Trading Techniques

Experienced traders will often say "trend is your friend" or "do not overtrade". What does it mean? The links below will lead you to pages where you can read more about basic trading guidelines, general information about the technical and fundamental analysis, and some simple ideas about risk management. These are just basics - you will need to read much more related literature to become a successful trader.

General Trading Guidelines

Plan your trade and trade your plan: You must have a trading plan to succeed. A trading plan should consist of a position, why you enter, stop loss point, profit taking level, plus a sound money management strategy. A good plan will remove all the emotions from your trades.

The trend is your friend: Do not buck the trend. When the market is bullish, go long. On the reverse, if the market is bearish, you short. Never go against the trend.

Focus on capital preservation: This is the most important step that you must take when you deal with your trading capital. You main goal is to preserve the capital. Do not trade more than 10% of your deposit in a single trade. For example, if your total deposit is $10,000, every trade should limit to $1000. If you don't do this, you'll be out of the market very soon.

Know when to cut loss: If a trade goes against you, sell it and let go. Do not hold on to a bad trade hoping that the price will go up. Most likely, you end up losing more money. Before you enter a trade, decide your stop loss price, a price where you must sell when the trade turns sour. It depends on your risk profile as of how much you should set for the stop loss.

Take profit when the trade is good: Before entering a trade decide how much profit you are willing to take. When a trade turns out to be good, take the profit. You can take profit all at one go, or take profit in stages. When you've recovered your trading cost, you have nothing to lose. Sit tight and watch the profit run.

Be emotionless: Two biggest emotions in trading: greed and fear. Do not let greed and fear influence your trade. Trading is a mechanical process and it's not for the emotional ones. As Dr. Alexander Elder said in his book "Trading For A Living", if you sit next to a successful trader and observe him or her, you might not be able to tell whether he or she is making or losing money. That's how emotionally stable a successful trader is.

Do not trade based on tips from other people: Trade only when you have done your own research. Be an informed trader.

Keep a trading journal: When you buy a market instrument, write down the reasons why you buy, and your feelings at that time. You do the same when you sell. Analyze and write down the mistakes you've made, as well as things that you've done right. By referring to your trading journal, you learn from your past mistakes. Improve on your mistakes, keep learning and keep improving.

When in doubt, stay out: When you have doubt and not sure where the market is going, stay on the sideline. Sometimes, doing nothing is the best thing to do.

Do not overtrade: Ideally you should have 3-5 positions at a time. No more than that. If you have too many positions, you tend to be out of control and make emotional decisions when there is a change in market. Do not trade for the sake of trading.

Technical Analysis

Technical analysis differs from fundamental analysis in that technical analysis is applied only to the price action of the market, ignoring fundamental factors. As fundamental data can often provide only a long-term or "delayed" forecast of market price movements, technical analysis has become the primary tool with which to successfully trade shorter-term price movements, and to set stop loss and profit targets.

Technical analysis consists primarily of a variety of technical studies, each of which can be interpreted to generate buy and sell decisions or to predict market direction.

Support and Resistance Levels

One use of technical analysis, apart from technical studies, is in deriving "support" and "resistance" levels. The concept here is that the market will tend to trade above its support levels and trade below its resistance levels. If a support or resistance level is broken, the market is then expected to follow through in that direction. These levels are determined by analyzing the chart and assessing where the market has encountered unbroken support or resistance in the past.

