You only have to think back to major stock market scams like Enron to know that it is almost impossible for the average, and even very sophisticated fund manager or hedge fund trader to really know what the real financial state of a company is.

Just by reading the balance sheet and other quarterly reports they release gives you a very limited insight into the real health of the company. Whereas the technical analysis charts of the company tend to give the real picture of what the market thinks of the value of the company. In the case of Enron even simple technical analysis told you to SELL when the stock was in the $80-90 range, this is why technical analysis of stocks is so popular.

So what are the secrets to technical analysis?, I’m about to tell you, here are my golden rules:

* Only use 3-5 simple technical analysis indicators

* Make sure that you understand how the indicators that you have selected work, what the parameter settings are and in what market conditions they are effective

* After selecting your indicators and parameter settings don’t mess with them.

The real secret to technical analysis is to become VERY familiar with your choosen indicators, and really this can only be done by watching and studying the market, so that you get to the point that you TRUST them.

The fact is that in any market, for each bar period, there are only 5 pieces of information, the open, close, high, low and volume, yet there are now hundreds of indicators. Most of these indicators are displaying much the same information and so are redundant.

For the record my set of indicators are:

* 4 Simple Moving Averages

* Bollinger Bands

* MACD

* Stochastics

But the way I use them is quite special, to learn more about how to become an expert at technical analysis visit:

Top Dog Trading Review

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Statistics show that in a bull market about 75% of the stocks will follow the general trend and go up, and in a bear market 75% will also go down. Trading with the trend is the best way to trade as 9 out of 12 stocks will follow the trend and give you the best chance of making gains on your stock purchases.

But what if you own some good stocks and don’t want to sell when the market is clearly going down, or about to go down?. There are a couple of tactics that you can consider, both of which involve the use of options, CALL options and PUT options. There is the widely known strategy called Covered Calls, and the much lesser known one called the Married Put.

If you are going to trade options it is essential that before you start trading you get the best option trading education that you can. You should also practice stock trading until you are comfortable with the process. This is a very important point that must be taken seriously, if you don’t understand the terminology and theory then you should not be trading options. If Put option, Call option, Married Put and Covered Call are new to you then don’t trade until you have studied sufficiently.

Selling calls against your stock in 100 share increments is the basis of the covered call strategy and it can provide about a 2-7% buffer against the loss in stock price. However a bigger drop in stock price will not be compensated for using the covered call strategy, in general.

Stocks in a bear market, and even in a bull market, can drop quickly on news or earnings releases, as much as 15 to 40% within a month. Using covered calls to protect your stocks will only provide limited protection of less than 7% at best and so will not save you if the stock takes a 40% tumble.

The better solution to providing downside stock protection is the option strategy called the Married Put. As the name suggests the PUT that you buy is used to provide protection when the stock goes down because Put options increase in value when the stock decreases in value. The term married is used because the option that is selected has to be very compatible with the stock, in other words a good match, if the strategy is to work.

The selection of the best Put option is not straight forward and involves several criteria which are listed below:

1. The strike price of the option

2. The current stock price

3. Choice of options, in or out of the money

4. Put expiration time

Even though the married Put protection only has a short life span if offers much more protection than the covered call. It can provide as much as 90-95% loss recovery in the event of a significant drop in the stock price.

The downside of the good protection is that you have buy the Put which is a debit whereas the covered call is a credit. But there are ways of offsetting this expense and there is much more to this strategy when executed correctly. The Married Put can be made to pay for itself and used to generate very good gains if the market, or stock to be specific, moves a lot.

The general idea of the Collar Trade is to combine the covered call and married Put strategy into one, this is what is called the Collar Trade. In effect you put a collar around the stock, sell a call and buy a PUT. If you do this correctly most of the cost of the Put can be offset by the credit from the covered call so you can protect your stock at almost no cost. Yes this is a great strategy which the general public is unfortunately very ignorant of, and most brokers don’t understand.

The strategy that I have outlined above is unknown to the average stock market trader but is one of the best trading systems you could have.

The 50 simple moving average, or 50 SMA, is simply the sum of the last 50 readings for each period, divided by 50, this is a moving window, as time moves on so does the average. Notice that I used the word period because this indicator works on any time period in exactly the same way.

It can be used on monthly, weekly, daily, hourly, 30 minutes, 15 minute and on whatever time period you want to monitor and trade. Although the SMA is the most commonly used there is also the exponential moving average or EMA. This is a weighted version of the formula using the mathematical exponent function to give more weight to the more recent values, this has the effect of making it a much faster average that many traders like.

The truth is that it probably does not matter if you used the SMA or the EMA, what does matter however is that you use one or the other and then be very consistent with it. Do not switch between them, it is more important that you learn to trust your chosen indicator then a slight difference in its value.

