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Showing posts with label between. Show all posts
Showing posts with label between. Show all posts

Friday, April 29, 2016

Getting the Right Mind Set Distinguishing Between Expenses and Failures ~ forex trading hours today

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Certainly when people start to get into forex trading every little trade that doesnt go their way seems like a gigantic failure. Definitely the reasons why this is the case are many but perhaps the most important one is that new traders do not have an approach to trading that lets them make the distinction between what is a failure and what is a normal trade that simply went wrong when everything was done "by the book". On todays post I will be talking about the distinction between trades that fail and trades that lose, I will define each one and I will attempt to give you some guidelines so that you can change your mindset and start approaching trading from a more business like perspective. Hopefully after reading this post you will apply this to your trading and you will find out that most of your so called "failures" are just business expenses while many of your profitable trades, are just failures.

Cataloging trades that go "wrong" and end up in losing territory as failures is easy because when we lose money we tend to feel like losers. It is therefore very normal to consider losing trades failures in the beginning. However after you have been trading for a while it becomes obvious that losing is an inherent part of long term profitable trading and that learning to catalogue losing trades differently is important to approach trading with the right mindset. In reality, when every trade is placed there is a natural probability that it may turn out to be a loser (the trades market exposure) and therefore when you execute everything as planned and you lose, it is just a temporary consequence of your strategy.

When you approach trading like a business, this becomes a business expense and the trade become a triumph since you planned you trade and traded your plan. This in turn makes it easier to deal with losing trades since you approach them in a very non-emotional way, simply as some temporary events that will lead to some future profitability. Therefore losing trades that are a consequence of a well laid out plan with accurate long term profit and draw down targets are not failures, they are just part of your business model.
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Failures - on the other hand - are all the trades you take that deviate from your business plan. When you intervene with your plan and make emotional changes to your trading methodology or system you are indeed failing at trading because you are moving away from your "business model". If you made a trade in which you took a decision that generated a lot of profit but that decision led to a road where the long term probability of success was unknown then you have failed because what you obtained was some profit out of some luck. Long term survival in forex trading is about having a plan and executing the plan to get to where you want to be, any deviations from the plan are failures since they lead you a road of unpredictability and uncertainty that will end up with failure.

In order to trade forex successfully I focus on trading as a business and on the trades taken by my systems as a business plan. Any losing trades that happen are merely "business expenses" and all of them are triumphs in the sense that they represent my confidence in the strategy and the business plan. I now understand that any action I take that may intervene with my strategies will deviate me from my long term profitability objective and this for me has become unacceptable since these changes constitute failures of what I want to achieve.

So in the end, loses are a natural part of trading and they will always be there. Dealing with loses is something which is naturally hard to do but you should be able to make the distinction and take loses that are part of a well laid out plan as business expenses while those trades that get you to uncharted territory should be regarded as failures. This mindset will get you on a track of long term thinking and understanding that will ultimately lead to long term profitable trading.

If you would like to learn more about automated trading systems and how you too could use them to succeed in forex trading by building your own systems with reliable trading tactics and accurate risk and profit targets please consider buying my ebook on automated trading or joining Asirikuy to receive all ebook purchase benefits, weekly updates, check the live accounts I am running with several expert advisors and get in the road towards long term success in the forex market using automated trading systems. I hope you enjoyed the article !

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Wednesday, April 13, 2016

Why There is No Universal System Differences Between Currency Pairs ~ forex trading glossary

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Can we build a system that trades successfully on all forex currency pairs ? This has often been a question of the automated trading system world that simply asks if there is a universal inefficiency, an inefficiency that is so common that it can be found an exploited on all different currency pairs. Up until now, the answer to this question has been a resounding and unequivocal NO. To the best of my knowledge no system has ever been developed to work on all currency pairs despite the claims of many system sellers who tell you that you can use their systems on all of them. But why has it been impossible to build such a system ? Why does trading all currency pairs seems like such a big challenge ? The answer lies within the very fabric of the market and the way in which the different currency pairs trade and react. Within the following paragraphs I will explain to you some of the basic aspects of these currency pair differences and why it makes the creation of any universal system extremely hard if not impossible.

You may have been told that inefficiencies in the market arise due to crowd behavior- which is a human characteristic- and that all currency pairs in forex show it to some degree. When you hear this it becomes easy to think that if a system "really works" then it is bound to work on absolutely all the instruments available in the currency market. After all, every instrument is bought and sold by humans and this would make them inherently inefficient.

Certainly if all instruments traded with the exact same number of people and with the exact same objectives we would be able to easily find a universal inefficiency but the matter of fact is that this is not the case. The first dramatic difference between instruments is the number of participants and the inherent liquidity of each currency pair. Some pairs like the EUR/USD are very liquid while others like the GBP/CHF dont have 1/10th of the liquidity of the former so their price action is dramatically different and the inefficiencies within it become dramatically different. The less people who trade a given pair, the more efficient it becomes since crowd behavior becomes less pronounced and individual decisions start to play important roles.