Popular Technical Analysis Tools

Moving Averages (MA): Indicators used to smooth price fluctuations and identify trends. The most basic type of moving average, the simple moving average, is the average of the past x bars ending with the current bar;

Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD): Indicator that utilizes moving averages to identify possible trends and an oscillator to determine when a trend is overbought or oversold;

Bollinger Bands: Bands that are placed x moving average standard deviations above and below a simple MA line;

Fibonacci Retracement Levels: Indicator used to identify potential levels of support and resistance;

Directional Movement Index (DMI): A positive line (+DI) measuring buying and a negative line (-DI) measuring selling pressure;

Relative Strength Index (RSI): Momentum oscillator that is plotted on a vertical scale from 0 to 100;

Stochastics: Momentum oscillator that measure momentum by comparing the recent close to the absolute price range (high of the range minus the low of the range) over a period of x bars;

Trendlines: Straight line on a chart that connects consecutive tops or consecutive bottoms of prices and is utilized to identify levels of support and resistance;

Fundamental Analysis

Fundamental analysis is the evaluation of non-visual information to evaluate trading activity and make trading decisions. Whereas technical analysts utilize charts and mathematical indicators to quantify price activity, fundamental analysts utilize market news and market forecasts to qualify price activity.

There are numerous market events that move financial markets every week. Some affect every market instrument while others affect specific instruments. If the outcome of a market event has been fully discounted by the market, traders will not notice any discernible impact on their charts. If the outcome of a market event has not been fully discounted by the market, the result is either price appreciation or price depreciation and traders will see this activity on their charts.

Every week, there are fundamentally-important market events that are scheduled in every country at specific times. Similarly, there are fundamentally-important market events that may not be scheduled for specific times. Some countries (Germany, for instance) often do not schedule market events for specific times. The outcome of market events is sometimes leaked in advance in certain countries (Germany, for instance) for different reasons.

Market events include the release of economic data, speeches and testimony by government officials, interest rate decisions, and others.

Controlling Risk

Controlling risk is one of the most important ingredients of successful trading. While it is emotionally more appealing to focus on the upside of trading, every trader should know precisely how much he or she is willing to lose on each trade before cutting losses, and how much he or she is willing to lose in trading account before ceasing trading and re-evaluating.

Risk will essentially be controlled in two ways: by exiting losing trades before losses exceed your pre-determined maximum tolerance (or "cutting losses"), and by limiting the "leverage" or position size you trade for a given account size.

Cutting Losses

Too often, the beginning trader will be overly concerned about incurring losing trades. Trader therefore lets losses mount, with the "hope" that the market will turn around and the loss will turn into a gain.

Almost all successful trading strategies include a disciplined procedure for cutting losses. When a trader is down on a position, many emotions often come into play, making it difficult to cut losses at the right level. The best practice is to decide where losses will be cut before a trade is even initiated. This will assure the trader of the maximum amount he or she can expect to lose on the trade.

The other key element of risk control is overall account risk. In other words, a trader should know before start of trading endeavor how much of trading account he or she is willing to lose before ceasing trading and re-evaluating strategy. If you open an account with $2,000, are you willing to lose all $2,000? $1,000? As with risk control on individual trades, the most important discipline is to decide on a level and stick with it. Further information on the mechanics of limiting risk can be found in trading literature.

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Introduction to Markets

Buying and Selling
Financial market is a mechanism that allows people to easily buy and sell (trade) market instruments at low transaction costs and at prices that reflect efficient markets. Financial markets have evolved significantly over several hundred years and are undergoing constant innovation to improve liquidity.

If you believe value of a market instrument is going to increase, then you would buy the instrument and at one point in the future you would sell it for a higher price. This is the basic motivation for trading on financial markets.

Orders and Positions
When you want to open a position you need to place an "entry" order. If and when the entry order executes, the position becomes "open" and starts its life on the market. At some point in the future, you will place an "exit" order to "close" the position. A position can be "long" (entry order is to buy and exit order is to sell an instrument) or "short" (entry order is to sell and exit order is to buy an instrument).

At the point when you place your entry order, you need to define price level at which you want to buy or sell certain instrument. You also need to specify type of the order and quantity of the instrument you want to trade. There are 3 order types:

Market Order
Placing a market order means that you will buy at the current "ask" (or "offer") price, or sell at the current "bid" price, whatever that price currently is. For example, suppose you are buying a market instrument and its current market price is 129.34 / 129.38. This means a participant in the market is willing to buy the instrument from you at 129.34 and / or sell it to you at 129.38.

