evaluating any trading system.

To Your Forex Trading Success!

When we talk of any money transactions like those pertaining to the stock exchange, one hears a lot about brokers. FOREX traders are known to use brokers to carry out their transactions for them. So how would one define a broker? In the true sense of the word, a broker is a person or a company that a prospective investor trusts to buy and sell as per his decisions. He then pays the broker a commission which is how the brokers earn their money. A fund for margin trading necessitates the FOREX broker to be connected with big financial institution like banks. As protection against fraud and abusive trade practices a broker should be registered as a Futures Commission Merchant or FCM with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission or CFTC.

An account would need to be set up with a FOREX broker before trading FOREX. There are a lot of brokers available on the Internet and one need to go through all that they are offering as part of their services before making an informed decision and ensure that you are apprised of the fees and other charges involved. As with all businesses the best way to advertise is the kind that goes by word of mouth and this applies to FOREX trading as well. Get information from friends and associates who have been dealing with brokers and find out the pitfalls in any that you need to be aware of and if they had any problems with their particular broker.

Everyone who has something to sell will have excellent pre-sales services and these may differ from the actual service they provide once you are registered with them. Look out for this aspect especially if you are looking at online FOREX brokers. Brokers need to be quick with buying and selling and ideally an online broker should ensure automatic execution with clearly stated policies on slippage and what percentage of slippage to expect in normal and fast moving markets. You would need to know what spread the broker is talking about, whether it is fixed or variable as per type of account, do mini accounts attract wider spreads and the charges for this, if any. More profit is accrued by the trader for smaller spreads but it may lead to a trade off between service and spread so go into the nitty gritty of the deal before signing up with any broker.

It is essential to understand the broker’s margin terms before you take on a contract with any broker as the life blood of the FOREX trading is these margin accounts. You would need information on things like the calculation of margins, requirements of the margin, whether the margin changes are based on the currency that is being traded and whether the broker has different margins for different accounts like mini accounts and standard accounts.

Fast moving markets need that you have reliability and an ability to perform and since trading software is very essential for online FOREX traders, see that you pan the options available, maybe try a demo or two and then make your decision. Ideally the software should have auto trading, trailing stops and chart trading as some of its special features. They may be charged extra so check what you need and go through the charges with the broker as well. Minimum account balances, interest account balances, currency trading and if non-standard sized lots are traded as well as clients’ funds insurance and to what extent are some things for which the broker would have certain policies and one must get all the information on them.

The objective of every forex trader is to become a profitable trader. But achieving this goal is not always an easy task, so it’s vital that you learn how to use as many of the technical indicators as you can. These indicators are very useful parameters that will tell you with a pretty high probability what the forex markets are more likely to do in their apparently disordered behavior.

MACD and RSI are two of these indicators; but what’s the meaning of these letters? Here is the answer:

Moving Average Convergence Divergence: MACD is a more detailed method of using moving averages to find trading signals. This indicator was developed by Gerald Appel, the MACD plots the difference between a 26-day exponential moving average and a 12-day exponential moving average. A 9-day moving average is generally used as a trigger line, this means that when the MACD crosses below this trigger it is a bearish signal (time to sell) and when it crosses above it, it’s a bullish signal (time to buy).

This indicator will help the trader using MACD studies to have an early signal of what the market will do next. When the MACD turns positive and makes higher lows while prices are still tanking, this is usually a strong buy signal. Conversely, when the MACD makes lower highs while prices are making new highs, this could be a strong bearish divergence and a sell signal.

The other indicator, RSI, stands for Relative Strength Index. The RSI indicator measures the markets activity as to whether it is over bought or over sold. It gives a trader an indication of which way the Market is moving at the moment. It is important to note, that this is a leading indicator and thus allows one to see what the market is about to do next and then act accordingly in order to have gains. The higher the RSI number, the more over bought it is and conversely the lower the RSI number, the more over sold it is. It is a great leading indicator for the micro and macro reversals in the forex market.