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Showing posts with label three. Show all posts
Showing posts with label three. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 10, 2016

The Three Commandments of the Successful Forex System Trader ~ forex trading jobs in india

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Very often people will ask me what is needed to achieve some success in automated trading. I get asked if it is actually possible to live "making money while you sleep" and to exploit market inefficiencies as the market changes. Often people I explain my line of work to are extremely skeptical. For example a person I met a few weeks ago at my sisters wedding asked how this was possible and that if this was possible, why isnt everyone making a profit from the forex market. Oh well, it certainly is useful when you talk to people who have absolutely nothing to do with trading - as a matter of fact - I had not found myself in such a difficult position to explain something for quite a bit of time. In the end, I told her that - in analogy with getting to heaven and the ten commandments - people do not succeed with the use of automated trading systems because they do not follow some very simple principles. I explained to her that there are simple rules that need to be followed when you trade these systems and that deviations - even if only small - can end up making a person fail to achieve the ultimate goal of long term profitability in automated trading.

On todays post I want to talk to you about these "three commandments" I explained to her and why each one of these simple rules is absolutely vital to get success in trading, specifically with mechanical trading systems. Of course, some of you may disagree and some of you may agree but in the end these are the rules I have found to work for me and what I believe "raises the bar" so that only a few traders are able to get to this point. Evidently I have not been enjoying this position for decades and therefore I am still tempted and strive to stay with my "three commandments of the mechanical system trader", hopefully following these three seemingly simple - yet very complex rules - will keep me in my way towards a few decades of forex automated trading profitability :o). Do you want to know more about these rules and whether or not they apply to your current situation ? Keep reading to find out !

1. You shall understand what you are doing. Perhaps this eliminates most of the people out there who are currently wanting to become profitable in the long term using these systems. Understanding is a vital part of success and achieving a profitable position in automated trading will simply not be possible - from what I have seen and experienced - if you do not perfectly understand everything you are doing, the systems you are using and how automated trading works. Understanding needs to be deep and should NOT be merely superficial. Understanding should cover deep knowledge about your systems logic, the inefficiency exploited, etc. If you have not gone through at least a few years worth of trades of the system you are trading in a trade by trade basis doing a trade by trade in-depth analysis then you still need to go a long way before you can consider that you truly know what you are trading. In the end, any effort you wont do is an effort somebody else will make and that someone will take your place as a profitable mechanical trader. So if you want to avoid efforts, this is not the place to be.

2. You shall know what to expect. After knowing what you are doing comes to know what you should expect. Traders who are successful using automated trading systems know exactly what to expect from their systems, they know all the characteristics of the systems they trade and precisely what their predicted draw down and profit periods are like. People who understand their automated trading systems and analyze them extensively know the accuracy of their simulations, the length of profit and draw down periods and all other characteristics of systems. Again - as with understanding - we are not talking about a superficial understanding of what to expect. Anything that happens with your system that you do not take into account within your plan will make you unsuccessful so you have to be prepared for every possible case. What if your system reaches a draw down deeper than the simulations ? what if the system has double the number of predicted consecutive loses ? You should know what the meaning of these events are related to your systems performance.

3. You shall evaluate your systems. The last commandment of the successful mechanical trader is to evaluate. You cannot be successful if you trade a system with blind faith - because every system can fail - and continuously evaluating the performance of your trading system and the current market conditions is of incredible importance to achieve success. Knowing when a worst-case scenario will be reached, if the current draw down cycle is too long, if the system is now too risky to be traded, etc is one of the most important aspects of successful mechanical trading.

For people who read this blog who are also Asirikuy members the three above mentioned commandments may have sounded very familiar as I refer to them continuously within the Asirikuy website videos as the Asirikuy mantra : understand, expect and evaluate. From my experience these three simple things are the only actual skills you need to be a successful system trader. You simply need to understand, know what to expect and evaluate performance.

