Posts Tagged ‘invest’
How To Buy The Best Stocks
Although it may seem obvious to most stock market swing traders there are a number of simple rules that you can follow which will ensure that you have more success when buying stocks:
In the USA stock market there are 3 major indexes which are each made up of a basket of stocks, they are the S and P 500 (also known as the S&P500), the DOW 30 and the Nadaq 100. These stock indexes generally only contain major blue chip stocks, as long as you buy from these 3 groups you will at least know that you are getting a well known solid stock.
For example the DOW 30 contains major industrials and large multinational stocks such as Home Depot (HD) and Johnson and Johnson (JNJ) whereas the Nasdaq 100 mainly contains techical companies such as Apple (AAPL) and Miscrosoft (MSFT).
Always buy a stock that is liquid, this means that it is a highly traded stock, this will enable you to quickly buy and sell at the price you want without having a delay. You will also get a smaller spread, thats the difference between the BID and ASK price of the stock. For a stock to be considered highly liquid it should trade at least 500,000 shares per day, ideally even more.
It is best to aviod stocks that are bellow as this usually means the company is in trouble, although with the bear market of 2008/9 there have been a lot of good stocks at bargin prices between and . Avoid buying a stock that is below at anytime.
Another consideration is options, does the stock has options?, this will be important if you want to trade options around your stock, such as a covered call, or you may want to buy a PUT option inorder to protect your stock.
Be very cautious about buying a stock just before it’s earnings release, stocks often drop significantly if you come out with a poor report. Earnings are released 4 times a year with one of them being the annual report.
If you are going to trade options make sure that you learn how to trade by getting some good education. There are many swing trading strategies that work well with stocks in todays volatile markets.
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Understanding Investment Bonds
Bonds are one of the main stream types of investment along with stocks and real estate, and if you want to learn how to trade bonds make sure that you get a good education in the subject 1st. There are a number of important points that you must understand about bonds before you start investing in them. Not understanding these things may cause you to purchase the wrong bonds, at the wrong maturity date.
Like all investments it is important to learn about what you are investing in, and certainly don’t just take the advice given to you by a bond seller without checking it out first yourself. The three most important things that must be considered when purchasing a bond include the par value, the maturity date, and the coupon rate.
The par value of a bond refers to the amount of money you will receive when the bond reaches its maturity date. In other words, you will receive your initial investment back when the bond reaches maturity.
The maturity date is the date that the bond will reach its full value. On this date, you will receive your initial investment, plus the interest that your money has earned.
Corporate and State and Local Government bonds can be ‘called’ before they reach their maturity, at which time the corporation or issuing Government will return your initial investment, along with the interest that it has earned thus far. Federal bonds cannot be “called”.
The coupon rate is the interest that you will receive when the bond reaches maturity. This number is written as a %, and you must use other information to find out what the interest will be. A bond that has a par value of say 00, with a coupon rate of 5% would earn 0 per year until it reaches maturity.
Because bonds are not issued by banks, many people don’t fully understand how to go about buying one. There are 2 ways this can be done.
You can use a broker or brokerage firm to buy them for you or you can go directly to the Government. If you use a broker, you will more than likely be charged a commission fee. If you want to use a broker, shop around for the lowest commissions!
Purchasing directly through the Government isn’t nearly as hard as it once was. There is a program called Treasury Direct which will allow you to purchase bonds and all of your bonds will be held in one account, that you will have easy access to. This will allow you to avoid using a broker or brokerage firm.
More advanced traders may try to buy and sell bonds to take advantage of the price movements, you can even swing trade them. But this is a very risky business if you don’t know what you are doing, you will need to take a swing trading course if this was something that wanted to, but again most people just buy and hold.
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What is Your Trader Type
Did you know that there are 4 mains types of trader and depending on what type you are will determine many parts of your trading strategy and trading plan. The 4 types are generally referred to as: scalping, day trading, swing trading and position trading. When you determine the type of trader that you are it will also determine the time frame in which you will be making your trade. This will be a very important decision that you need to make when deciding how you want to learn to day trade.
1. Scalping Trader, if you scalp the markets this means that you are only looking for a few ticks profit per trade and you may only be in the trade for a few seconds or a minute at most. trading. Some people will also call this day trading but it’s really micro day trading, buying the bid and selling the offer, it’s high speed trading and you might end up doing 10-50 trades a day. This can be quite a stressful way of trading.
2. Day Trader, the true day trader opens and closes their trade within the same trading session, usually this mean the same day, but unlike a scalper the trade may be held for a few minutes up to several hours. Usually day traders make about 2-6 trades a day and most of them will be in the 5-30 minutes range. This is a less stressful way of trading than scalping but it still requires much attention and quick decision making.
3. Swing Traders, swing trading usually means that a position is held for between 1 to 5-10 days, although some swing traders may keep a trade on for a longer time most are within this time period. For many this is the idea way to trade because it allows you to review your trade overnight, at the very least you have several hours to make your trading decisions.
