2Bull Forex Blog

As investors, we all face common problems. Where can I find the best rate of return? What is a good stock to invest in? What do I do with my money in between investments? With the first two questions, limitless answers can apply. However, with the last question, there are two popular alternatives. A CD or money market account are both viable choices that should be investigated. But which one will give you the most bang for your buck?

CD’s or certificates of deposit are basically like you giving the bank a loan. You give the bank a certain amount of money and they give you a certain amount of interest. The interest rate that you get is proportionate to how long the investment is. Before you ever deposit your money into a CD, you decide on how long the money will be invested. The longer you invest, the higher your interest rate will be. This is why older people are notorious for having many CD’s because they simply want to keep the money they have at a reasonable interest rate.

CD’s can range in time frames from a few weeks to years. It all depends on the investor. The bad thing about CD’s is that you don’t have access to your money. If you decide that you need to get your money out of a CD before it matures, you will probably have to pay a fine. So if you get a CD, your money is officially tied up.

The other popular choice is a money market account. This is basically like an investor’s checking account. Whichever investment firm you have will take the balance from your money market account and invest it into mutual funds and other securities. With this form of investment, the rate of return is directly proportionate to how much money you have in the account. It is not linked to a certain time period as with a CD. This means that if you don’t have very much money, you won’t make any interest. The main benefit with these accounts is that you have access to the money at any time. Most financial institutions will give you a checkbook that you can use like you normally would. The bad thing is, many people will treat it as an actual checkbook instead of their investment money.

Whichever form of investment you choose, make sure it’s the right one for you. They both have positives and negatives that you should consider, before making a choice.

Rising volume when prices are falling can come in two flavors. There are volume spikes which typically indicate a short term bottom as those hoping for higher prices bail; and then there are the gradual build up in volume type moves accompanied by gradual but continuing declines in price. These are the sickening moves that happen from time to time where you have a blow off type volume move over a period of days that results in very low prices relative to the general price level and is usually accompanied by a V shaped volume and price spike back in the other direction. The problem is having the patience and the nerve to stick your neck out in such a decline. You have to gradually average in to such a move as the odds of catching the bottom tick are almost nil. You will find these types of plays all over the place during a bear market.

In a bear market, there are stocks that still rise. However, in a bear market, there are times when even the good stocks are pulled down and you find declining prices on average or falling volume. Falling or average volume when prices are falling is usually a sign of strength, not weakness; especially if the stock has generally been in an uptrend prior to the short term down trend.

When a stock exhibits steady volume when prices are steady, then this doesn’t really give us anything to go on. It doesn’t give us any insight into where prices will necessarily go based on a volume read, but the fact that the price range is narrowing suggests that something will occur soon enough. It is then that we will get both a volume and a price read to determine the sustainability of the next move.

There is a close relationship between price and volume. Although indicators have been built on various volume measures, all indicators have a couple of inherent problems and we continue to feel that it is important to view price and volume as a relationship that says different things about a stock when the general trend is up versus down, versus sideways. In general, rising prices should be accompanied by rising volume for the market and/or stock to be healthy.

Similarly, falling prices should be punctuated with volume spikes and to a lesser degree, rising or steady volume shows a healthy continuation to the downside. Falling volume that is associated with rising prices generally is a red flag warning you to be careful as a healthy correction could be just around the bend.

Average volume on rising prices generally occurs when a stock is turning from down to up or sideways to up or sideways to down. Generally a stock that moves from up to down has large prices drops that is accompanied by large spikes in volume.

If you intend to trade stock, you should only ignore volume at your own peril. It can give you the comfort to stay with a position when times are tough, or to signal that you need to lighten up or get out of a position when things seem fine. Volume recognition is your friend just as is the trend.

If you trade anything you need to educate yourself and I am not taking about how the markets work and how to place orders that’s easy, but it won’t help you win.

Below find some forex education that’s free and will help you build a trading system that can make you big long term gains. The good news it’s all free.

You may be tempted to buy an e-book from a guru and pay but you don’t need to, you can get a good solid system for free if you know what to look for.

Follow the advice on forex education below and you will see that you can build and apply a forex trading system from free sources on the net.

The Basics

The first thing to learn about is technical analysis simply type in the phrase and all the basics are there for free learn all about trend lines, support and resistance etc.