Stop Order
Initiating a trade with a stop order means that you will only open a position if the market moves in the direction you are anticipating. For example, if an instrument is trading at 129.34 / 129.38 and you believe it will move higher, you could place a stop order to buy at 129.48. This means that the order will only be executed if ask price in the market moves up to 129.48. The advantage is that if you are wrong and the market moves straight down, you will not have bought (because 129.48 will never have been reached). The disadvantage is that 129.48 is clearly a less attractive rate at which to buy than 129.38. Opening a position with a stop order is usually appropriate if you wish to trade only with strong market momentum in a particular direction.

Limit Order
A limit order is an order to buy below the current price, or sell above the current price. For example, if an instrument is trading at 129.34 / 129.38 and you believe the market will rise, you could place a limit order to buy at 129.28. If executed, this will give you a long position at 129.28, which is 10 pips better than if you had just used a market order. The disadvantage of the limit order is that if the instrument moves straight up from 129.34 / 129.38 your limit at 129.28 will never be filled and you will miss out on the profit opportunity even though your view on the direction was correct. Opening a position with a limit order is usually appropriate if you believe that the market will remain in a range before moving in your anticipated direction, allowing the order to be filled first.

For both entry and exit orders you can specify price levels at which you want them to be executed. You have to specify entry levels when you place you entry order, while most trading systems would allow you to specify exit levels at any time.

Calculating Profit
The objective of trading is to buy a market instrument and later sell the same market instrument for a higher price. In case of margin trading, trader can also sell a market instrument first and later buy the same market instrument for a lower price. Either way, trader has to close position in order to lock in the profit.

Let us assume that you open a long position by buying a market instrument for 129.38 (quantity of 10000) and few hours after that, you close the position by selling it for 129.52 (same quantity of 10000). These two trades would bring you profit of (129.52 - 129.38) * 10000 = 1400.

We can also say that these two trades would bring you 14 "points" profit. A "point" is the smallest increment in an instrument's price. For the instrument in the above example, one point is 0.01 and for an instrument denominated with 4 decimals, one point would be 0.0001. Expressing position profits in points is often very useful for quick calculations and estimates.

One point, from the example position above, would bring you 0.01 * 10000 = 100 profit, denominated in the same currency the market instrument is denominated in.

In case of Forex, currency pair denomination will be in the counter currency (JPY is the counter or quote currency in the USD/JPY pair) and you may need additional currency conversion to get profit calculated in the currency your trading account is denominated in.

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What Is Marketiva?

What is Marketiva?

With more than 800,000 serviced users, 500,000 unique and live trading accounts, and more than 3.8 million live orders executed each month, Marketiva is one of the most popular over-the-counter market makers in the world providing Forex, Indexes and Commodities trading services.

May I open a test account and try the system first?

Because live and virtual trading desks co-exist within one Marketiva account, you may try our system with a regular account and later use the same account for live trading. In any case, you can open your Marketiva account for free!

How much money do I need to start trading forex right now?

With its flexible quantity specifications and $5 cash reward, Marketiva allows you to start trading with no money down. Due to strict lot specifications, many other over-the-counter market makers require at least $500 to start with.

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Never Give Up Dude, All Come From Zero : Slogan Blogger Pemula

Slogan atau berupa kata motivasi Never Give Up Dude, All Come From Zero ini menurut saya sangat cocok bagi seorang blogger pemula layaknya saya yang mencoba All Come From Zero. Memulai Bisnis Online dari NOL dan Never Give Up Dude. Kayak lagunya D’Masiv “Jangan Menyerah”, kurang lebih seperti itu.

Seperti kontes seo joko susilo dengan tema Stop Dreaming Start Action, kali ini Yasirli membuat

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Bisnis Online 2010 : Blogging dan PPC

Fenomena bisnis online 2010 yang banyak di gandrungi oleh banyak pebisnis. Terjun ke dunia online menjadi suatu alternatif pekerjaan baru. Tentunya banyak hal penyebab orang mencoba bisnis online. Tidak sedikit yang berhasil, namun banyak juga yang mengalami kegagalan.

