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Posts Tagged ‘informedtrades’

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The second lesson of two on interest rates, why they are so important to the stock market and to traders and investors in the stock, futures, and forex markets with an introduction to the Federal Reserve.

In yesterday’s lesson we began our discussion on Monetary Policy with a look at one of its primary components, interest rates. In today’s lesson we are going to continue this discussion with another look at how interest rates affect the economy and therefore the markets, and by introducing the institution which implements Monetary Policy, the Federal Reserve.

As we saw in our example yesterday, small movements in interest rates can have dramatic effects on the economy. Just as small changes in interest rates can dramatically increase the costs for individuals to own a home or borrow money to purchase other goods, they can also have a dramatic affect on the cost of doing business.

It is for this reason that when interest rates rise, making borrowed money more costly, that people will also be less likely to start or expand a business. This not only has an effect on the business owner themselves but filters throughout the entire economy as less businesses being started and expanded means less jobs, which means less people getting paychecks, which means less people spending money and on and on down the line. The opposite is of course also true for when interest rates fall and business owners take advantage of access to cheaper borrowed money.

In addition to interest rates affecting the stock market, interest rates also have direct and indirect affects on the bond, foreign exchange, and futures markets. Here are a couple of quick examples of this which we will expand on in later lessons:

The Bond Market: When interest rates rise the value of existing bonds fall as investors can now purchase the same bond with a higher interest rate and vice versa.

The Forex Market: When Interest rates it becomes more attractive from a yield standpoint to own the dollar against other currencies or to invest in interest bearing dollar based assets. This creates a demand for dollars which will many times cause the dollar to strengthen. The reverse is also true when interest rates fall.

The Commodities Market: When economies grow at a greater rate as a result of lower interest rates this will mean a greater demand for commodities so their value will rise and vice versa.

Duration : 0:5:12

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http://www.informedtrades.com/
The second lesson in a two part series on trading strategies for trading the flag and pennant chart patterns using technical analysis for day traders and investors in the stock market, futures market, and foreign exchange market.

Duration : 0:5:26

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A lesson on the basics of fundamental analysis, the top down and bottom up, and the US Economy for traders of the stock, futures, and forex markets.

there are two ways that traders analyze the markets which are known as technical analysis and fundamental analysis. As I also mentioned in that lesson while most people who buy and sell over the short term focus on technical analysis and most people who buy and sell over the long term focus on fundamental analysis, in my opinion both technical traders, fundamental traders, and investors can all benefit from at least having an understanding of both types of analysis even if they prefer one or the other as their primary tool they use to make their trading decisions.

While technical analysis focuses solely on the analysis of historical price action, fundamental analysis focuses on everything else including things such as the overall state of the economy, interest rates, production, earnings, and management. When analyzing a stock, currency or commodity using fundamental analysis there are two basic approaches one can use which are known as bottom up analysis and top down analysis. Bottom up analysis very simply means looking at the details such, as earnings if we are talking about a stock, first and then working one’s way up to the larger picture by looking at things such as the industry of the company who’s stock you are trading and then finally the overall economic picture. Top down analysis on the other hand means looking at the big picture things such as the economy first and then working one’s way down to the details such as earnings if we are talking about a stock.

While there is some debate about which method is best my personal preference is for Top Down analysis and since by starting this way we can start with the things that apply to all markets and not just the stock market this is how we will start.

The first thing that it is important to understand from a fundamental standpoint is what the economic situation is as it affects the financial instrument you are trading. As I am based in the US and the US is the World’s largest economy this is what I am going to talk about, however most of the things I discuss here apply in a broad sense to any economy. When we begin to discuss the foreign exchange market in later lessons we will go into specific details of the other major and emerging market economies from around the world.

According to Investopedia.com the definition of an Economy is “the large set of inter-related economic production and consumption activities which aid in determining how scarce resources are allocated. The economy encompasses everything relating to the production and consumption of goods and services in an area”

People often refer to the US Economy as a capitalist or free market economy. A capitalist or free market economy in its most basic sense is one in which the production and distribution of goods and services is done primarily by private (non government) companies and the price for those goods is set by the free market. This is in contrast to a socialist or planned economy where production and distribution of goods and services as well as the pricing of those goods and services is handled by the government.