4. Position Traders, this just means that you are going to hold onto your trade for longer than a few days, maybe even as long as 1 to 2 months.
If you are still working out how to day trade then it may be better to go with the longer time frames as it gives you more time to think.
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How to Select the best Currency Pairs?
Every trading involves a currency pair. The currency pair got of two foreign exchange currencies involved in the trade. Example of currency pairs are EUR/USD and USD/CAD. Now which one is the best pair for Fx trading? There are chiefly two things that you have to keep in mind while deciding the best forex pairs for currency trading. These factors are trade volume and the currency trading systems. First let us see the activity part.
The Most Traded Forex Currency Pairs?
If you are new at forex the best ways to start trading is by picking up the most traded currency pairs. Many experts will propose you to do so because of various reasons. The primary reason is that active currency pairs got more liquidity and this means your stops will more consistantly met without slippage. Besides, in case of foreign exchange pairs which are very active in the market, the costs are likely to be cheaper. While enormous number of people are trading in the forex trading market it creates a tighter spread, and there is also high war between forex brokers which will help to keep the fees down.
So does this mean we just require to look into the most traded currency trading market and choose the forex currency? Nope. If you are new to foreign exchange you may be surprised to know that the most voleme forex trading floor is London, UK and not New York. But the most traded currency globally is of course US dollar. Now one might conclude that USD, GBP (British Pound) pair is the most traded foreign exchange in the forex market. This is not right. Actually EUR/USD currency pair is the most active foreign exchange pair. The next most traded currency pair is USD/JPY and the third is GBP/USD pair.
Right Currency Pairs for Your Fx trading System
The key factor in selecting the forex pair is definitely the trade volume and your understanding about the economic situation of a particular forex currency. Your currency trading system also could be a factor in picking the forex pair. You might have the best currency trading system, but if you choose the wrong currency pair you might end up with poor results.
For example if your currency trading system involves the use of automated forex robot, you will most likely find that the particular Fx trading software is set to work with a small number of currency pairs and that the most active forex currency pair may always gives you the best results. For example, you may know that Forex Autopilot turbo which a best selling forex EA available in the market is developed to trade EUR/GBP and EUR/CHF currency pairs. However most users observed that they are able to get good results using EUR/CHF pair though EUR/GBP more active pair in this case. Though one can trade various currency pairs with a foex EA, a particular forex software is always tend to give better profits with its currency pair.
Hence in cases like this you must pick a forex currency pair which is right for your Fx trading system even if the currency pair is not the best. There is a new forex robot called Ivybot which comes with 4 separate forex trading EA in which each one is set to work well for a particular currency pair. You can checkout the Ivybot review here.
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Mini Forex Account What You Should Know
Until recently trading currency was exclusively controlled by large financial firms. The evolution of internet and Forex Trading Software had changed this. Forex mini accounts are perfect for everyone who is fresh in trading foreign exchange. You would have to be very rich or very self-assured to start directly with a standard forex account if you are a home based trader. A mini account allows an individual to trade without risking huge amount money and this makes it an incredible opportunity for lots of men and women.
Here is an excellent tutorial on mini forex accounts with piles of good info.
Forex Mini accounts in general let you to do the trading with omly one tenth of the normal lot size. This means 10k units of currency as opposed to usual 100K lot size.
Yes, you need not have to have that much in your brokerage account. You know trading forex works with leverage. Suppose you are utilizing 100 times leverage then you only need hundred dollars to manage $10,000 in your forex mini account or $1,000 to control hundred thousand dollars with a standard account.
Hundred dollars or 100 units of your base currency per trade is all you need to commit to a trade when they are starting out and that is why the mini forex account is so attractive.
The pip size is also typically smaller in a forex mini account. pips are units in which we can calculate your profits, losses and costs (the spread). Their value in dollar can differ depending on the fx pair that you are trading, the lot size and other factors of your broker, but a usual standard pip size is $10 and pip size for min accounts is one dollar.
Few FX brokers are now quoting prices to 5 decimal places which technically would make one pip 0.00001 of the quoted price, however we will go with the normal four decimal place pip for this example.
So if you have a standard trading account you can expect to put up thousand dollars on each trade, to trade lots of $100,000 and calculate your profits in $10 units.
On the contrary, with a mini forex account you can expect to commit $100 on each trade, to trade lots of $10K and calculate your gains in $1 units.
Certainly you can set stop losses so that you do not have to risk all of the cash that is assigned for trading. However your losses will be calculated in terms of pips so these too will be 10 times greater with the standard account.
When you make lot of profits and your deposit grows, you might look forward for trading larger sums. It is possible to do this with your forex mini account by trading numerous lot simultaneously. This means if you want to trade a standard lot size you just have to trade 10 mini lots. But this might be a tedious process without using program like Forex Autopilot Robot.
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