Kesalahan dalam mindset mengenai bisnis online menjadi faktor pertama kegagalan dalam bisnis online 2010. Beberapa Mindset yang

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Kenyataan Forex

....sebuah peluang bisnis yang sangat menjanjikan, bisa menghasilkan keuntungan besar secara singkat, juga bisa menimbulkan kerugian yang besar dalam waktu sekejap, istilahnya berbanding lurus dengan hasil dan resikonya (hight risk investment). Ada sebagian kisah sukses dan sebagian besar berjatuhan.

....begitu manis atau mengerikankah bisnis ini?...(to be continue..)

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Hedging dan Average strategi Money Management

Hedging :

(Saat ini broker-broker dari  Amerika Serikat (NFA,CFTC Regulation) tidak mengijinkan trading memakai sistem ini).

Bagi sebagian orang Hedging dianggap merupakan salah satu cara yang cukup ampuh untuk meraih profit namun kembali lagi apapun taktik, strategi dan caranya yang namanya resiko akan selalu melekat saya pribadi lebih suka memposisikan hedging untuk menyelamatkan atau mengunci kekalahan kita. Salah satu kelemahan dari hedging ini adalah dari segi waktu yang lama, menuntut perhitungan yang lebih cepat dan teliti, bisa mempengaruhi dari segi psikologis kita bagi yang tidak sabaran. Akibatnya malah kita bisa terjebak ke minus point yang lebih besar lagi.

Dasar-dasar hedging

Hedging adalah suatu keadaan dimana kita membuka 2 posisi berlawanan secara bersamaan yaitu membuka open posisi buy, tapi juga sekaligus membuka open posisi sell secara bersamaan dengan tanpa di pasangi stop loss melainkan hanya target profit saja biasanya target profitnya berkisar 30-50 poinan adapun maksud dan tujuannya adalah supaya kita memperoleh profit disaat terjadi swing harga baik saat harga bullish maupun saat harga bearish

Cara kerja hedging :

Pada saat salah satu open posisi mencapai target misalnya 50 point maka open posisi yang tadi akan otomatis terlikuidasi sehingga anda hanya punya 1 posisi saja yang masih minus 50 point langkah selanjutnya adalah menunggu sampai minus di posisi yang satunya berkurang sedikit misalnya dari minus 50 point jadi tinggal minus 30 point. Jika benar terjadi minus berkurang, maka kita akan melakukan open posisi yang berlawanan lagi tapi secara fakta kita sudah untung 20 poin demikian seterusnya proses situ berjalan yang penting diingat adalah kita harus konsekuen sesuai target kita jangan menjadi gugup jika misalnya kedua posisi malah minus semua berpikirlah dengan tenang bahwa sebenarnya apapun yang terjadi minus anda tidak akan lebih dari angka-angka yang telah di kunci tersebut.

Bagaimana setelah saya mencoba menunggu beberapa waktu dengan harapan posisi saya yang tinggal satu ini minusnya berkurang, tapi malah kenyataannya makin bertambah?

Inilah salah satu kelemahan dari tak-tik hedging tersebut salah satunya cara yang bisa dilakukan ya sesegera mungkin melakukan open posisi yang berlawanan tersebut sebelum minusnya makin bertambah besar dengan harapan kelak kesempatan untuk mengurangi minus akan selalu ada.

Idealnya system hedging di praktekan jika salah satu posisi mengalami kerugian berkisar 30-50 poinan saja. Sistem hedging sudah mulai terasa berat di praktekan kalau salah satu posisinya sudah mengalami kerugian mencapai lebih dari 100 poin ada satu cara untuk mengurangi minus poin tersebut yang akan kita bahas pada sesi berikut ini.