Now let’s look at a way of applying technical trading that works today as it always has.

Trading breakouts

If you look up this phrase then you will understand why breakouts work. It really is simple to understand. Keep in mind most of the world’s top traders use breakouts in their methodology. So now you will know the basics of technical analysis and the logic of trading breakouts.

The next bit of forex education we need to look at is timing trades. For this we need to look at some indicators that will help us time trades, spot trend changes and help us calculate the strength of trends.

Here are a few you should learn about:

1. Bollinger bands
2. Stochastics
3. Moving Averages
4. RSI

There are more but over 20 years of trading I have always used these as the basis of my own trading.

Applying what you have learned

In further articles in this series I will show you how to use charts, a breakout methodology with the indicators above to build a trading system that you can use which you will understand have confidence in and could make some nice profits. We will look also at money management and adopting the right mindset to go and make some big profits.

For now simply brush up your forex education in the areas indicated above and we will move to the next stage of putting it all together.

In forex trading most new traders don’t understand the concept of standard deviation.

However if you understand it, you can gain greater insight into price movement and a huge edge in your quest for profits.

Let’s look at standard deviation in greater detail.

Standard deviation may seem a bit confusing at first, but it’s totally logical.

Let’s do the technical bit first and then look at why it is so important at the end of this article.

What is it?

Standard deviation is a statistical term that provides an indication of the volatility of any price and that includes forex prices.

It measures how widely values (closing prices) are dispersed from the average.

Dispersion is the difference between the actual value (closing price) and the average value (mean closing price).

The larger the difference between the closing prices and the average price, the higher the standard deviation will be and therefore the volatility of the market.

The closer the closing prices are to the average mean price, the lower the standard deviation and the volatility of the currency is.

It is calculated by taking the square root of the variance, the average of the squared deviations from the mean.

High Standard Deviation values occur when the data item being analyzed is changing dramatically.

On the other hand, low Standard Deviation values occur when prices are more stable.

Major tops and bottoms are accompanied by high volatility as investors reflect the psychology of euphoria, greed and fear.

Why it is so useful?

All short term price spikes in financial markets that move to far from the mean price are unsustainable and are a reflection of human psychology.

The emotions of greed and fear are at work and eventually prices will move back toward the mean.

Keep this equation in mind:

Supply and demand fundamentals + investor psychology = Price movement.

A big rise in volatility away from the mean is a spike normally driven by emotion.

If you can spot this you have a tool to take profits if you are trading in the direction of the move or make a great contrary trade against the volatility.

How to apply standard deviation easily

If you understand standard deviation you can use it to your advantage.

A great way is to incorporate Bollinger bands in your trading and we will look at them in more detail in next article.

I read a lot of material on forex trading systems and the great copy offering me huge profits for $100 or so, sounds great!

Then when I come to buy the system I look for one thing and one thing only to see if it’s worth me parting with my money.

Its obvious but most forex system buyers don’t think to ask the obvious its:

The real time audited track record from the vendor.

After all if they make claims about how great their system is shouldn’t they be trading it and shouldn’t they have some proof it makes money?

Of course they should!

In most cases however with forex trading systems all you get is a hypothetical track record at best, or a load of vague claims without substantiation.

A hypothetical track record means absolutely nothing.

Let’s define exactly what this means:

It means the person had all the closing data in hindsight and can simply make the profit and loss whatever they want it to be.

You never see one that loses money.

Let’s face it, if we are doing a track record knowing the closing prices anyone can make money as they know what the prices did.

My 10 year old boy can do that!

There are some good forex trading systems out there and the best way to get one that is reputable is to get a trader who puts his money where his mouth is and trades his own system.

Would you take driving lessons from someone who had not driven before?

Of course you wouldn’t!

Use the same rule in trading if the vendor doesn’t have the confidence to trade his own system why should you?

Don’t fall for the hype

Fact is, there are many forex trading systems sold by vendors without track records and they know their systems don’t work and that’s why they don’t trade.

Of course, they make money from greedy and foolish people who fall for the copy.

Vendor wins you lose – Simple.
People will say the fact that a froex trading system just because it has made money in the past does not mean it will make money in the future and of course this is true, but I Like the fact the person selling at least has shown profit and has the confidence to trade.

My view is never trade a system without a real time track record of at least two years.