2Bull Forex Blog

When it comes to figuring out your financial future, there are some investing tools that are invaluable. How much should you save for retirement? When should you start saving? Should you rent or buy your home? What kind of mortgage can you afford? Should you choose a Roth IRA or a Traditional IRA? How much will my children need for college? These are all questions that can be better answered using some of the many online calculators and financial planners.

Retirement savings is a great place to start and CNN Money has a retirement calculator that helps determine if you are on track for retirement. It is quite detailed and takes into account Social Security payments, portfolio, current savings, and increases in your salary from year to year. If you already know how much you will need for retirement and want a quick way to find out if you are saving enough annually, try the Bloomberg Retirement Calculator . It is more basic than the CNN Money calculator and allows you to choose your rate of return.

Along with retirement, estate planning is something that everyone needs to address, not just those with large fortunes. Fidelity Investments has several estate planning tools and calculators to help prepare for you or your spouses death. The Estate Planner allows you to see what your next steps would be to prepare your estate to be passed on to beneficiaries. It looks at all of your assets and outlines what items need to be considered to avoid as many taxes as possible when you pass away. Additionally, it offers estate planning resources that discuss topics such as wills, trusts, estate planning strategies, etc.

Do you wonder if you are loosing money paying rent? Are you unsure what size mortgage you can afford? There are several different mortgage calculators online that answer these types of questions. One of the best places for mortgage calculators is at interest.com. This website contains easy to use calculators that allow you to find out everything you need to when it comes to mortgages.

Once you already have a mortgage and are wondering about ways to pay it off quicker, a prepayment calculator is your best resource. This calculator can tell you what an additional monthly payment can do to whittle down your mortgage. It also gives you a monthly amortization schedule that maps out your payments for the life of the loan.

Does debt prevent you from buying a home right now? If you are trying to get out from under your debt, CNN Money has a great debt elimination calculator. It allows you to enter up to eight different sources of debt and then see what kind of difference additional payments would make. It can also show how much you should pay each month to reach a debt-free deadline. Probably the most interesting part of the calculator is that you can see what just paying your minimum payments will do for you. It is frightening how long it takes to pay off loans when just making the minimum payments, not to mention the interest paid over the life of the loan. If you have done your calculation but aren’t sure where to go from here, try this bank software website for more information on sites and software that can help you to eliminate your debt.

There are a lot of different financial software products on the market. Some can do everything including budgeting, keeping check registries, and planning such as the Quickbooks or Microsoft Money products. Do you own a business and need software to help you manage your finances? A great resource for small business owners is the software page of the investing-partners website. It has links and explanations of numerous software products to track business expenses, payroll, etc.

The last item on our list is higher education. Domini Social Investments College Calculator allows you to choose what to calculate, whether it be the monthly amount you need to save, initial savings needed, or number of years to save to obtain your goal. It also takes into account inflation so you can indicate the current amount you would need for your child’s schooling and it calculates what you would need to have that amount in future dollars.

Another college savings calculator is from Fidelity Investments. This calculator is quite a bit more detailed and conservative than the above calculator. It estimates market returns based on the past and allows you to choose your likelihood of meeting your goal. It can also lookup costs of all universities in the United States, eliminating the need for your own research. The tools mentioned here are just the beginning when it comes to online investing tools.

The internet has vast amounts of calculators, wizards and software to help you prepare for any financial future you choose. Whatever your financial goals, there are resources to assist you in setting those goals and having more confidence in being able to reach them.

The term “forex”, also known as the foreign exchange is a market for the sale and purchase of all kinds of currencies.

It originated in the early 1970’s when floating currencies and free exchange rates were first introduced. At this time, the forex market traders were the ones who set the value of one type of currency against another. Nowadays, the market forces determine the value of a currency against another.

One unique aspect of the Forex market is that very little trading qualifications are required of anyone intending to trade therein. Independence from external control ensures that only the market forces influence the currency prices. As the largest financial market, with trades reaching up to 1.5 trillion U.S. dollars, or USD, the money moves so fast, it’s impossible for a single investor to substantially affect the price of any major foreign currency.