The simple moving average is primarily used to determine what the current trend of the stock is, depending on the value used it could be a short term, medium term or long term trend. An important point to note is that moving averages are really only useful when the stock is trending, if the moving average is flat, i.e. horizontal on your chart it can become very choppy, this is a good time to stay out of the market.

The general rule is that if the current price is above the SMA the trend is up, if below the trend is down. This is very important to understand because it forms the basics of trend trading and trading with the trend.

For the short term trend many traders like using a 5-8 SMA or EMA, here is a trading secret, never trade again the direction of the short term tend, this is really just common sense when you think about it.

Moving averages often act as support or resistance, many traders use the 15, 21 or 30 SMA for this purpose.

There are a number of other very important moving averages that you need to know about, these are the 50, 100 and 200 SMA, and this mostly applies to the daily and weekly charts. A lot of big players in the markets, like the the mutual funds, investment banks etc use the 50 and 200 SMA as support and resistance, if they decide to buy or sell based on these you need to follow suite, the 100 to a lesser extent. These are very useful averages to watch if you trade EFT’s like an Oil ETF.

A useful tip is that when a stock breaks through one moving average it will often move all the way to the next, for example, if a stock breaks the 30 SMA it may move to the 50 before finding some support or resistance.

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There’s also a lot of hype about how complicated it is and why you need to spend thousands of dollars on options trading education before you get started. Needless to say this last statement usually comes from trading seminar companies trying to sell your their trading course on options.

Lets cover a few of the basics about options and set you straight about a few important points. Firstly yes it is true that you can make a lot of money trading options, but of course you can also lose money just as fast.

When trading stocks your leverage is 1:1, if you go full out on margin you get get 1:2 leverage, but thats about it. With options it is not as straight forward to calculate the leverage but generally speaking you can get between 1:5 and 1:10 when you buy an option on a stock, or ETF.

So with 1:10 leverage, when the stock increases by 5% your option can increase by approx 50%, and this can happen in just a few days, this is why swing trading strategies using options on stocks is so popular.

However the downside is that a big loss can also happen, if the stock drops by 5% your option can also drop by 50%, at which point you may want to close the trade and save some of your option value, it really depends on what your stop loss and risk.

What I’ve just described is called directional option trading where you are betting on the getting the direction of the stock movement correct, this is highly speculative. Options can also be used in option strategies which are much more non directional, such as covered call trades, credit spreads and Iron Condors. In these trades there is much lower dependance on getting the stock direction correct, but it still matters.

So should you learn to trade options?, in my opinion you should not do directional option trades until you become very good at trading stocks. This is because you must be very precise with your entry and exit strategy and trading plan, and be very good at technical analysis.

Whereas if you want to do non directional option trades you don’t need to be such an experianced stock trader to be successful, but of course it does not hurt either.

Learning how to trade options is a very useful skill you have, but don’t rush into it and blow out your account. Make sure that you get a good options trading education before you start, and also make sure that you have a very solid stock trading education as well, such one from Top Dog Trading Review.

It is important not to get confused about what the word future refers to. Futures traders are not day trading futures prices, we are trading today’s prices, but the settlement is taking place in the future. So we buy if we think prices will increase and sell if we think prices will drop.

If I buy (or sell) a futures contract today, I don’t have to hold it until the contract expires, I can simply choose to sell it (or buy it) in the market at the prevailing price. Futures contracts are bought and sold in the regulated environment of a futures exchange, such as the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) in the U.S. and the London International Futures and Options Exchange (LIFFE) in the U.K.

Futures were originally developed to help offset the risks and uncertainties experienced by farmers and merchants due to the fluctuating supply and demand for produce. Take for example a coffee plantation farmer. The price that he will receive for his beans will vary according to the vagaries of supply and demand. In a year when supplies are limited and demand is high, prices will be high. In a year when demand falls and the supply is plentiful, the price will fall.

The use of futures trading in the farming industry has many benefits such as allowing the farmer to be able to plan ahead as he already knows what kind of profit he can expect from his crop of say coffee beans. The price may not be the best and the merchant may make a killing but the risk is reduced.

By using a form of futures contract long before harvest time both the farmer and the merchant can reduce their risks by setting the price.

Today the futures market has changed a lot from the historical origins. There are now futures contracts on financial instruments such as stocks and bonds. broadly speaking futures contracts are either commodity type products or financial type products. It is usually not very important because they are rarely held until expiration.

The CBOT was started in 1848 for the benefit of the farmers and merchants. The exchange was to regulate the quality and quantity of the actual crop that was being traded. Today the CBOT offers many contracts on items like wheat, silver, corn, bonds and soybeans.

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) was created in 1919 and has managed a futures market in such things as pork bellies, live cattle and the SP500 index.

