There are two important components of federal market activity which affect long- term economic activity and stock and commodity values; these are interest rates and money supply. A contracting money supply was one of the factors that caused the Great Depression of the 1930's. In the early 1980's most traders focused almost totally on the money supply figures, which would cause cash bonds and T-Bil...
Trading Educators Blog
Something you should be aware of if you're trading the TF: Starting today (December 5th) the E-Mini Russel 2000 (TF) has a tick value of USD 5.00 instead of USD 10.00 while the tick size stays the same. For more info see the ICE FAQ. Happy Trading! Marco
Question from a subscriber: "Once I’ve achieved success as a trader, then what? I’ve heard that after a while trading can become boring." I know you would all like to have that problem, but I can vouch for its being true. I always have to find new ways to trade or I do become bored. However, I have never run out of ways to trade that remain exciting, at least for a fairly long time. After the obje...
As a trader, it's essential that you set specific goals. Trading is chaotic enough without trying to achieve unstructured goals that are difficult to manage and reach. Making profitable investments requires you to prepare carefully. You have to develop hypotheses regarding current market conditions. You have to devise ways of identifying setups and determine how and when to enter and exit the trad...
I’m happy to tell you that today a new AlgoStrats service was launched: Ambush Signals for Futures. To find out more have a look at the following video presentation: Happy Trading! Marco
Just wanted to let you know that I uploaded a new video to YouTube a couple of days ago. This time it's about why Entry Signals are important and one way to test an Entry Signal isolated from Exit Signals. If you like the video or my videos in general, and would like to see more of these in the future - please go ahead and like it on YouTube, leave a comment, add it to your playlist and share it o...
When I started out trading I had the illusion that being a successful trader meant to no longer have drawdowns or at least on very rare occasions. And I think most traders start out with that idea in their mind even though they don’t understand what it actually means. In Trading, you are in a Drawdown anytime you don’t make new equity highs on your account, or if you have multiple accounts across ...
Whenever the Federal Open Market Committee meets and releases its rate decision and its statement, it’s seen as one of the most important data releases in the markets in the currency markets. And it is, as sometimes there’s a real surprise that can have a huge impact on the markets. Because of that the whole FX world goes crazy days before it and waits for the statement in anticipation of big move...
As I’m about to go on vacation I thought it’s a good idea to write down my thoughts about trading on vacation. Is it a good idea to do so, or just crazy? I believe it depends. If you’re longer-term position trader and have a couple of positions open that are doing great and you don’t want to close them out now for example, I think there’s nothing wrong managing your position once a day while you’r...
After writing about why good trading usually is quite boring last week, I’ll continue down that road today and write about another similar topic. And again it’s more of a rant that many of you maybe don’t want to read about. But I believe it really can be an eye-opener to those of you who’re really serious about trading and these are the traders that I care for the most. Actually I wish I ha...
When you start out trading, it’s pretty much all about the excitement. You watch every trade tick by tick, gazing at a chart ticking up and down together your P&L. You’re long. When it goes up, you feel excited because you’re making money, if it goes down you’re excited because you’re losing money. But boy you’re making sure you don’t miss any of this. You sit there and gaze at that chart as i...
FYI: Get 20% off Ambush through July 13th. Simply enter the coupon code ambush20 when you check out. No doubt, the decision if or if not one should trade through the BREXIT-event and on which days was not an easy one for traders. But like most of the time, the answer at least in hindsight for Ambush traders was a clear "Yes". I personally didn't have any positions on going into the BREXIT...
And a few days after the surprise from UK (sorry to see you guys leave!) the markets seem to calm down a bit already which is nice. But I expect to see a few more crazy days and regarding the FX markets it’s all one big Risk ON/OFF scheme right now, driving up correlations between the pairs. Now I keep on getting emails asking when the Free Trial for AlgoStrats:FX will start but I won’t rush it as...
Actually I didn't want to jump on the BREXIT bandwagon but since a few of you asked me if I trade the Brexit and if so how, I'll let you know and give you a bit of a warning along the way. There's tons of traders out there on social media, blogs, trading sites and forum talking about how they'll trade the Brexit event, stay up over night and so on. Now I'm not one of them. Actually the Brexit is o...
What’s better to trade the currency markets? Trading Futures or Forex? This is the question I try to answer in my new video, where I briefly discuss the major differences between trading Futures and Forex from my perspective. At the end though there’s no “right” answer to that question, as it really depends on your needs.
I just posted another video on our YouTube channel about another very common trading mistake, and that's trading your P&L instead of the actual market. While there are many variations of this, I guess I covered some of the most common ones that I've done myself again and again when I started trading. Go check it out and let me know if you have any questions or comments!
I just uploaded Episode 3 of my Questions & Answers Series to YouTube. It covers questions on the usefulness of demo-trading and on trading 123 formations. In the last part I talk about why I developed my own python-based backtesting platform which is probably only interesting for those of you who're hardcore into system-development. So if you're not, just stop there ;)
About a year ago I wrote an article about measuring performance where I explained the concept of measuring trading performance in Rs instead of $s. Everyone who trades for a while quickly realizes that $s don't really say too much about performance. You made $10? Maybe great. You made $50.000? Maybe not so good. The question always is in relation to what? What account size does the t...
There seems to be a massive obsession out there among traders about the EUR/USD, what's going on with it, where it's going and why. Whenever I go on twitter or Facebook or any of the financial news pages, I find at least a couple of posts on what's going on in that market, usually with some bogus comment on why. Classic one would be "EUR/USD moves higher after breaking through 1.1350" or "EUR/USD ...
Hi Trader, now this has been a quite volatile week so far in many markets and I hope you've also been able to capture some nice profits out of these wild moves! Thanks to my trading being almost completely systematic right now I still had a few minutes to record a new video for YouTube and actually start of a new Series. In the first one I explain what a BID/ASK spread is for those of you who're c...