Of course, easier said than done :o) Maybe the first point seems to be the hardest - and it probably is- but the second and third are NOT any easier. Knowing what to expect from a system requires extensive analysis and it requires you to have a very clear understanding about the role and limitations of simulations and the whole way in which the system changes as market conditions start to develop, not to mention a deep understanding of system cycles, their extent and composition. Evaluating is also not very easy to do since it requires the confidence to run your system on live accounts and to weather the profit and draw down cycles trusting your expectancy analysis to be right.

My advice for you is therefore extremely simple. If you want to be successful in automated trading, follow the above three rules and I can guarantee that you will - at least- get to the point where I am today :o). If you would like to learn more about my journey in automated trading and how you too can build and trade 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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Friday, April 22, 2016

The Indicator Series The Awesome Oscillator A Tool to Measure Momentum ~ forex trading for beginners

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On todays article we will be discussing a very interesting indicator which forms part of Bill Williams "chaos trading" theory in which several indicators are used to attempt to trade the markets profitably. This indicator- called the Awesome Oscillator - was developed as a means to get an idea about short term momentum on a given trading instrument. Within the next few paragraphs you will learn more about how this indicators values are calculated, what it really tells us about the market and how we can use this information for the building of likely long term profitable automated trading systems. As a part of the "indicator series" this article will attempt to give you an idea about the essence of the indicator and the real nature of the information it conveys.

So what is the Awesome Oscillator about ? What makes it so awesome ? This indicator - usually plotted as a histogram - uses a very simple calculation to measure what we would call "market momentum". The indicators value is obtained as the difference between a 34 and a 5 moving average calculated around the median price (which is the (high-low)/2 of each bar). Putting it simple, the values are obtained with this simple equation :

Awesome Oscillator = SMA(MEDIAN PRICE, 5)-SMA(MEDIAN PRICE, 34)

You might have also noted that the awesome oscillator contains red and green colors which depend on the increasing or decreasing nature of the values. If the last value is lower than the current values the current bar is green while the opposite case makes the bar red. To sum it up the awesome oscillator tells us if the 34 and 5 period average values of median price are coming closer or falling further apart. When the values are falling apart there is momentum (since short term price is - in average - moving away from the longer term average, when the values are closer then we have the opposite.
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It may now seem more evident how this indicator might be traded. We can build a system that trades the cross of the 0 line (which is equivalent to the simple moving average cross system of the 34 and 5 period MA values calculated on median price) or we can trade changes in direction (changes from red to green) to attempt to capture changes in momentum which may forecast an eventual cross of the moving averages. However the fact that the oscillator only gives us information about the momentum change taking into account a relatively small number of bars means that its success on lower time frames is bound to be very limited. When using this indicator on time frames lower than the daily you will see that it gives extremely confusing signals since the 34 and 5 median calculated moving averages cross a lot, something that makes the finding of an inefficiency quite hard.

Added to that is the fact that the awesome oscillator momentum "changes" (color changes from red to green) can happen during a single bar and therefore give a lot of fake signals. For this reason most people will advice to trade this indicator on three bar signals to gain a better perspective and eliminate signals that are simply spikes that might only "seem" like changes in momentum. By doing this we can gauge changes in momentum better and build a system that reacts quicker to changes in market direction. Exiting trades when the first opposite bar appears also seems to be a good exit strategy since usually this wont happen after the majority of the large move happens. Of course, the success of such an approach is bound to be minimal on lower time frames, again due to the inherent problems of the low period usage of the awesome oscillator on these charts.
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Above you can see a USD/CHF daily chart with some of the possible signals during the financial crisis which was a very trending period for this and other currency pairs. You can see here how the awesome oscillator would have captured moves with very good accuracy. Of course, the system is not going to be perfect and under conditions when the 34 and 5 MA comes close for large periods of time the system would suffer large amounts of losses (this is the systems market exposure so that it can get into this very good trades when they develop). The above mentioned signals also allow us to get back into trends after retracements, so they are definitely a necessary compliment since they help us fully exploit large runs without missing a large part (as if we only entered shorts above 0 and longs below 0).
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So as you see, the awesome oscillator is really not that awesome, it is simply a tool to measure momentum which compares the prices of two simple moving averages calculated on median price values. This information is bound to be useful for the development of a momentum based automated trading system, especially on large time frames - like the daily - where these signals are much more meaningful than on lower time frames when the low periods used by the oscillator will make the finding of inefficiencies extremely hard, if not actually impossible.