In London the biggest financial futures exchange is the London International Futures and Options Exchange (LIFFE). Here financial instruments such as the FTSE100, the GILT and Short Sterling are traded, the exchange is relativily new and opened in 1982.

EUREX started it’s life as the DTB, the German futures exchange. The DTB has always been an electronic exchange and started back in 1990, when electronic exchanges were still considered to be inferior to the open outcry system.

The German Bund was a heavily traded financial contract and one of the biggest markets on the LIFFE.

Many markets in futures have very high volumes and hence very good liquidity, these are attractive markets for traders. The high leverage in futures means that profits can be made very fast when the market moves, however money can also be lost very fast. If you want to learn to trade futures, or are even thinking of trading futures make sure that you learn as much as you can before using real money.

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Mini Forex Trading Or Demo?

Somebody starting out in forex has several options:

1. Start out right away with live trading in a standard brokerage account, investing from $1,000 to $5,000. This would be very risky for a beginner and is not recommended.

2. Begin with live trading in a mini forex account. Generally you need $250 for these accounts but you may be able to find brokers who will let you start with even less.

3. Start out with a demo Forex day trading account where you are picking up trading skills without investing any real money at all, then when you are consistently making profits, switch over to either a mini account or full brokerage account depending on your capital and your strategy.

Advantages Of A Mini Forex Trading Account

Most people choose option 3, the demo account. They feel much safer using ‘toy money’ online for several days, weeks or months. A demo account also gives you the opportunity to try out the various different strategies that you are probably reading about.

However there can be problems with running a demo account for too long. Some forex traders and trainers say that it lulls you into a false sense of security. It is much easier to take risks when there is no real cash involved, and you will be practicing with strategies that you may be uncomfortable using in real life trading.

So what can happen is that the demo account teaches you to make profits using medium to high risk strategies, but when you are faced with a real cash situation you may lose your nerve. This usually results in poor decisions made on the spur of the moment and ’strategy hopping’ where you are constantly switching from one plan to another. Losses are almost inevitable in this situation.

For this reason, some experts recommend starting with a mini account and using real money almost from the get-go. You would only use a demo account for a small number of trades to familiarize yourself with the technical side of operating your account and making trades. In this way you are likely to learn strategies that can work for you in the long term.

Disadvantages Of A Mini Trading Account

When you are trading small amounts, you must expect to pay more in percentage terms to the broker. This eats into your gains. In the long term this can have a massive effect on your results and can make the all important difference between profit and loss. Therefore, most people operating a mini account will be aiming to switch to higher value trades as soon as they have the capital to do so.

However you choose to start, you will need to understand that forex trading is high risk by its very nature, like all forms of investment that offer the possibility of large gains in a short time. You should only invest cash that you are prepared to lose if things go against you.

Starting out with a mini Forex account can be a great way for someone who is new to forex to pick up the techniques for real. Mini forex trading could be the best way to find out for sure whether foreign exchange trading is right for you.

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For example “trading course” brings up 758,000 pages in Google and “trading seminar” another 109,000 pages, the question is what should you be looking for when selecting a trading course or seminar. In this article I’ll point out some of the things to check before spending your hard earned money on your trading education.

1. Becareful of the hidden costs involved in a trading seminar that is away from home, account for the expense of hotels, meals travel and car rental?, it may be a lot more than you expect.

2. What is the return policy, this can vary widely between trading education companies, for some you only have a 3 day cooling off period while for others you may have up to 12 noon or the end of the 1st day to ask for refund if you decide this was not right for you.

3. For a live seminar are you also given DVD’s of the same or similar content?, so often live seminars fail to cover all the very important details involved in day trading. Having a set of DVD’s enables you to watch the content over and over again at home until you get it. Beware that some companies will bill you extra for the DVD’s even though you have already paid for a live trading seminar.

4. Check the internet for positive and negative feedback on the company and trading seminar. Use search terms like “company name review”, “company name refunds” or “company name scam”. Often reviews are posted in trading forums, these can be found by searching for terms like “trading forum”.

5. A head of time try and find out exactly who will be presenting the seminar. The last thing that you want is a professional “teacher” presenting a seminar on trading, what you want is a “trader” who makes his living by trading and only does a few seminars a month out of interest and for personal reasons, not because they need the money.

6. If you are buying an online day trading or investing course where the content is 100% viewed online you should get at least a 30 day 100% money back guarantee, if not stay away.

7. If you are buying a course or trading seminar in which DVD’s and manuals are being shipped to your house, again you should expect a 30 day 100% money back return policy, less shipping and handling, again if not stay away.

8. It’s very likely that you will have questions after taking either the live or online course or watching the DVD’s, make sure that you will be able to ask questions and have them answered, either one on one or in a forum setting.

