May 09 2009

Facts About Forex Managed Funds

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4If you are considering signing up for a forex managed funds account, there are a number of things you need to know about these accounts.

Granted, if things pan out as planned, then there is a very real chance of you making yourself a pretty fortune, with a minimum input of effort. But there are also some unflattering facts about forex managed funds that you need to be aware of before you sign up for one.

The first thing you need to know about forex managed funds is the money you put into them is used for a speculative activity – called the forex trade – and there is a very chance of you losing out on both the capital (also called the principal) and what you would have earned out of it should the worst come to pass. This is an important fact, and although the people who offer genuine forex managed funds accounts do make a point of mentioning this to prospective account owners, they usually do in a low-toned money, just mentioning it as a by the way, yet the fact that the money one puts in forex managed funds is being used for speculative activities is a basic tenet of the funds that anyone putting money into them should be made aware of. In fact, seen in this way, money put in forex managed funds cannot be counted as money that has been invested, but rather as money that has been aside for speculative purposes, with the attendant risks that come with speculation.

The second thing you need to know about forex managed funds is that the term very forex managed fund is often (but not always, take note) used as a smokescreen for a forex scam – where people take your money, trade with it, make neat profits with it – and then give you a measly portion of what they make (in the best case scenarios) or where they take your money only to inform you that the money got lost in the trade, and there is usually nothing you can do about this as they usually make you aver to the fact that you understand that the money you put into forex managed funds is money you are putting into a speculative venture, with risk of losing both the principal and the earnings thereof.

The third thing you need to know about forex managed funds is that the impressive charts and performance graphs that the vendors usually give to you are usually not indicative of performance that you should expect to make out of the funds. Like the fact that forex managed funds are speculative in nature, the fact that the charts that their vendors give when marketing them are not indicative of the performance to expect from them is something that the vendors make a point of mentioning to prospective account holders, but this too, they tend to do in a low-key manner (in the fine print of the agreement) whereas in the real sense it is something that everyone getting into forex managed funds should be aware of – that the charts given are not indicative of performance one can or should expect from the account – and that they are just meant to impress.

May 08 2009

Managed forex trading

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3One of the quickest ways of losing a lot of money on forex trades is a loss of discipline. Investors in the foreign market need to be able to remain disciplined and focus when they trade. This is certainly most important in times of great volatility and excitement in the marketplace.

Ignoring market signals and trading on emotions is one sure sign of a loss of discipline. This is one reason why a lot of investors can benefit from an automate forex trading system. In a nutshell, an automated trading system will stick to the trading strategy like a robot, and unaffected by human emotion.

Novice investors need to be very careful when considering automated trading systems. A lot of unscrupulous companies prey on their ignorance and sell them useless trading systems. At best, these systems will not earn any profits. More likely though, they will result in massive losses. It is therefore very important to research any potential tools thoroughly.

The market offers many different automated trading systems, with varying levels of complexity, ability, and price. A mistake a lot of novices make is to buy what seems the most complicated system. This is no guarantee of profit. There are a lot of simple systems on the market that deliver good returns when trading on the forex markets.

There are a lot of benefits to using simple systems. They are easier to use. They tend to require less input data for analysis. They are also easier for the investor to understand, and fine tune for their purposes. As with any tool, it is better to have a simple one that you use, than it is to spend a fortune on a complicated system that then gathers dust in the corner.

The most basic automated trading systems are actually recommendation engines. They take live market quotes, and try and predict movement trends in the prices. They then recommend trades to make. If for example, the system predicts prices to be rising, it will recommend buying, and vice versa. It is then up to the investor to accept this recommendation and manually make the trade.

Rising in complexity, some systems can automatically make these trades for you. Advances in communication mean that an investor’s trading system can be directly connected to an account at a forex brokerage firm all the time. It is important to find out what automated trading systems your specific brokerage firm will support. The best automated trading systems allow investors to customise the sizes and types of trades they can make.

At the far end of the spectrum, are systems that analyse a lot of data, from a lot of sources, before making trade recommendations. Some of these automated systems are run millions of calculations per second, and require mainframe computers to run. The data they analyse can be price trends in the forex markets, or weather patterns in specific countries.

A novice investor would be wiser to start with a simple system that makes trade recommendations. This makes it easier to test, evaluate and adjust the system before automatic trades are made. Once an investor has confidence in such a system, it can then be allowed to trade automatically. As knowledge and confidence improve, an investor can then move to some of the more complicated automated trading systems.

Once again, there are a lot of junk products masquerading as automated trading systems. It cannot be stressed enough that it is essential to research, and try any system before allowing it to make automatic trades on a live brokerage account.

