Like all investments it is important to learn about what you are investing in, and certainly don’t just take the advice given to you by a bond seller without checking it out first yourself. The three most important things that must be considered when purchasing a bond include the par value, the maturity date, and the coupon rate.

The par value of a bond refers to the amount of money you will receive when the bond reaches its maturity date. In other words, you will receive your initial investment back when the bond reaches maturity.

The maturity date is of course the date that the bond will reach its full value. On this date, you will receive your initial investment, and the interest that your money has earned.

Corporate and State and Local Government bonds can be “called” before they reach their maturity, at which time the corporation or issuing Government will return your initial investment, along with the cash that it has earned thus far. Federal bonds can not be “called”.

The coupon rate is the interest that you will receive when the bond reaches maturity. This number is written as a percentage, and you must use other information to find out what the interest will be. A bond that has a par value of 00, with a coupon rate of 5% would earn 0 per year until it reaches maturity.

Because bonds are not issued by banks, many people don’t understand how to go about buying one. There are two ways this can be done.

You can use a broker or brokerage firm to make the purchase for you or you can go directly to the Government. If you use a brokerage, you will more than likely be charged a commission fee. If you want to use a broker, shop around for the lowest commissions!

Purchasing directly through the Government isn’t nearly as hard as it once was. There is a program called Treasury Direct which will allow you to purchase bonds and all of your bonds will be held in one account, that you will have easy access to. This will allow you to avoid using a broker or brokerage firm.

More advanced traders may try to buy and sell bonds to take advantage of the price movements, you can even swing trade them. But this is a very risky business if you don’t know what you are doing, you will need to take a swing trading course if this was something that wanted to, but again most people just buy and hold.

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In the USA stock market there are 3 major indexes which are each made up of a basket of stocks, they are the S and P 500 (also known as the S&P500), the DOW 30 and the Nadaq 100. These indexes generally only contain major blue chip  stocks, as long as you buy from these 3 groups you will at least know that you are getting a well known solid stock.

For example the DOW 30 contains major industrials and large multinational stocks such as Home Depot (HD) and Johnson and Johnson (JNJ) whereas the Nasdaq 100 mainly contains techical companies such as Apple (AAPL) and Miscrosoft (MSFT).

Always buy a stock that is liquid, this means that it is a highly traded stock, this will enable you to quickly buy and sell at the price you want without having a delay. You will also get a lower spread, thats the difference between the BID and ASK price of the stock. For a stock to be considered highly liquid it should trade at least 500,000 shares per day, ideally even more.

It is best to avoid stocks that are bellow as this usually means the company is in trouble, although with the bear market of 2008 there have been a lot of good stocks at bargin prices between and . Avoid buying a stock below at anytime.

Another consideration is options, does the stock has options?, this will be important if you want to trade options around your stock, such as a covered call, or you may want to buy a PUT option in order to protect your stock.

Be very cautious about buying a stock just before it’s earnings release, stocks often drop significantly if you come out with a poor report. Earnings releases are 4 times a year with one of them being the annual report.

If you are going to trade options make sure that you learn how to trade by getting some good education. There are many swing trading strategies that work well with stocks in todays volatile markets.

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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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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.

There are more and more people pouring into the forex trading sector every day. There is always money to be made and this is certain to attract large numbers. At the same time, the market is not likely to become saturated. There are so many possible trades to make between all the different currencies and banks and private individuals will always need to make currency exchanges.

So why is the forex market so profitable? The answer is that fluctuations in the exchange rates can be intense and very quick, especially in times when the world economy or the economy of a particular country is unsettled. When a country’s currency is constantly changing in value, a lot of money can be made in a very short time. That is, if you are lucky – or if you know what you are doing.

This means that people are constantly hungry for training materials that will help to give them an edge. They want to discover how to predict the rise and fall of the market. That is how cash is made and it is a skill that can be acquired.

So why would a high earning forex trader want to spill his secrets in a currency trading tutorial?

Skilled, experienced currency traders are used to responding to a market. So when they see a demand for teaching their skills, they respond to that market too. Traders want to make money in all possible ways and those ways includes teaching others. Often when a person sets out to teach something, they end up discovering new things about the subject themselves. Or sometimes they are tired of just working with numbers all day and want to work with real people for a change!

Nevertheless, a good trader who is giving his time in providing training material will generally expect to get something back. This means that any free forex tutorial, if it is worth investing your time, will have some payback for the trader providing it somewhere down the line. Probably they will send you promotions for other products that they offer. This is not a problem of course, you will not be obligated and you can just ignore these.

This does mean that although the free tutorial may be very useful for you, it will not contain everything that the trader has to teach. He will often be holding back many secrets for his paying members or buyers.

Because of this, free forex tutorials are usually best for beginners. At that level you can learn a lot from a trader just showing you the basics. If you are new to forex it will be much better for you this way and you will be grateful that he does not confuse the issue by throwing in all his advanced strategies into the free currency trading tutorial!

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