Well it's been another frustrating week with a lot of sideways trading action but the summer months are coming to an end now so hopefully things will pick up in the next few months. (…)
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Forex Day Trading - How to Understand It? Talking about forex day trading, we can trace constituent of the phrase. Let us take an example. Forex day trading can be broken down into: trading, day trading, forex trading, and forex day trading.Trading is a term created to describe the buying and selling activities. In trading we know the two interacting parties, ie seller and buyer. When you perform
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Aside from the standard meat-and-potatoes equity and fixed-income investments that should make up the portfolios of most people, several alternative asset classes are available to individual investors.
Alternative assets are a good diversification tool because they’re generally not correlated to the stock market. This means when the market goes down, alternative assets may go up or stay the same and vice versa.
Large investors such as pension and endowment funds have been attracted to hedge funds because of their reputation for producing high returns. But it’s difficult to tell how successful hedge funds are because the historical data leaves much to be desired.
“They are self-reported. Indexes of hedge fund performance are biased by the fact that those that do poorly go out of business and those that do well stay in business,” says Walt Woerheide, Ph.D., CFP, vice president of academic affairs and professor of investments at The American College in Bryn Mawr, Penn. “And so when you look at the index over time, it’s really an index of those that have done well.”
Though people refer to hedge funds as a single category of investment, they actually follow different strategies that try to beat the market.
“One may engage in bankruptcy situations. Another may be involved in merger and acquisition opportunities. The variety of strategies that hedge funds follow is all over the place. It’s not a homogenous type of investment,” says Woerheide.
Like actual hedge funds, hedge-like mutual funds also follow various strategies, but they are much more transparent and less controversial than their brethren. In general, they’re more expensive than other stock funds, charging 2.04 percent a year on average, versus 1.47 percent for actively managed stock funds and 0.78 percent for equity index funds, according to Morningstar. Some hedge-like mutual funds cost as much as 3.89 percent, and a couple cost more than 5 percent annually.
That’s cheap compared to real hedge funds, though.
“They get something like a 2 percent fee and then 25 percent of the profits if they make money. And then nothing happens if they lose money,” says Woerheide.
Albert Chu, chief investment officer for Wealthstone in Columbus, Ohio, believes that getting exposure to the asset class is worth the fees in some cases.
“We index our large-cap managers since they tend not to outperform and with those savings we’re going to allocate some fee dollars to some of our alternative strategies,” he says.
Should you choose to dabble in these alternative investments, be sure to investigate them thoroughly or get some good advice from a trusted adviser.
Long-Short Funds
According to investment research company Morningstar, about 75 mutual funds employ hedging strategies.
“The easiest example of an alternative strategy is going to be a long-short fund or opportunistic equity,” says Chu, a chartered financial analyst and chartered alternative investment analyst.
A long-short strategy involves investing in stocks with positive prospects (making long bets) as well as stocks that are expected to decline in value.
“If a portfolio manager has a group of stocks, they’re going to go out there and buy their best ideas and hope they rise in value. And that is a long (bet),” Chu says.
Then if they find some challenged companies, the fund managers will short those companies and put together a long-short portfolio.
Here’s how short-selling works: The investor can use leverage, by borrowing money on margin from his broker, to borrow the stock at a certain price and sell it to someone else. When the stock price drops, the investor buys the stock at market price, gives it back to the broker and pockets the profit.
Short-selling is a highly risky strategy, because if a stock goes up instead of down as expected, the investor’s potential for loss is unlimited.
Long-short funds are the most widely available hedge strategies in mutual funds, and most don’t require big minimum investments.
“You’re going to have a different return pattern than the overall stock market,” says Chu.
Recent history bears this out. Long-short funds outperformed the S&P 500 during the 17-month bear market that ended March 9, 2009. The hedge-like mutual funds lost 15 percent on average while the broad market plummeted 43 percent.
Long-short funds also haven’t rebounded as much either. Since March 10, the S&P gained 50 percent through mid-August, while long-short funds advanced 16 percent.
Commodities
Commodities also may be a good alternative option for the individual investor’s portfolio.
“Commodities are worth considering not for returns but because they act like portfolio insurance. By themselves they’re very volatile, but when you add them to a portfolio, the historical evidence is that you reduce the risk of the portfolio and get higher risk-adjusted returns,” says Larry Swedroe, principal and director of research at Buckingham Asset Management in St. Louis.
