Archive for December 5th, 2009

What You Should Know About Forex Trading Before You Make Your First Trade

For a beginner forex currency trading may seem to be a whole new world but in fact the basics are quite easy to learn. You just need to understand the buzz words and trading terms and grasp a basic understanding of how the markets work.

The rates of exchange on the the foreign market rise and fall quickly. With this fact in mind, investors are poised to make a lot of money fast. But, then, they realize that risk is involved and that they could easily lose of a lot of money just as quickly. As with anything else in life, big risk can equal big gain.

If you’ve ever exchanged currency for a vacation, then you know that the rates are constantly changing. For example, say you’re planning to travel abroad, and you change $100 into another country’s currency. Then you find out that you don’t need it and change it back into your country’s currency. The rate will most likely have changed in the interim, and you may even have made a small profit.

Obviously, forex traders hope to make a profit in dealing with currencies. Why else would they do it? But rather than changing their money at a bank, they use a broker. With the advent of the World Wide Web, most transactions occur online. And, it’s a lot like trading in the stock market; forex investors trade in margins in which a small balance controls a large deal.

One advantage that forex traders have over stock exchange traders is that they are able to trade in more than just their own country. Trading any two currencies can be done anywhere. Because of the international aspect, trading is done 24 hours a day from Monday morning in Australia to Friday afternoon in New York.

World currencies are designated using three-letter codes. For the United States dollar, it’s USD; for the Swiss franc, it’s CHF; for the Barbados dollar, it’s BBD; for the Botswana pula, it’s BWP; for the Egypt pound, it’s EGP; for the Mexican peso, it’s MXN. Two countries exchange rates are expressed as a proportion. For example, USD/CLP 1.493. This translates into one US dollar equals 493 Chilean pesos.

If you want to start out in forex trading you will need to look for a broker or investment management company that you trust. It is worth shopping around and checking online forums for recommendations. Check out how long the company has been in business and what your rights and liabilities will be. Read all of the fine print.

You will probably also want to use a bot to do your trading for you. This is automated forex trading software that can trade 24 hours a day according to rules that you set for it. There is usually a demo option so that you can test out the whole system for a while before you let it trade with real money. There are many forex robots on the market and most of them come with full instructions for beginner forex currency trading.

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Index Options Trading (Part I)

The options market has caught the fancy of many investors and this is not surprising. The beauty of options is embedded in its very name. You have the options but not the obligation to buy or sell stocks at a given price by a given time. Now for options buyers this option unlike futures limits their maximum liability to the option premium they had paid at the time of buying the options contract.

Everyone knows the terms S&P 500 Stock Index and the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA). These are two world famous stock indexes. Infact every stock exchange around the world ahs got a stock index associated with it. You must have come across the term Index Options. So what are index options? In’78, Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) began options trading on popular stock indexes such as the S&P 500 Stock Index. The CBOE options trades in multiples of $100 per index point. This is much cheaper than the $250 multiple per index point for the S&P futures contract.

An index option allows the investor to buy the stock index at a set point within the given time period. Let’s take an example. Suppose the S&P 500 Index is at 1100 points. You have a bullish opinion of the market and are of the opinion that the S&P 500 Index will go further up.

There are options Greeks that you need to understand. Time and volatility are two very important factors for an options contract. In case of an index options, what this means is that if any time for the next three months you decide to exercise your call option, you will get $100 for each point the index is above 1150. So you decide to purchase a call option at 1150 for three months for 50 points. In other words you paid an option premium of $5000.

In that case you will only lose the premium of $5000 that you had paid to buy the call index option. Now, 1150 is the strike price of the index option. In case the S&P 500 Index does not rise above 1150, you can simply decide to not exercise your call option.

Contrast this with S&P futures. In case of S&P futures, the downside risk is unlimited whereas in index options the downside risk is limited to only the premium that you had paid for the options contract. Call options are considered to be bullish. So for you to make a profit with this call option, the S&P 500 Index will have to rise above 1200 point within the next three months otherwise you will lose your premium.

In case the S&P Index had fallen to 1100 point, you would have recouped your options premium. Put options are considered to be bearish. A Put Index Option works in exactly the same way as a Call Index Option except that you make profit when the stock index goes down. If you had bought the put index options instead of the call index option in our example above, every point below the strike price of 1150 would have given you a profit of $100.

But the most important factor is the expected volatility of the market. Now the option premium that you pay is determined by the market and it depends on many factors like interest rates and dividend yield.

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Forex Trading Tips – Managing Risk Is The Name Of The Game

When you trade in the forex market without strict rules to manage your cash-flow, you are not trading but in fact gambling. From time to time traders may fall into the trap of buying or selling way too much of a currency pair and risking way too much of the money in their accounts based solely on hunches, also known as ‘feelings’; but this is a sure way to accelerate disappointment in the market. When you start out as a beginning trader it is important to devise a method of calculating how much risk (by default) you would be willing to risk on any position.

Money management rules such as the 2 percent rule are designed to protect us in the long run. You are probably wondering how, and I will explain that in a moment, but first an example. Case and point, Mark decides to make only 10 trades a month, he is what you would call a conservative trader. Mark has a simple rule that stipulates that if he makes four consecutive losses in a row he would pull out of the market until the next month; and for every profitable position he closes, he will risk only a third of his profit in the next trade that he makes; fairly simple rule and very effective in the long run in ensuring that his gains remain consistent.

So what rule can you apply in your trading strategy or how should you go about managing risk? Choosing the right means to protect your capital depends a lot on your style of trading, your account size and even your own personal tolerance for market speculation.

While using a reduced lot size is a good way to start, it will not be very helpful if you have a number of open lots. You must understand relationship between the currency pairs of the forex market; if for example you were to make a short trade on GBP/USD and a long trade on USD/JPY, you are unduly exposing yourself twice to the USD. This equates to having 2 lots of USD in a long position. If the USD price drops, you would lose…twice! Try to keep the lot numbers to a minimum and this is especially encouraged for beginning traders. You can also consider placing only 2 percent of your forex account at risk as mentioned earlier for any opened position, a common technique used by many traders.

Here is an example I hope will show you practically and in a different angle what we have covered here today. With a newly opened forex account 1000 dollars, I risk only 2 percent of that in every trade that means each position is worth 20 dollars of my account. I plan to have only 10 trades a week with a target of 100 dollars profit after all trades; this means I would have to endure the risk of losing 10 trades to suffer a maximum of a 100 dollar loss on my account. Naturally, I do not expect to lose 10 trades consecutively nor lose over 100 dollars in my account, and as fate would have it, I make 6 winning trades but lose 4. The following week I use the gains of my previous trades as risk and consistently repeat this cycle. This example shows you how you can keep your capital safe, and work more on growing your profits and choosing winning trades, I how you found these tips informative.

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