Duration : 0:7:42

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Technorati Tags: analysis, Business, daytrade, economy, Forex, fundamental, futures, howto, informedtrades, investing, stockmarket, Trade, trading

http://www.informedtrades.com
A lesson on the second two components of the US Economy the Private and Government Sector and how these each affect forex, futures, and stock traders.

In our last lesson we began a discussion on the different components that make up the US Economy and how these relate to trading with a look at the Natural Resources and Labor Force components. In today’s lesson we continue this discussion with a look at the Private Sector and Government components and how each of these relates to trading.

While having lots of natural resources and a large well educated labor force to produce goods and services from those natural resources is a great thing, without a way to organize these first two components of the economy, not much would get done. This is where the small, medium, and large businesses which make up the private sector come in. In addition to organizing the labor force to produce goods and services, the private sector is also responsible for raising the capital necessary to bring all these things together which they do through private investors, loans from commercial banks, the bond market, and/or the equities market.

While many people think that the US Economy is dominated by the large corporations, it may come as a surprise the large role that the small business play’s in the US Economy. According to the US Department of State:

“Of the nearly 26 million firms in the United States, most are very small—97.5 percent … have fewer than 20 employees,” the U.S. Small Business Administration says. “Yet cumulatively, these firms account for half of our nonfarm real gross domestic product, and they have generated 60 to 80 percent of the net new jobs over the past decade.”

While we will go into more details about the private sector and how this all relates to trading in later lessons, it should be obvious at this point the large effect that the private sector has on all markets as they are the ones who: 1. Raise capital through bonds and stocks that we then trade, 2. produce the goods and services which drive demand for the commodities we trade and 3. Affect the foreign Exchange markets by playing a role in what goods and services are produced domestically, which we import from overseas, as well as cross boarder mergers and acquisitions.

Duration : 0:5:44

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Technorati Tags: analysis, Business, daytrade, economy, Forex, fundamental, futures, howto, informedtrades, investing, stockmarket, Trade, trading

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A lesson on open market operations and how the federal reserve increases and decreases the money supply in order to move interest rates and what this means for traders of the stock, futures, and foreign exchange markets.

In our last lesson we looked at the structure of the Federal Reserve and the components of the FOMC, the portion responsible for implementing Monetary Policy. Now that we have an understanding of this, we can look further into exactly how monetary policy is facilitated and what happens to markets under differing scenarios.

Monetary Policy very simply is anything which relates to action by the Federal Reserve to influence the amount of money and credit available in the economy. To understand exactly what this means, one first must understand the concept of fiat monetary systems.

Fiat Monetary Systems: The United States, like most major economies, has what is known as a fiat monetary system. A Fiat Monetary system very simply is any system which uses a monetary unit (in this case the US Dollar) which is not convertible to some commodity, in general a precious metal such as gold.

Fiat money, is money that is backed by the credit of some entity, normally a government, and the value for which is derived from its relative scarcity and the faith placed in it by the population which uses it.

This is important to us as traders because the fact that the Dollar is not convertible to a commodity such as gold gives the Federal Reserve the ability to increase or decrease the money supply as it sees fit, or in other words to enact Monetary Policy.

With this in mind the 3 tools available to the Fed for enacting monetary policy are:

• Open Market Operations
• The Discount Rate
• Reserve Requirements

The most common tool that the Fed uses, and therefore the one that we will cover, is Open Market Operations. Once we have an understanding of this and how increases or decreases in the supply of money affect demand and prices, the other two less commonly used tools will be more easily understood.

Through something which is known as the Open Market Committee, the Fed increases and decreases the supply of money by buying and selling US Government securities.

When The Fed wishes to reduce interest rates they will increase the supply of money by buying government securities using money that was not available in circulation before they made their purchase. As with anything, when additional supply is added and everything else remains constant, price normally falls. In this case the price that we are referring to is the cost of borrowing money or interest rates.

Conversely, when the fed wishes to increase interest rates they will instruct the open market committee to sell government securities thereby taking the money they earn on the proceeds of those sales out of circulation and reducing the money supply.