That wasn’t particularly the case in the most recent bear market, though. According to Morningstar, most commodity indexes did worse than the S&P 500 in 2008, which was down 37 percent for the year. For instance, the natural resources category, which includes gas and oil, took a 48 percent hit.
Swedroe, author of “The Only Guide to Alternative Investments You’ll Ever Need,” particularly recommends commodities in the form of fully collateralized commodity futures.
Fully collateralized means unleveraged. Commodity futures are speculative financial instruments known as derivatives that are financial contracts written on the future price of a product.
Just like with equities, some commodity funds use long-short strategies in an effort to improve returns. Some commodity funds are actively managed, while other ETFs and mutual funds follow commodity indexes.
Multistrategy Funds
A few fund companies offer products with a number of different strategies in one absolute return product, called a multistrategy mutual fund.
As a mutual fund, the way it works is that the manager sets up different accounts as a custodian. All of those accounts together would be contained in one mutual fund.
They’re “just different alternative strategies combined into one. What they try to do is target equity-like returns and bond-like volatility,” says Chu.
Individual investors looking for alternative investments might rather go with a multistrategy fund than a long-short fund, Chu says. “You probably want to go with a multistrategy fund-of-funds mutual fund.”
Some of these funds have somewhat prohibitively high minimums, but others can be reasonable for anyone.
“We use those alternative mutual funds in our own 401(k) here at Wellstone, and we also recommend that for other 401(k) plans that we administer,” says Chu.
“In the end the manager selected may not be as, I don’t want to say ‘good,’ but may not be the best manager out there,” he says. “But again, it goes back to the fact that it is more important to get the asset classes correct since we know over time that tends to add more value than manager selection.”
Article by Bankrate.com
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I've got something a little different for you today because the article below is a guest article from John Robinson (forextraders.com). (…)
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If there’s one question that investors have asked themselves over the past year and a half, it’s that one. If only I had acted differently, they say. If only, if only, if only.
Yet here’s the problem: While we know that we made investment mistakes, and vow not to repeat them, most people have only the vaguest sense of what those mistakes were, or, more important, why they made them. Why did we think and feel and behave as we did? Why did we act in a way that today, in hindsight, seems so obviously stupid? Only by understanding the answer to these questions can we begin to improve our financial future.
This is where behavioral finance comes in. Most investors are intelligent people, neither irrational nor insane. But behavioral finance tells us we are also normal, with brains that are often full and emotions that are often overflowing. And that means we are normal smart at times, and normal stupid at others.
The trick, therefore, is to learn to increase our ratio of smart behavior to stupid. And since we cannot (thank goodness) turn ourselves into computer-like people, we need to find tools to help us act smart even when our thinking and feelings tempt us to be stupid.
Let me give you one example. Investors tend to think about each stock we purchase in a vacuum, distinct from other stocks in our portfolio. We are happy to realize “paper” gains in each stock quickly, but procrastinate when it comes to realizing losses. Why? Because while regret over a paper loss stings, we can console ourselves in the hope that, in time, the stock will roar back into a gain. By contrast, all hope would be extinguished if we sold the stock and realized our loss. We would feel the searing pain of regret. So we do pretty much anything to avoid that pain—including holding on to the stock long after we should have sold it. Indeed, I’ve recently encountered an investor who procrastinated in realizing his losses on WorldCom stock until a letter from his broker informed him that the stock was worthless.
Successful professional traders are subject to the same emotions as the rest of us. But they counter it in two ways. First, they know their weakness, placing them on guard against it. Second, they establish “sell disciplines” that force them to realize losses even when they know that the pain of regret is sure to follow.
So in what other ways do our misguided thoughts and feelings get in the way of successful investing—not to mention increasing our stress levels? And what are the lessons we should learn, once we recognize those cognitive and emotional errors? Here are eight of them.
No. 1
Goldman Sachs is faster than you.
There is an old story about two hikers who encounter a tiger. One says: There is no point in running because the tiger is faster than either of us. The other says: It is not about whether the tiger is faster than either of us. It is about whether I’m faster than you. And with that he runs away. The speed of the Goldman Sachses of the world has been boosted most recently by computerized high-frequency trading. Can you really outrun them?
It is normal for us, the individual investors, to frame the market race as a race against the market. We hope to win by buying and selling investments at the right time. That doesn’t seem so hard. But we are much too slow in our race with the Goldman Sachses.
So what does this mean in practical terms? The most obvious lesson is that individual investors should never enter a race against faster runners by trading frequently on every little bit of news (or rumors).
