Friday, 19 August 2011

Automated Forex Signals

People have been subscribing to forex signals for years now, but one of the trends that we have seen emerge in recent years is that more and more people are starting to use automated forex signals as well. So what exactly are automated forex signals and how do they differ from the conventional signals?

Well ordinarily you subscribe to a signal provider and in return they send you their trading signals. It is then up to you to trade these signals as soon as possible with your own broker so that you trade your positions at roughly the same price.

However with automated trading signals you don't have to place any trades at all. The signals that are generated are automatically placed in your account whenever the provider opens or closes a trade themselves. This means that you can continue working full time and getting on with other things, whilst still making money from forex trading.

As always happens when a new trend emerges, you get lots of websites being created that are all designed to grab a slice of the pie. However there is one site that is head and shoulders above the rest in my opinion - Zulutrade.

As you can see by reading this ZuluTrade review, this website hosts thousands of different signal providers and you can subscribe to as many of them as you like completely free of charge. All of the signals generated by these traders are then replicated in your own brokerage account.

You have to be cautious because some of these providers take big risks and even the consistently profitable ones can occasionally experience big losses. Nevertheless if you take some time to look at the statistics of each one and analyze their trades in order to pick out the most profitable ones that have minimal draw-downs, you should be able to make some decent profits.

So to sum up, I would say that you should definitely consider giving automated forex signals a try, particularly if you haven't yet been able to make money from forex trading yourself. There is potentially a lot of money to be made from currency trading, and there's nothing wrong with having someone else generate the trades if that's the road you want to go down.

Thursday, 18 August 2011

Day Trading - When Should You Trade Forex Breakouts?

Day trading is very popular with a lot of forex traders because you can bank profits in a short space of time, and you do not have any sleepless nights because all of your trades are closed out before the end of the day. One of the most popular ways of generating these profits is by trading forex breakouts. So in this post I want to discuss the best time of the day to trade these breakouts.

The fact is that if you are based in the US or certain other countries, you may well find that the markets have already moved an awful lot before the US market has even opened. So a lot of time it will not be possible to trade any breakouts if that is the case.

If you are based in Europe, however, it is a lot easier to profit from these breakouts because many of them occur during the first few hours of the European trading session. You often have a quiet overnight period when the major pairs such as the GBP/USD and the EUR/USD barely move, and then a surge in volatility when the European markets open.

This is when you often get the big price moves that set the tone for the rest of the day. So the key to profiting from these breakouts is to wait until you get an overnight trading range that is very low, and then enter a position as soon as the price breaks out of this range. This will nearly always be after the London and European markets open, and you can often bank an easy 20 or 30 points.

Of course you may not be able to do this on every major pair every single day because sometimes the price will have moved a lot overnight. So any subsequent breakout that occurs may not move that much and you may have to take a loss.

Anyway the point is that with all things being considered, the best time of the day to trade intraday forex breakouts is generally during the first few hours of the European trading session. If you are not available to trade during this time, then you will probably want to abandon the idea of trading breakouts and concentrate on finding another type of trading strategy instead.

Thursday, 30 July 2009

Choosing A Forex Trading Course

One of the best ways to learn how to trade forex is to either buy a book on the subject or go online and purchase a forex course. There are lots of these courses available so today I want to talk about what you should be looking for when choosing one of these forex courses.

A lot depends on how much knowledge of forex trading you have already. If you know next to nothing about this exciting industry then you will obviously want to choose a course that will start right at the beginning and teach you the basics of forex trading.

If, however, you have been trading for a while but want to further your education, then you will probably want to choose a course that will teach you about some of the more advanced subjects such as how to use technical analysis and how you can use technical indicators to improve your trading.

Alternatively you may already know about all of these things but your only problem is that you are not yet making any profits. In which case you will want to choose a course that teaches you a specific trading strategy that is actually profitable in the long run. Now unfortunately these are few and far between but there are a few decent courses being sold online which provide you with a decent trading strategy.

One of these is Forex Nitty Gritty. This course has only been out for a few months but it's one that I can strongly recommend because it covers all three of these areas. It teaches you the basics of forex trading, discusses technical analysis in great detail, and best of all it teaches you a profitable strategy you can use to trade the currency markets.

Sunday, 22 March 2009

Successful Forex Trading – It's Not All About Day Trading

There are many preconceptions about what it actually takes to become a successful trader. However here are a couple of points to consider if you want to become a profitable forex trader.

Firstly you should try and forget about trading short-term / day trading strategies. Many people believe that if they want to make big profits from forex trading, then they need to trade lots of positions every single day. However this couldn't be further from the truth.

Day trading in itself is very difficult. You have to make quick decisions and deal with highly volatile markets, particularly during times when economic data releases are announced. You also have to deal with increased spreads during these busy periods which can seriously deplete your overall profits. You also have to deal with the random noise that occurs when the price isn't trending in one direction or the other, so overall it is far from easy.

A much better strategy is to use much longer time frames such as the 4 hour or daily charts, for instance. In general you will often find that technical analysis is much more reliable when you use these longer time frames.

This is something that is endorsed by many top traders such as Bill Poulos who has actually devised several trading strategies that only use end of day charts. (More details can be found by reading this Forex Profit Accelerator review).

Anyway the point is that although you can make money from day trading, it is so difficult to consistently make money in the long run. Scalping systems will often generate short-term profits but there are very few systems that will continue to be profitable in the long-term. Longer term systems are usually much more dependable and are often much more profitable because each trade usually has much larger profit targets.

Saturday, 21 March 2009

Why Do A Lot Of Forex Systems Ultimately Fail?

There are many reasons why the majority of forex systems simply do not work, as I'm about to discuss.

Firstly you will often find that many forex systems you come across online are incomplete. They will go into great depth describing the basics of forex trading but when it comes down to the finer details of how to trade the system in question, it will very often leave the trader wondering how they actually trade the system.

Another reason why a lot of systems fail is because they completely disregard risk management. This is just stupid because it's no good outlining a system if you don't mention when you should admit defeat and cut your losses. No system is perfect and they will always generate some losses, so they should always mention how you can keep these losses as small as possible.

A third reason why a lot of systems fail is because they are based on trading important news events. By that I mean things like interest rate decisions and important economic data releases which have such a major impact on the major currency pairs. These systems are based on trading highly volatile markets which often means increased spreads as well, so it is very hard to actually make money trading this way on a consistent basis.

The final reason is simply because they are short-term trading systems. Consistently making profits from day trading the forex markets is extremely difficult, and although a lot of systems may make profits in the short-term, in the long run the vast majority of these systems will end up losing money.

So if you are looking for a profitable forex trading system, you should ideally look for ones that use the longer term charts such as the daily charts. The systems included in the Forex Profit Accelerator course are examples of such systems but there are lots of others out there as well.