วันศุกร์ที่ 31 สิงหาคม พ.ศ. 2550

Forex Trading - Proven Methods For Generating Consistent Profits

by Scott


When I see so many people with powerful dreams and desires for their lives looking to the Forex market I really feel for them. I remember when I first started investigating Forex trading and started to get an understanding of what it can do, I could hardly sleep at night because of all the wheels that kept turning in my mind. I kept asking the people I knew who were already involved in Forex trading, "You mean I can now live anywhere in the world or travel as long as I have a laptop and wireless internet?" Yes! "You mean I can start with a very small amount of money and within a year be making more money than I could have after 5 years of real estate investing? Yes! The more I thought about it the more excited I got.

Once I got started learning to trade, however, I started to see that it just wasn't as easy as what the brokers and training salesmen tried to make it out to be. In fact, after visiting some of the forex forums out there and listening to all the negative discussion I began to wonder if anyone really made money in the trading world. I watched many people join various training programs, get discouraged and eventually give up. Fortunately I knew that success was possible and continued to work on my trading while studying every training program I could find. I started to meet people personally who were credible ordinary people who had gotten through the struggling period and actually multiplied their accounts just like the trading plan formulas show. Rather than put 100% faith in a particular program I gathered information from every source I could. During this time I was priveleged to have a series of breakthroughs and insights some of which most traders never see. While others would follow a particular trading program like a religion then give it up and "convert" to another guru's system, I continued to take the best of all that I found and put it all together in the testing ground of my own experience.

After a couple of years I was still trading and finally started to see the results I was looking for. The potential results in Forex trading are so amazing and exciting that once you experience it there is nothing else that compares. The first thing I did was quit my previous business and move to Santa Fe to enjoy the sunny climate, artistic community, the beautiful Rocky Mountains and surrounding desert. Next year I may move to Aspen or to Fiji or Switzerland. Now I am only doing what is most fulfilling in my life. I can finally live by T Harv Eker's wealth statement, "I work because I choose to, not because I have to." There are many things I love being involved in and I don't do them for money because the money department is taken care of.

When some of my associates started asking me to show them how I trade the thought of being involved in forex trading training kind of defeated my purpose for trading. I really don't want another job and training is a job. Plus, I never really cared much for "public speaking" if you know what I mean. Well, after some coaxing I realized that with today's web conferencing technology I can show people exactly what I am doing while sitting in my adobe courtyard watching another incredible Santa Fe sunset. Or from the alpine European style lodge where I vacation in Aspen. Plus I do enjoy helping others succeed and that fits in well with my chosen mission in life. So, here we go!

วันอังคารที่ 7 สิงหาคม พ.ศ. 2550

Forex scalping basics

by Thomas Lindblom


The forex market is the most liquid of today's exchange, trading in excess of 1.6 trillion dollars daily. This is roughly greater than 5 times the daily trading volume of the U.S. Treasury Bond Market, and 160 times the average daily volume of the U.S. Stock Market. This extreme liquidity gives forex traders an edge in the art of lightning fast execution and the quick trade method referred to as "scalping".

Forex scalping is considered as the art of using high leverage and a large number of short term trades to steadily increase an account. Usually, only 1 to 5 pips are targeted for each trade. This type of trading appeals greatly to day traders and those looking to minimize the risk involved in trading currencies. Next to money management, "risk control" is the single most important trait to a surviving (and thriving) currency trader. The small amount of time that is spent in the market limits much of the risk in exposure in comparison to a longer term system. Also, the freedom involved in a speedy forex scalping system in such a liquid market is a "magnet" that drives many traders from other markets to try their hand in currency. A disciplined and steady scalper could seamlessly double or triple an account, and spend only a fraction of the time in the market as a common day trader.

Effective forex scalping strategies take advantage of extremely slight price fluctuations (sometimes only 1-3 pips) many times in order to steadily build an account. Because of the smaller number of pips gained per trade, larger than normal leverages play a key role in a successful forex scalping strategy. By leveraging much more than a standard day trader in a liquid environment, a very skilled scalp trader is able to make just as much money as the day trader in a shorter period of time. However, this is an obvious double-edged sword. The market can just as easily move against you on a high leverage, which could produce substantial blows to your account.

Also, it is important to take into consideration the physical and mental speed of a trader who will only stay in the market for seconds to minutes. Executing a scalping strategy by hand can be extremely difficult considering the quick amount of time you must be in and out of the market for your strategy to be affective Many successful forex scalping strategies are built to be automated; the rules to the system are coded into a trading platform to automatically perform scalp trades around the clock. Though it is completely possible to trade a forex scalping strategy manually, the majority of today's traders would agree that automating the process based on a set of rules would be the best way to ensure speed and reliability. When choosing a platform to automate your scalp strategy, it is extremely important to stick with those platforms that allow the execution of your system on every tick (such as MetaTrader 4). This ensures that your entrances and exits will be on a per-tick basis, and will give you a much higher probable rate of success than those platforms who will execute your code more periodically.

Though forex scalping may seem like a preverbal "holy grail" at first glance, there are still many unseen hurdles that surround the controversial method of trading. If you do wish to add scalping to your trading toolbox, it is extremely important to pick a broker who can support a scalpers' system. You will quickly find that many brokers do not allow scalp trading, as the method of quickly entering and exiting trades may actually cause the broker to lose money at the dealing desk. Forex scalping also does not give the broker a means to trade against their clients. Out of the hundreds of online forex brokers, only a handful support (and sometimes encourage) scalping.

Forex scalping can be a good method of growing an account quickly, but should not be looked at as the "holy grail" of trading. Most brokers do not support scalping, and a consistently profitable forex scalping strategy can be very difficult to engineer. However, if much time and effort is spent in system optimization and setting up a good relationship with a scalp supporting broker, the benefits could be well worth the time spent.