Instead, simply buy and hold a diversified portfolio. Banal? Yes. Obvious? Yes. Typically followed? Sadly, no. Too often cognitive errors and emotions get in our way.
No. 2
The future is not the past, and hindsight is not foresight.
Wasn’t it obvious in 2007 that financial institutions and financial markets were about to collapse? Well, it was not obvious to me, and it was probably not obvious to you, either. Hindsight error leads us to think that we could have seen in foresight what we see only in hindsight. And it makes us overconfident in our certainty about what’s going to happen.
Want to check the quality of your foresight? Write down in permanent ink your forecast of tomorrow’s stock prices. Do that each day for a year and check the accuracy of your predictions. You are likely to find that your foresight is not nearly as good as your hindsight.
Some prognosticators say that we are now in a new bull market and others say that this is only a bull bounce in a bear market. We will know in hindsight which prognostication was right, but we don’t know it in foresight.
When I hear in my mind’s ear a voice that says that the stock market is sure to zoom or plunge, I activate my “noise-canceling” device rather than go online and trade. You might wish to install this device in your mind as well.
No. 3
Take the pain of regret today and feel the joy of pride tomorrow.
Emotions are useful, even when they sting. The pain of regret over stupid comments teaches presidents and the rest of us to calibrate our words more carefully. But sometimes emotions mislead us into stupid behavior. We feel the pain of regret when we find, in hindsight, that our portfolios would have been overflowing if only we had sold all the stocks in 2007. The pain of regret is especially searing when we bear responsibility for the decision not to sell our stocks in 2007. We are tempted to alleviate our pain by shifting responsibility to our financial advisers. “I am not stupid,” we say. “My financial adviser is stupid.” Financial advisers are sorely tempted to reciprocate, as the adviser in the cartoon who says: “If we’re being honest, it was your decision to follow my recommendation that cost you money.”
No. 4
Investment success stories are as misleading as lottery success stories.
Have you ever seen a lottery commercial showing a man muttering “lost again” as he tears his ticket in disgust? Of course not. What you see instead are smiling winners holding giant checks.
Lottery promoters tilt the scales by making the handful of winners available to our memory while obscuring the many millions of losers. Then, once we have settled on a belief, such as “I’m going to win the lottery,” we tend to look for evidence that confirms our belief rather than evidence that might refute it. So we figure our favorite lottery number is due for a win because it has not won in years. Or we try to divine—through dreams, horoscopes, fortune cookies—the next winning numbers. But we neglect to note evidence that hardly anybody ever wins the lottery, and that lottery numbers can go for decades without winning. This is the work of the “confirmation” error.
What is true for lottery tickets is true for investments as well. Investment companies tilt the scales by touting how well they have done over a pre-selected period. Then, confirmation error misleads us into focusing on investments that have done well in 2008.
Lottery players who overcome the confirmation error conclude that winning lottery numbers are random. Investors who overcome the confirmation error conclude that winning investments are almost as random. Don’t chase last year’s investment winners. Your ability to predict next year’s investment winner is no better than your ability to predict next week’s lottery winner. A diversified portfolio of many investments might make you a loser during a year or even a decade, but a concentrated portfolio of few investments might ruin you forever.
No. 5
Neither fear nor exuberance are good investment guides.
A Gallup Poll asked: “Do you think that now is a good time to invest in the financial markets?” February 2000 was a time of exuberance, and 78% of investors agreed that “now is a good time to invest.” It turned out to be a bad time to invest. March 2003 was a time of fear, and only 41% agreed that “now is a good time to invest.” It turned out to be a good time to invest. I would guess that few investors thought that March 2009, another time of great fear, was a good time to invest. So far, so wrong. It is good to learn the lesson of fear and exuberance, and use reason to resist their pull.
No. 6
Wealth makes us happy, but wealth increases make us even happier.
John found out today that his wealth fell from $5 million to $3 million. Jane found out that her wealth increased from $1 million to $2 million. John has more wealth than Jane, but Jane is likely to be happier. This simple insight underlies Prospect Theory, developed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Happiness from wealth comes from gains of wealth more than it comes from levels of wealth. While gains of wealth bring happiness, losses of wealth bring misery. This is misery we feel today, whether our wealth declined from $5 million to $3 million or from $50,000 to $30,000.