Duration : 0:4:6

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Technorati Tags: Business, daytrade, economy, fed, federalreserve, Forex, futures, howto, informedtrades, investing, stockmarket, Trade, trading

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A lesson on how most traders have unrealistic profit expectations which cause them to lose all their money and what realistic profit expectations are when trading the stock, futures or forex markets.

The first step in understanding and building a solid money management plan, the key component in successful trading, is setting realistic profit expectations. All too often I see people open trading accounts with balances of $10,000 or under expecting to make enough money to support themselves from their trading profits within a short period of time. After seeing all of the hype that is out there surrounding most trading education, trading signal services, etc it is no wonder that people think this is a reasonable goal, but that does not make it a realistic one.

As most any truly successful trader will tell you, the stock market has averaged somewhere in the neighborhood of 10% a year over the last 100 years. What this basically means is that if you would have invested in the 30 stocks that make up the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the index which is designed to represent the overall market, you would have earned about 10% on your money on average over the last 100 years. With this in mind, what most any truly successful trader will also tell you, is that if you can consistently double that return, on average, over the long term, then you will be considered among the best traders out there.

Duration : 0:5:58

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Technorati Tags: Business, daytrade, finance, Forex, futures, howto, informedtrades, investing, market, money, of, psychology, stock, Trade, trading

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A less on how traders determine their initial stop levels when trading the stock, futures, and forex markets.

In our last lesson we looked at the difficulty of overcoming a loss in the market to further emphasize the importance of protecting your trading capital as a critical component of any successful trading strategy. In today’s lesson we are going to start to look at the first and one of the best ways of protecting one’s trading capital, setting your initial stop.

As we learned about in our lesson on the effects of trading losses, 50% or more of the trades made by many successful trading strategies are losers. These trading strategies and traders are successful not because they are highly accurate on a trade by trade basis, but because when they are wrong they cut their losses quickly and when they are right they let their profits run. While the trading strategy that you eventually end up trading for yourself may have a higher success rate than what I mention above, any strategy is going to have loosing trades, so the first key to staying in the game is to have a plan for managing those losses so they do not get out of control and wipe out your chances for success.

With this in mind, what most traders will start with when designing a plan for setting their initial stop loss is the amount they can afford to loose on a per trade basis without having a detrimental affect on their account. While this varies from trader to trader and from strategy to strategy, as Dr. Alexander Elder mentions in his book Trading for a Living, many studies have shown that strategies and traders who risk more than 2% of their overall trading capital on any one trade are rarely successful over the long term. From what I have seen most traders risk way more than this on an individual trade basis, another large contributor to the high failure rate among traders.

Traders who set their per trade risk level at 2% of their trading capital or less, not only put themselves in a situation where a fairly lengthy string of losses will not knock them out of the game, but also put themselves in a situation where any one trade is not going to make or break their account. This is important not only from a money management standpoint but also from a psychological standpoint in that they are not attached to any one trade and are therefore more likely to stick to their strategy.

In order to have a true understanding of what this number should be for a specific strategy you will need to know what the expected accuracy rate is for the strategy, something which will cover in later lessons. For now however it is sufficient to simply understand that you need to have a feel for how much you plan to risk on a per trade basis as a first step in designing a successful money management strategy, and that you should be very wary of any strategy which risks more than 2% of your trading capital on any one trade.

Now that we understand that determining how much to risk per trade is the first step in any successful money management strategy, we can move on to other methods of setting your initial stop which fit within the limit set by the amount a trader is willing to risk on a per trade basis.

As always if you have any questions or comments please leave them in the comments section below so we can all learn to trade together, and good luck with your trading!

Duration : 0:3:16

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A lesson on crowd psychology and how it relates to trading the stock, futures, and forex markets.

The best summary that I have seen on this subject, as well as a great book on trading in general is Dr. Alexander Elder’s book Trading for a living. As the Trader and Psychologist points out in his book, people think differently when acting as part of a crowd than they do when acting alone. Dr Elder points out that “People change when they join crowds. They become more credulous, impulsive, anxiously search for a leader, and react to emotions instead of using their intellect.”