Then we have other differences that also make the movements of currency pairs different. For example if you are trading the USD/JPY and there is a negative trade balance against Japan then there will be a given fixed amount of money each month that will pull the USD against the JPY just merely because of business transactions that have nothing to do with speculation. The volume of these transactions is very significant and the time in which they are processed and their magnitude will have an impact on the way in which a pair moves.

Many other factors such as central bank intervention and even cultural differences play an important role in the way in which a pair moves when compared to another and all of these factors help to explain why the finding of universal inefficiencies is so hard. However when you look at higher time frames (daily and beyond) there seems to be some coherence and this is the reason why some systems that target month or year long trends manage to exploit the same inefficiency on several different currency pairs. However the success of these systems along the whole portfolio is never total and more often than not there are very strong differences between the profitability of different currency pairs and several pairs where the systems simply do not work.

So will we ever find a global and total inefficiency ? I would have to say that probably no, but if there is a chance it will take a lot more liquidity on all instruments and a lot more market participants to make this the case. Certainly in the future if the market volume on the illiquid currency pairs increases enough we might be able to have - even though not a truly universal system - at least systems that will have better success along different currency pairs.

If you would like to learn more about system development and how you too can build your own likely long term profitable systems based on sound trading tactics please consider buying my ebook on automated trading or joining Asirikuy to receive all ebook purchase benefits, weekly updates, check the live accounts I am running with several expert advisors and get in the road towards long term success in the forex market using automated trading systems. I hope you enjoyed the article !

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Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Weird Arbitrage Opportunities in Currency Trading The USD COP Case ~ forex trading germany

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Have you ever dreamed about making money with absolutely no risk of loss in the currency trading market ? Did you think that such opportunities did not exist ? Contrary to most peoples belief in the fact that there are absolutely no arbitrage opportunities in currency trading I have personally observed the contrary for perhaps the past ten years in a very weird occurrence that seems to be absolutely particular to the USD/COP currency pair. The COP - or Colombian peso - is the main currency unit of the Colombian government and some extremely weird arbitrage opportunities are presented within Colombia to make substantial profit from USD or EUR exchanges. On todays post I will share with you this very strange case and why it leads to a rare inefficiency which doesnt seem to be present anywhere else.

The USD/COP is what many would call a "strange" currency pair. The pairs spread is usually around 0.1-0.2% of the pairs value and daily fluctuations can go from 2 to 10% of the exchange rate. This sometimes crazy volatility makes trading this pair hard (for anything but long term trading) but it also makes local Colombian currency exchange houses maintain some exchange rates away from the real interbank FX rate when very large fluctuations occur to avoid having strong monetary loses.

What happens here is that a great arbitrage opportunity is created that is actually quite strange. For example in early 2009 the USD/COP went from 1800 to nearly 2600 in a matter of a few months and the local exchange houses kept their exchange rate near 2000-2100 due to the fact that raising the rate to 2600 would cause them loses due to their previous peso reserves against the USD. Since most currency houses lack proper diversification and protection measures they need to eliminate their own loses by keeping exchange rates artificially low (although the time period this lasts is limited).

The opportunity arises since you can go to a currency house, exchange COP for USD at an exchange rate of 2100 then you need to physically take your money to the US (yes, you need to travel) then deposit it into a US bank and withdraw it through a wire transfer to Colombia at the FX rate of 2600. If you think this would have been impossible due to some reason, the fact is that I know several friends and traders who actually did the trip and managed to get 20% profits in a matter of days. I even had a friend who did the trip three times and made a 60% return over his initial "investment". Of course, the arbitrage opportunity is limited by the fact that you can only take 10K USD in cash out of the country legally per trip but it does give you the chance to get some risk-free profit from currency exchanges.

The reasons why this bold inefficiency exists are many but probably both the above exposed lack of proper protection from strong currency moves and the general injection of money from the drug industry into currency exchange houses could make this arbitrage opportunity both a consequence of money laundering and inefficient handling. The fact that a very small percentage of the population has US or EU visas and bank accounts in the US and EU needed to finish the transaction could also explain why this is not exploited to the point where the market is made efficient.

Of course the fact that exploiting such an inefficiency could also be supporting the drug industry has made me refrain from ever taking part in this game but certainly there is an arbitrage opportunity that I know many have taken advantage of to get massive profits when these small windows of opportunity arise every 2-5 years. Definitely a weird occurrence that is worth noting and discussing. If you have any opinions please feel free to leave a comment below :o)

If you would like to learn more about my journey in automated trading and how you too can build your own automated trading systems based on sound trading tactics please consider buying my ebook on automated trading or joining Asirikuy to receive all ebook purchase benefits, weekly updates, check the live accounts I am running with several expert advisors and get in the road towards long term success in the forex market using automated trading systems. I hope you enjoyed the article !

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