We’ll have to wait a while before we recoup our recent investment losses, but we can recoup our loss of happiness much faster, simply by framing things differently. John thinks he’s a loser now that he has only $3 million of his original $5 million. But John is likely a winner if he compares his $3 million to the mountain of debt he had when he left college. And he is a winner if he compares himself to his poor neighbor, the one with only $2 million.
In other words, it’s all relative, and it doesn’t hurt to keep that in mind, for the sake of your mental well-being. Standing next to people who have lost more than you and counting your blessings would not add a penny to your portfolio, but it would remind you that you are not a loser.
No. 7
I’ve only lost my children’s inheritance.
Another lesson here in happiness. Mental accounting—the adding and subtracting you do in your head about your gains and losses—is a cognitive operation that regularly misleads us. But you can also use your mental accounting in a way that steers you right.
Say your portfolio is down 30% from its 2007 high, even after the recent stock-market bounce. You feel like a loser. But money is worth nothing when it is not attached to a goal, whether buying a new TV, funding retirement, or leaving an inheritance to your children or favorite charity.
A stock-market crash is akin to an automobile crash. We check ourselves. Is anyone bleeding? Can we drive the car to a garage, or do we need a tow truck? We must check ourselves after a market crash as well. Suppose that you divide your portfolio into mental accounts: one for your retirement income, one for college education of your grandchildren, and one for bequests to your children. Now you can see that the terrible market has wrecked your bequest mental account and dented your education mental account, but left your retirement mental account without a scratch. You still have all the money you need for food and shelter, and you even have the money for a trip around the country in a new RV. You might want to affix to it a new version of the old bumper sticker: “I’ve only lost my children’s inheritance.”
So here’s my advice: Ask yourself whether the market damaged your retirement prospects or only deflated your ego. If the market has damaged your retirement prospects, then you’ll have to save more, spend less or retire later. But don’t worry about your ego. In time it will inflate to its former size.
No. 8
Dollar-cost averaging is not rational, but it is pretty smart.
Suppose that you were wise or lucky enough to sell all your stocks at the top of the market in October 2007. Now what? Today it seems so clear that you should not have missed the opportunity to get back into the market in mid-March, but you missed that opportunity. Hindsight messes with your mind and regret adds its sting. Perhaps you should get back in. But what if the market falls below its March lows as soon as you get back in? Won’t the sting of regret be even more painful?
Dollar-cost averaging is a good way to reduce regret—and make your head clearer for smart investing. Say you have $100,000 that you want to put back into stocks. Divide it into 10 pieces of $10,000 each and invest each on the first Monday of each of the next 10 months. You’ll minimize regret. If the stock market declined as soon as you have invested the first $10,000 you’ll take comfort in the $90,000 you have not invested yet. If the market increases you’ll take comfort in the $10,000 you have invested. Moreover, the strict “first Monday” rule removes responsibility, mitigating further the pain of regret. You did not make the decision to invest $10,000 in the sixth month, just before the big crash. You only followed a rule. The money is lost, but your mind is almost intact.
Things could be a lot worse.
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–Mr. Statman is a professor of finance at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, Calif. He can be reached at reports@wsj.com.
One of the best things you can do if you're serious about becoming a profitable forex trader is to learn all about money management. (…)
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Forex Trading Training - All You Need to Know About Due to the possibility of high profits in forex trading, more and more people are getting attracted towards forex trading. Many people are ending up in the middle of no where entering Forex trading just because they do not have proper knowledge and are not trained to be a Forex trader. Forex trading market is a ground of high competition and you
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Watch this interesting view points of Peter Peterson on National Debts; former chairman and co-founder of the Blackstone Group and the author of ”The Education of an American Dreamer.” He pointed out how America got into such a big mess and he is trying to make a difference in setting up a foundation to help up the issue.
The forex market, unlike other exchange driven markets, has a unique feature that many market makers use to entice traders to trade. They promise no exchange fees or regulatory fees, no data fees and, best of all, no commissions. To the new trader just wanting to break into the trading business, this sounds too good to be true. Trading without transaction costs is clearly an advantage. However, what might sound like a bargain to inexperienced traders may not be the best deal available - or even a deal at all. Here we’ll show you how to evaluate forex broker fee/commission structures and find the one that will work best for you.
Commission Structures
There are three forms of commission used by brokers in forex. Some firms offer a fixed spread, others offer a variable spread and still others charge a commission based on a percentage of the spread. So which is the best choice? At first glance, it seems that the fixed spread may be the right choice, because then you would know exactly what to expect. However, before you jump in and choose one, there are a few things you need to consider.