In his book Dr. Elder gives several examples of academic studies which have been done which show that people have trouble doing simple tasks such as choosing which line is longer than the other when put in a situation with other people who were instructed to give the wrong answer.

Perhaps no where is the strange effect is the psychology of crowds seen than in the financial markets. One of the more recent examples as I have spoken about in my other lessons of the effect that the psychology of crowds can have on the markets is the run-up of the NASDAQ into 2000. As you will find by pulling out the history books however, this is not an isolated incident as financial history is littered with similar price bubbles created and then destroyed in the same way as the NASDAQ bubble was.

So why does history continue to repeat itself? As Dr. Elder points out in his book, from a primitive standpoint chances of survival are often much higher as part of a group than they are alone. Similarly war’s are often one by militaries with the strongest leaders. It is thus only natural to think that human’s desire to survive would breed a desire to be part of a group with a strong leader into the human psyche.

So how does this relate to trading? Well as we learned in our lessons on Dow Theory, the price is representative of the crowd and the trend is representative of the leader of that crowd. With this in mind think about how difficult it would have been to short the NASDAQ at the high’s in 2000, just at the height of the frenzy when everyone else was buying. In hindsight you would have ended up with a very profitable trade but, had the trade not worked out, people would have asked how could you have been so dumb to sell when everyone else knew the market was going up?

Now think about all the people who held on to their positions and lost tons of money after the bubble burst in 2000. As they had lots of company there were probably not a whole lot of people who were laughing at them. Yes they were wrong but how could they have known when so many others were wrong too?

By looking at this same example, you can also see how panic selling often ensues after sharp trends in the market as this is representative to a crowd whose leader has abandoned them.

In order to trade successfully people need a trading plan which is designed before entering a trade and becoming part of the crowd so they can fall back on their plan when the emotions which are associated with being part of a crowd inevitably arise. Successful traders must also realize that there is a time to run with the crowd and a time to leave the crowd, a decision which must be made by a well thought out trading plan designed before entering a trade.

That completes our lesson for today and our lessons on the psychology of money management. In tomorrow’s lesson we are going to begin looking at different strategies which can be used to manage a trade once you have entered, which many traders also use to help remove some of the negative emotional effects of trading as part of a crowd.

As always if you have any questions or comments please leave them in the comments section below so we can all learn to trade together, and good luck with your trading!

Duration : 0:7:0

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A lesson on the importance of money management in trading and how most traders of the stock, futures, and forex markets ignore money management because they do not consider it important and therefore loose money trading.

Why the Majority of Traders Fail

In our last lesson we finished up our series on Candlestick Chart Patterns with a look at the Inverted Hammer and the Shooting Star Candlestick Chart Patterns. In today’s lesson we are going to start a new series on money management, the most important concept in trading and the reason why most traders fail.

Over the last several years working in financial services I have watched hundreds if not thousands of traders trade, and over and over again I see smart people who have been intelligent enough to accumulate large sums of money in their non trading careers open a trading account and loose huge sums of money making what you would think are easily avoidable mistakes that one would think even the dumbest traders would avoid.

Those same traders are the ones that consider themselves too good or smart to make the same mistakes that so many others make, and that will skip over this section to get to what they feel is the “real meat” of trading, strategies for picking entry points. What these traders and so many others fail to realize is that what separates the winners from the losers in trading is not how good someone is at picking their entry points, but how well they factor in what they are going to do after they are in a trade into their trade entries and how well they stick to their trade management plan once they are in the trade.

For the few who do get that money management is far and away the most important aspect of trading, the large majority of these people don’t understand the large role that psychology plays in money management or consider themselves above having to work on channeling their emotions correctly when trading.

So in this series of lessons we are going to first start with a look at the psychology of money management and the role that this plays in causing so many traders to loose their shirts and then move on to ways of managing this before finishing up with specific strategies for managing trades once you are in them.

While not the most exciting part of trading, I assure you that if you don’t understand and work on the concepts presented in this section you are pretty much doomed to failure as a trader no matter how well you understand the other aspects of trading. Having said this I also assure you that if you do understand and work to expand your knowledge of the concepts presented in this series you will be well on your way to becoming a successful trader.

Duration : 0:3:0

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