In addition, unlike any stock that is rarely traded, forex traders are able to open and close any positions within seconds, because there are always a number of willing buyers and sellers.

1. The first thing you need to do is open a forex account. You will have to fill an application form which includes a margin agreement stating if the broker will be allowed to intervene with any trade when it appears too risky. Since most
trades are done using the broker’s money, it is only logical that he protect his interests. However, once you have established an account, you can fund it and begin trading in the forex market.

2. Adopt a trading strategy, that has proven to be successful for you. Remember that strategies will work differently for different traders, so don’t try to adopt a strategy that works well for another trader. It might backfire on you. The two available approaches are either technical analysis or fundamental analysis. A combination of the two is a more preferred choice for experienced traders.

3. Understand that prices move by trends. Forex has a popular saying, “The trend is your friend”. There are certain movements that have been studied over many years in order to identify a pattern in the trend. These trends need to be understood in order to understand a good trading strategy. For small accounts that are $25,000 and under, trading with a trend may help improving your odds when compared to bi-directional trading. Most newbie’s will look to trade in any direction, when they should be trading with a trend.

4. Ensure you know which are the top five currencies pairs in the foreign exchange. These are USD/Yen, Swiss franc/USD, Euro/Yen, Euro/USD and Pound/USD.

5. For newbies, it is advisable to maintain two accounts to ensure you learn to play the trading game. Keep one real account, one that you will actually use to trade real money; and the second account should be a demo, one that you can use to test alternative moves in the trading game. You can easily use your demo account to shadow the trades in your real account so you can widen your stops to see if you are being too conservative or not.

6. Always examine the one hour, four hour and daily charts that concern your trades. Although you can trade at 15 and 30 minute time intervals, doing so requires a handful of dexterity.

A one or two percent price fluctuation on a single currency can bring in thousands of dollars in profits. Another attractive aspect of the forex market is that more leverage is available for a trader.

For example, 10,000 dollars can be leveraged to purchase as much as 100,000 dollars through margins. This allows the chance of great returns, even at only one percent, with less risk than might otherwise be necessary.

The Stock exchange is only open during business hours. The forex market is open 24 hours a day. A forex trader can literally work 24 hours a day, moving from the Asian market to the European to the American. Couple this with the leverage opportunities then the chances of large profit with forex are phenomenal. Also the forex market doesn’t charge commission which can amount to significant savings.

Most traders with experience in the stock exchange but little knowledge about the forex believe that it is risky and returns low profits. This is because there is minimal information on the forex trade. A forex trader is required to self-educate himself. Researching as much as possible about the forex trade is required before you become an experienced trader.

Compared to the stock exchange, the forex requires much more effort in order to return profits. A person investing in blue chips in the stock exchange need not know much about it, but will return profits. For long term savings stocks are fine, but the short term large gains are definitely to be found with forex.

The forex market goes through trillions of dollars in a single day, that’s how huge it is. No single investor can corner the market as has happened in the past with some stocks, and also with some precious metals and commodities.

A major characteristic of the Forex market is risk. Pension funds rarely invest in forex trading. However for the smart investor who has time to become educated, forex can be the way to go. George Soros is one such smart investor, and through the forex market has become a billionaire. At one time, he made $2 billion in profit by shorting the British pound sterling.

He operates the Quantum Fund which manages funds running to about $4 billion, generating around 65% in returns. His is an example of how profitable the forex market can be to an investor if played right.

Just to illustrate how volatile the stock market can be, George Soros lost a staggering $200 million in just one day, during the October 1987 stock market crash. His reply to this was stoic, “I made a very big mistake, because I expected the crash to come in Japan, and I was prepared for that, and it would have given me an opportunity to prepare for the falloff in this country, and actually it occurred in Wall Street and not in Japan. So I was wrong!” While this mistake cost him a great deal, it wasn’t the end of the world.

Soros philosophy is if he is right, he makes a ton of cash, and if he is wrong he pays for his mistake and keeps on moving. A prime example of how good money can be made in forex by investors who are willing to study, learn, invest and take risks. While not for the timed, the chances of a good return from forex make it the place for daring entrepreneurs to try their hand.