The spread is the difference between the price the market maker is prepared to pay you for buying the currency (the bid price), versus the price at which he is prepared to sell you the currency (the ask price). Suppose you see the following quotes on your screen: “EURUSD - 1.4952 - 1.4955.” This represents a spread of three pips, the difference between the bid price of 1.4952 and the ask price of 1.4955. If you are dealing with a market maker who is offering a fixed spread of three pips instead of a variable spread, the difference will always be three pips, regardless of market volatility. (For more, see Common Questions About Currency Trading.)
In the case of a broker who offers a variable spread, you can expect a spread that will, at times, be as low as 1.5 pips or as high as five pips, depending on the currency pair being traded and the level of market volatility.
Some brokers may also charge a very small commission, perhaps two-tenths of one pip, and then will pass the order flow received from you on to a large market maker with whom he or she has a relationship. In such an arrangement, you can receive a very tight spread that only larger traders could otherwise access.
Different Brokers, Different Levels of Service
So what is the bottom line effect of each type of commission on your trading? Given that all brokers are not created equal, this is a difficult question to answer. The reason is that there are other factors to take into account when weighing what is most advantageous for your trading account.
For example, not all brokers are able to make a market equally. The forex market is an over-the-counter market, which means that banks, the primary market makers, have relationships with other banks and price aggregators (retail online brokers), based on the capitalization and creditworthiness of each organization. There are no guarantors or exchanges involved, just the credit agreement between each player. So, when it comes to an online market maker, for example, your broker’s effectiveness will depend on his or her relationship with banks, and how much volume the broker does with them. Usually, the higher-volume forex players are quoted tighter spreads. (For more, see Getting Started In Forex.)
If your market maker has a strong relationship with a line of banks and can aggregate, say, twelve banks’ price quotes, then the brokerage firm will be able to pass the average bid and ask on to its retail customers. Even after slightly widening the spread to account for profit, the dealer will be able to pass a more competitive spread on to you than competitors that are not well capitalized.
If you are dealing with a broker that can offer guaranteed liquidity at attractive spreads, this may be what you should look for. On the other hand, you might want to pay a fixed pip spread if you know you are getting at-the-money executions every time you trade. Slippage, which occurs when your trade is executed away from the price you were offered, is a cost that you do not want to bear.
In the case of a commission broker, whether you should pay a small commission depends on what else the broker is offering. For example, suppose your broker charges you a small commission, usually in the order of two-tenths of one pip, or about $2.50 - $3 per 100,000 unit trade, but in exchange offers you access to a proprietary software platform that is superior to most online brokers’ platforms, or some other benefit. In this case, it may be worth paying the small commission for this additional service.
Choosing a Forex Broker
As a trader, you should always consider the total package when deciding on a broker, in addition to the type of spreads the broker offers. For example, some brokers may offer excellent spreads but their platforms may not have all the bells and whistles that are offered by competitors. When choosing a brokerage firm, you should check out the following:
* How well capitalized is the firm?
* How long has it been in business?
* Who manages the firm and how much experience does this person have?
* Which and how many banks does the firm have relationships with?
* How much volume does it transact each month?
* What are its liquidity guarantees in terms of order size?
* What is its margin policy?
* What is its rollover policy in case you want to hold your positions overnight?
* Does the firm pass through the positive carry, if there is one?
* Does the firm add a spread to the rollover interest rates?
* What kind of platform does it offer?
* Does it have multiple order types, such as “order cancels order” or “order sends order”?
* Does it guarantee to execute your stop losses at the order price?
* Does the firm have a dealing desk?
* What do you do if your internet connection is lost and you have an open position?
* Does the firm provide all the back-end office functions, such as P&L, in real time?
Conclusion
Even though you might think you are getting a deal when paying a variable spread, you may be sacrificing other benefits. But one thing is certain: As a trader you always pay the spread and your broker always earns the spread. To get the best deal possible, choose a reputable broker who is well capitalized and has strong relationships with the large foreign exchange banks. Examine the spreads on the most popular currencies. Very often, they will be as little as 1.5 pips. If this is the case, a variable spread may work out to be cheaper than a fixed spread. Some brokers even offer you the choice of either a fixed spread or a variable one. In the end, the cheapest way to trade is with a very reputable market maker who can provide the liquidity you need to trade well.
by Selwyn Gishen
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Well it's been quite an interesting week this week because I've been employing a few strategies that I wouldn't normally consider using. (…)
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