If you would like to learn more about automated trading and gain a true education in the development of likely long term profitable mechanical trading systems please consider joining Asirikuy.com, a website filled with educational videos, trading systems, development and a sound, honest and transparent approach automated trading in general . I hope you enjoyed this article ! :o)

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Wednesday, April 6, 2016

It is NOT Only About the Spread Understanding Market Depth ~ forex trading jargon

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Maybe the first thing that people new to forex learn about brokers is the fact that better brokers have better spreads. Since the spread - the difference between the bid and ask price - is the fixed cost per transaction then any given broker that offers you a better cost per transaction will ultimately be better from a profit wise perspective. This becomes critical when you are using systems that take profit in areas lower than 10 times the spread since the contribution of the market spread to your trading costs is very significant. However what traders often fail to notice is the fact that the spread is not enough to tell a brokers quality from another, often new traders will get involved with brokers who have "the best" spreads only to find that their execution is no where near what they expected. How can you judge the quality of different brokers besides the spread ? On todays post I want to talk about marketp depth, the nature of order execution and what you should look for within a broker besides an excellent spread level. This article will also further pinpoint the difficulties in achieving long term profitabilities with scalping systems and why great care is needed when choosing a broker for such systems.

What ? I thought that the spread was the only cost per transaction, determining broker quality - you might be thinking. However reducing broker performance to their spread level is simplistic and does not give you a full picture about the whole quality of your brokers trading operation. When you buy a given contract in forex trading, you are - ideally - filling a transaction from someone who wants to sell their previously held contract. For example, if you want to buy EUR/USD at 1.2345 you are actually buying a contract from someone who is selling it at 1.2345+spread. The dealer hands the contract over to you and keeps the Bid/Ask difference -the spread- as a comission.

However the problem comes when you realize that the number of contracts available at any given price level is not unlimited. Of course, not everyone wants to sell EUR/USD at a given price level or buy it at another and therefore the amount of liquidity available in the market is very limited. The consequence is that you might have a broker with a GREAT spread but it might have a very dry liquidity pool so you might be unable to get your orders filled at the price levels you want.
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Of course, the problem now comes to the difference between brokers with and without dealing desks. When a broker has a dealing desk it will try to fill all your orders, regardless of liquidity but it might not want to fill your orders at a certain price level if your orders are too large or too fast for them. The solution of the broker to this exposure you cause it is to simply requote you until you get a price level in which the broker has enough liquidity, hedging positions from other traders, etc. The end result is that you feel absolutely tricked because you are unaware of the true causes of why all this requoting has happened.

On the other hand, ECN brokers allow you to have second level market depth, which means that you are able to directly see the orders that are being placed and you can actually SEE how much volume is available for you to get. Of course, there are simply no requotes on ECN brokers because the transactions are done from peer to peer and everything is much more transparent to you (of course, someone can beat you to a transaction but then there is no requote but simply you "failed" to capture the transaction first) . Using an ECN broker allows you to see exactly how the market is moving and what volumes at what price levels are available for purchase.

For systems that need to trade fast having this added volume information and having transparency over execution is absolutely vital to have any chance of long term success. The fact that liquidity at different price levels is limited also points out why scalping systems may not have such a great chance at achieving long term profitability. Many people are fighting for very narrow price ranges with very limited volumes and the people who fail to get their desired price levels will definitely lose a significant portion of their profits. However, systems that swing trade and use very wide targets might no be affected by this fact simply because they can have a lot of flexibility around their entry points and deviations of +/- 5 pips are not bound to cause any disastrous effects in the long term.

So to sum it up, the quality of a broker is not only given by its spread levels but by the quality of its liquidity pool. When you use a regular dealing desk broker you will not be aware of this pool while on ECN brokers you will see all the action directly through second level market depth. Having brokers that allow you to see deeper is vital for people who trade scalping systems while it adds little value for traders who use swing and longer term systems. Nonetheless traders who use long term strategies but trade high amounts of volume may also need to see their brokers liquidity pool to catch better entry and exit points.