Average

Average adalah salah satu cara untuk meminimalkan kekalahan dengan cara membuka posisi yang sama.

Contohnya open buy yang pertama anda sudah kalah -100 poin maka anda segera membuka posisi open buy lagi maka jika kemudian harga bergerak turun mencapai 100 poin maka anda akan mendapati posisi seperti ini: open posisi pertama anda menjadi profit 0 sementara open posisi ke dua menjadi profit +100 jika terjadi demikian maka anda masih bisa mendapatkan profit

Tetapi jika dirasakan open posisi keduanya berada dalam keadaan tidak menentu bahkan cenderung akan loss lagi maka bisa diambil jalan tengahnya yaitu open posisi pertama minus -50 kita tutup sebaliknya open posisi kita yang kedua profit +50 juga kita tutup maka kita akan mendapatkan kondisi dalam keadaan netral kembali ( modal kita masih tetap utuh )

Contoh kasus EURO-USD

Open posisi 1 buy di : 1.1919

Harga tick saat ini di : 1.1819

Kerugian posisi 1 saat ini : -100 poin

Buka open posisi lagi

Open posisi 2 buy di : 1.1819

Target BEP di : (1.1919+1.1819) : 2 = 1.1869

Pada saat harga bergerak di harga 1.1869 artinya anda sudah mencapai titik impas anda bisa melikuidasi ke dua posisi tersebut dan modal pokok anda masih utuh tidak berkurang

Kelemahan pada system Average:

System average memiliki kelemahan yaitu malah bisa semakin menambah beban minus point maka sebaiknya system ini dilakukan apabila kerugian sudah mencapai di kisaran 100-150 poin. Dan jangan dilupakan pula dasar dari pengambilan keputusan adalah tetap berpedoman pada prinsip range High dan Low yang telah anda pelajari di awal supaya walaupun anda masih kalah anda masih bisa mendapatkan harga yang terbaik.

Inti yang harus kita pahami adalah bagaimana caranya pada saat kita kalah, kekalahan tersebut tidak perlu sampai mengurangi modal pokok kita. Seandainya mengurangipun usahakan pada titik seminimal mungkin.

Inilah sebabnya mengapa modal yang di gunakan untuk trading cukup 10% saja dari modal pokok kita gunanya untuk mencegah hal-hal yang tidak diinginkan

System Forex trading adalah hal yang sederhana, bahkan begitu sederhananya kadang membuat kita menjadi lupa atau masa bodoh dan menganggap semuanya masih bisa diatasi dan dalam batas toleransi

Mungkin melihat nilainya yang kecil maka kita masih menolerirnya namun di balik semua itu tersimpan bahaya yang luar biasa besarnya yang mengancam keseluruhan keadaan financial anda.

Ada cerita nyata yang mengisahkan pada awal koloni kulit putih di benua Amerika, orang-orang kulit putih ini membeli pulau Manhatan New York dari penduduk pribumi suku Indian dengan manik-manik senilai kira-2x USD 24 saja.

Namun jika Uang USD 24 tersebut di tabung dengan bunga 4% saja maka orang-orang Indian itu kini bisa membeli kembali pulau Manhatan New York Lengkap dengan isinya gedung-gedung pencakar langit bahkan masih mendapat kembalian. Mungkin ada sebagian dari pembaca yang pernah mendengar kisah ini. Maka Albert Einsten pernah berujar bunga berbunga adalah keajaiban dunia yang ke 8

Banyak kekalahan besar timbul dari sikap demikian kekalahan besar timbul dari hal sepele dan bodoh yang jika kita berpikir dengan tenang maka kita akan heran sendiri mengapa bisa sampai kita berbuat sebodoh itu. Tapi itulah faktanya

Menghadapi sikap tamak serakah walaupun secara teori mudah namun pada prakteknya dari jaman dahulu sampai sekarang tetap merupakan musuh terberat dalam hidup ini.

sumber : http://lukitohendro.cjb.net

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