May 07 2009

An introduction to trading forex

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2Forex is an abbreviation for the term foreign exchange. This term is itself sometimes shortened to FX. The forex markets are the global marketplaces for all dealers in forex. These trade volumes of over $3 trillion daily. To give an indication of the scale, this is larger than all the commodity and share or stock markets.

The forex markets are virtual markets. They do not have a physical location. Everything is electronic. This virtual market is made up of an international network of industrial companies, banks, individual traders and governments. Because of the nature of the market, currencies, unlike shares, are traded 24 hours daily.

The largest player in the forex markets are the investment banks, accounting for over 50% of all the forex traded globally. Multinational companies also have big representation in the forex markets. For most organisations, stable prices are a cornerstone of forecasting and planning. Where some of their trade is international, it makes sense for them to hedge their currency exposure on the forex markets.

Other big firms on the forex markets are investment firms, some of which run forex market funds. Central banks, such as the Bank of England will sometimes use the forex markets to try and control interest rates, or money supply. By far the smallest group on the forex markets are the individual and retail traders, accounting for less than 5% of the global forex trade.

In many respects, forex trading tracks the sun as it moves around our planet. Some of the busiest exchanges are in New York, London, Tokyo and Singapore. The European trading sessions are typically beginning when the Asian ones are ending. Similarly, as the European sessions start to close, the American ones are opening.

Despite the huge volumes of trade on the forex markets, some currencies are traded more than others. The biggest currencies, by volume, include the United States Dollar (USD), the British Sterling (GBP), the Euro currency (EUR), the Japanese Yen (JPY), and the the Swiss Franc (CHF).

Unlike the stock exchange, where one buys or sells a stock, the forex market deals in currency pairs. Each transactions will have two currencies associated with it. A trader is therefore simultaneously buying one currency while selling another one.

Assume for example that the trader believes that the British Pound will strengthen against the United States Dollar. The trader would then place a trace to buy GBP/USD, i.e, they are buying Pounds, and paying for them (selling) Dollars. To close this trade, the forex investor would then sell GBP/USD. In this last trade, they sell their Pound holdings, and get paid for them in Dollars. The difference (in dollars), between what they paid for their Pounds, is their profit or loss for the forex trade.

When prices for forex are quoted, the first currency quoted in the pair (e.g. USD/JPY) is known as the base currency. The latter is known as the counter or quote currency. The most valuable currency is quoted first.

Taking the first example, where a trader buys GBP/USD. The trader cannot buy USD/GBP if they think the dollar will strengthen against the pound. What they have to do is sell GBP/USD. The effect is the same, but is an important distinction to note. Too often, novice investors will buy the wrong currency, as they confuse the base and counter currencies.

May 06 2009

Forex IRA Managed Accounts

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1Forex IRA managed accounts are opened give the person who happens to hold them an opportunity to trade forex and channel the proceeds from the forex trade into their retirement savings, tax free.

The acronym IRA stands for Individual Retirement Account – which literally is an account into which an individual accumulates money for their retirement, and which enjoys some tax benefits. The tax benefits that the government gives to the IRA account holders stem from the understanding that the money which they accumulate in such an account will (ideally) help them in their old age, thus saving the government money that it would have to spent caring for them – keeping in mind that it is the responsibility of the government to take care of the vulnerable in the society and the old are included in the category of the vulnerable people. Without tools like IRAs, the government might find itself having to pay wholly for these individuals survival in their old age, a considerable cost – and it is in recognition of this fact that the government encourages the growth of IRAs and other measures that people take to safeguard their old age.

Now money that people put into their IRAs are invested in various ventures, one of them being in forex trade – where one aims to buy foreign currencies when they are trading at a lower price, hold them for a while and sell them when they are trading at higher price, and keep the difference between what the currencies were bought for and what the currencies where sold for as profit. When money in an IRA is invested in the forex trade, we end up with a forex IRA managed account.

The earnings made out of forex trading – like all other income is subject to taxation if it is to be legitimately enjoyed. The government, however, in a bid to encourage people to keep money for their old age, doesn’t tax the earnings made out of the forex trade using forex IRA managed accounts. And the tax savings made out of this can be quite significant, especially when you happen to be trading in huge volumes (with the attendant huge profits) from your IRA funds.

The downside to forex IRA managed accounts is that you have to wait till you retirement before you can start enjoying the earnings that go into them, which of course is not a bothersome concern if you are nearing your retirement age, but which can feel like a very long wait if you are still in your 20s or 30s. Now in this respect, the forex IRA managed funds are different from ordinary managed forex accounts because in the case of ordinary forex managed accounts, you can access your funds at any time when you feel like it (or at a time you pre-agree with the account manager) and don’t have to wait till your retirement to get the money. Of course, you get taxed for every dime you make with an ordinary managed forex account, and this is the downside to it.