If you would like to learn about mechanical trading systems and how you can code your own automated trading systems with sound trading tactics to achieve success in forex trading 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

Three Way Triangular Arbitrage in Forex Does it Work ~ forex trading for maximum profit pdf

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One of the most interesting ideas in forex trading comes from what would seem to be a fundamental market inefficiency that would seem very easy to exploit by most market participants. Three way arbitrage is a trading technique that seeks to exploit inconsistencies in exchange rates arising from trading activity, inconsistencies that supposedly lead to tradable market inefficiencies. On todays article I will write a little bit about three way arbitrage, what it is, how it is traded and what the potential rewards may be. I will tell you why I think this cannot be done successfully by regular retail traders and why the rewards - if any - would be much lower than those of a regular long term profitable trading system.

When we have a large group of currencies and all their combinations are available as different currency pairs there is a basic consequence that leads to the trading of several pairs being equivalent to the trading of some crosses. For example if you are buying 1 lot EUR/JPY it would supposedly be equivalent to going long an equivalent on the EUR/USD and going long one equivalent on the USD/JPY. The idea is that your profits are dependent on the EUR/USD and the USD/JPY exchange rates such that the USD exposure is canceled and your net exposure comes from the indirect relationship of the EUR with the JPY. The below graph better explains this idea (using the EUR/USD, GBP/USD and EUR/GBP) (the graph was taken from here, where the concept is also further explained).
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The three way arbitrate inefficiency now arises when we consider a case in which the EUR/JPY exchange rate is NOT equivalent to the EUR/USD/USD/JPY case so there must be something going on in the market that is causing a temporary inconsistency. If this inconsistency becomes large enough one can enter trades on the cross and the other pairs in opposite directions so that the discrepancy is corrected. Let us consider the following example :

EUR/JPY = 107.86
EUR/USD = 1.2713
USD/JPY = 84.75

The exchange rate inferred from the above would be 1.2713*84.75 which would be 107.74 and the actual rate is 107.86. What we can do now is short the EUR/JPY and go long EUR/USD and USD/JPY until the correlation is reestablished. Sounds easy, right ? The fact is that there are many important problems that make the exploitation of this three way arbitrage almost impossible.

The first problem is the trading cost. This three way arbitrage is based on taking very small profits from the market and as such it becomes extremely vulnerable to spread variations. A bad spread means that you will lose most of the profitability or that you will need to search for very large arbitrage gaps which are rare and often fall in line with news events when trading spreads are much higher and trading becomes much harder.

The second and biggest problem is execution. Not only will it be extremely hard to get into these orders without any slippage (since your profitability depends on it) but getting out might be even harder as you will be trying to squeeze a very small amount of profit from the market. These arbitrage opportunities are also searched by funds with ultra fast computers and direct connections to banking feeds and therefore the liquidity related to them will dry up terribly fast.

The simple fact when trying to trade three way arbitrage is that for a retail trader it will be almost impossible to profit given the amount of trading cost, the rarity of very good opportunities and the speed in which these opportunities "dry up" as traders with access to much faster computing power take advantage of them. In the end trying to exploit one of these trading techniques is bound to be MUCH harder than trading a simple long term profitable system since their profitability will depend on too many factors which the regular retail trader cannot control. As a matter of fact, the exploitation of every arbitrage opportunity greater than trading costs is something that banks and hedge funds do constantly, a practice that aids to keep exchange rates equalized also making these opportunities for retail traders practically nonexistent.

As always there is no "free lunch" in forex trading and success comes from knowledge and understanding and not from the exploitation of some "magical" trading system that no one else takes advantage of.

If you would like to gain an education around automated trading and learn how you too can make up your own systems with sound profit and draw down targets please consider joining Asirikuy.com, a website filled with educational videos, trading systems, development and a sound, honest and transparent approach to trading systems. I hope you enjoyed this article ! :o)

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