9. Last, but certainly not least, before buying do a lot of window shopping. The price for trading seminars, either stocks, options, Forex or futures varies widely from for an ebook to over K for a comprehensive set of training. You may be able to find the same education much cheaper at a different company.

Also be aware that day trading education and seminar companies are always running specials and offering discounts, before you buy search the internet carefully for any deals and also call the company directly and ask for a low price guarantee. Make sure you are paying the lowest price possible for the course or seminar before you commit to it.

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But there are many kinds of stock day training available these days and it may be hard to judge what is the best. With so many websites, blogs, articles and ebooks available on the internet, often low priced or even free, it is tempting to think that we may be able to pick up all we need to know for dirt cheap.

However, it can be a big mistake to limit yourself to this kind of bit by bit training. There are some great ebooks and free systems out there but others are outdated or never had any success at all. As a beginner you will find it hard to know which ones to trust.

Even the best manuals generally do not cover everything you need to know. They may focus on one or two strategies that are not necessarily the best match for your situation. The cash saved on training may be lost several times over once you start currency trading for real.

In most cases you will be better advised if you sign up for formal training through a membership site. This is likely to be run by a trading group or an experienced currency trader. They will have set up a step by step process that you can work through from complete beginner to knowledgeable trader.

Beginners are usually attracted to forex day trading by the lure of quick and easy money and most know nothing about it when they start. It is great to have a system that covers pretty much everything and someone who can answer your questions.

Many formal forex training programs have a forum where you can discuss your strategies and results with others. Sharing information in this way can be a great way to learn. In fact, in many cases the forum itself is worth the cost of membership and many people remain members after completing the program just to have this exposure to the knowledge and experience of other traders.

Solid forex training is unlikely to be free except at the most basic level. If you just want to dabble in the forex market as an experiment, without caring too much whether you win or lose, you may be satisfied with free training. The best type of free training is often given a way as a teaser or taster by sites or brokers who hope you will then join them as a paying member. In fact, you can often pick up top level tips this way and a free report from a reputable trader will often be more useful and valuable than a $20 ebook.

Whatever type of training you choose, be sure to follow it exactly. Don’t skip over the first steps hoping to get straight into making cash – that would be a fast route to disaster. Test out the system you are being taught, either with small trades or in a demo account. Ask questions. Make sure you get every bit of wisdom from the training you have chosen so that you put yourself in the best position to turn a profit on completion of the forex trading training program.

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No matter whether your currency trading book is published on paper or downloaded as an ebook, it can be the best way to learn in many circumstances. It wins over other options on both convenience and price.

You can open it up whenever you need it. You can reread it whenever you want, repeating the more advanced passages and exercises as many times as you need to before everything is fully absorbed so that it becomes like second nature.  You can also schedule your training sessions for times to suit your life.

Another advantage of forex books is that you save time by skipping over the things you already know. If you have any experience at all, going over all the basics can waste a lot of your time in training that is based around seminars or even audio or video sessions online while you wait for everyone else to be shown the techniques that you have already mastered.

There are new books on forex day trading being published almost every week, so it is useful to know what to look for and how to pick out the best. Just as with any other market where money is involved, you need to know how to identify and stay clear of any scams that you might come across. The old rule is very valid here and you may want to post it up on the side of your computer as you browse for books online: “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is!”

Having said that, the currency trading market is a place where you can expect to find a certain amount of hype. Do not be too quick to make negative judgments just because a book or ebook is advertised with a fair amount of hard sell. Remember the advertising copy is probably written by a professional writer, not the author of the book.

So you can safely ignore most of the hype in the promotional advertisements and look for the things that you really need to know. These are:

1. What areas of expertise are covered in the book.

2. Whether it is right for you, i.e. whether it is aimed at traders of your skill and experience level.

3. What are the benefits that you personally can hope to gain from it.

The first of these should be very clear from the advertising. If it is not, try asking to view the contents index of the book. The other two points will require a closer reading of the promotional material keeping your own individual situation in mind.

If you can take a look inside the book you will soon see whether it is well written. You are looking for something that is down to earth, logical and practical. Professional presentation and editing is a good sign of a reputable and successful author or publisher. If you are a beginner you will want step by step information. In any case, hyped up language inside the book itself is definitely a warning sign.

Another thing that you should do before getting a book or ebook, even if you plan to buy in a book store, is to do internet searches on the book title and author name. Look for any news stories about the writer. Is he or she a successful real life trader, or just someone hoping to make cash from a lucrative trend? You need to be sure that the information in a currency trading book is good before you risk real money on the strategies it suggests.

You can also look for reviews written by buyers who are actually using the information they have learned successfully. It is true that some of these may earn a commission on sales of the book but a good review will help you figure out whether the book is right for beginner, intermediate or advanced traders, and how it fits your idea of what you need to know from forex books.

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