How To Buy A Trading Seminar
Mar0
If you are about to start, or are already in the process of learning how to trade, or day trade, you may have already been searching the internet using Google or Yahoo for day trading training education, tools, software or seminars, and have found that there is a lot on offer.
For example “trading course” brings up 758,000 pages in Google and “trading seminar” another 109,000 pages, the question is what should you be looking for when selecting a trading course or seminar. In this article I’ll point out some of the things to check before spending your hard earned money on your trading education.
1. Becareful of the hidden costs involved in a trading seminar that is away from home, account for the expense of hotels, meals travel and car rental?, it may be a lot more than you expect.
2. What is the return policy, this can vary widely between trading education companies, for some you only have a 3 day cooling off period while for others you may have up to 12 noon or the end of the 1st day to ask for refund if you decide this was not right for you.
3. For a live seminar are you also given DVD’s of the same or similar content?, so often live seminars fail to cover all the very important details involved in day trading. Having a set of DVD’s enables you to watch the content over and over again at home until you get it. Beware that some companies will charge you extra for the DVD’s even though you have already paid for a live trading seminar.
4. Check the internet for positive and negative feedback on the company and trading seminar. Use search terms like “company name review”, “company name refunds” or “company name scam”. Often reviews are posted in trading forums, these can be found by searching for “trading forum”.
5. A head of time try and find out exactly who will be presenting the seminar. The last thing that you want is a professional “teacher” giving a seminar on trading, what you want is a “trader” who makes his living by trading and only does a few seminars a month out of interest and for personal reasons, not because they need the money.
6. If you are buying an online day trading or investing course where the content is 100% viewed online you should get at least a 30 day 100% cash back guarantee, if not stay away.
7. If you are buying a course or trading seminar in which DVD’s and manuals are being shipped to your house, again you should expect a 30 day 100% money back return policy, less shipping and handling, again if not stay away.
8. It’s very likely that you will have questions after watching either the live or online course or watching the DVD’s, make sure that you will be able to ask questions and have them answered, either one on one or in a forum setting.
9. Last, but certainly not least, before buying do a lot of window shopping. The price for trading seminars, either stocks, options, Forex or futures varies widely from $50 for an ebook to over $25K for a comprehensive set of training. You may be able to find the same education much cheaper at a different company.
Also be aware that day trading education and seminar companies are always running specials and offering discounts, before you buy search the internet carefully for any deals and also call the company directly and ask for a low price guarantee. In other words make sure that you are paying the lowest price that they are offering the product for.
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Technical Analysis For Stock Traders
Mar0
Technical analysis of the stock market, or any other market such as Forex, Bonds, Futures, is how most traders and investors make their trading decisions. This is as opposed to fundamental analysis which most people more agree is pretty much done as a way of making trading decisions, unless of course you are Warren Buffet!.
You only have to think back to recent stock market scams like Enron to know that it is almost impossible for the average, and even very sophisticated fund manager or hedge fund trader to really know what the real financial state of a company is.
Just by reading the balance sheet and other quaterly reports they release gives you a very poor insight into the real health of the company. Whereas the technical analysis charts of the company tend to give the real picture of what the market thinks of the value of the company. In the case of Enron even simple technical analysis told you to SELL when the stock was in the $80-90 range, this is why technical analysis of stocks is so popular.
So what is the secret to technical analysis?, I’m about to tell you, here are my golden rules:
* Only use 3-5 simple technical analysis indicators
* Make sure that you understand how the indicators that you have selected work, what the parameter settings are and in what market conditions they are effective
* After selecting your indicators and parameter settings don’t mess with them.
The real secret to technical analysis is to get VERY familiar with your choosen indicators, and really this can only be done by watching and studying the market, so that you get to the point that you TRUST them.
The fact is that in any market, for each bar period, there are only 5 pieces of information, the open, close, high, low and volume, yet there are now hundreds of indicators. Most of these indicators are displaying much the same information and so are redundant.
For the record my set of indicators are:
* 4 Simple Moving Averages
* Bollinger Bands
* MACD
* Stochastics
But the way I use them is quite special, to learn more about how to become an expert at technical analysis visit:
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How To Buy Good Stocks
Mar0
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 DOW30 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 easily 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 $10 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 $5 and $10. Avoid buying a stock that is below $5 at anytime.
Another consideration to make 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 releases are 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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Trading The Futures Market Facts
Mar0
Contracts in the futures market are between a buyer and seller. The contract states that the seller must provide the buyer a very specific quantity of a certain item, such as grain, oil etc, for a price agreed today, but at a date in the future.
It is important not to get confused about what the word future refers to. Futures traders are not day trading futures prices, we are trading today’s prices, but the settlement is taking place in the future. So we buy if we think prices will increase and sell if we think prices will drop.
If I buy (or sell) a futures contract today, I don’t have to hold it until the contract expires, I can simply choose to sell it (or buy it) in the market at the prevailing price. Futures contracts are bought and sold in the controlled environment of a futures exchange, such as the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) in the U.S. and the London International Futures and Options Exchange (LIFFE) in the U.K.
Futures were originally developed to help offset the risks and uncertainties experienced by farmers and merchants due to the varying supply and demand for produce. Take for example a coffee plantation farmer. The price that he will receive for his bean crop will vary according to the vagaries of supply and demand. In a year when supplies are limited and demand is high, prices will be high. In a year when demand falls and the supply is plentiful, the price will fall.
The use of futures trading in the farming industry has many benefits such as allowing the farmer to be able to plan ahead as he already knows what kind of profit he can expect from his crop of say coffee beans. The price may not be the best and the merchant may make a killing but the risk is reduced.
By using a type of futures contract long before harvest time both the farmer and the merchant can reduce their risks by setting the price.
Today the futures market has changed a lot from the historical origins. There are now futures contracts on financial instruments such as stocks and bonds. broadly speaking futures contracts are split between commodity type products and financial type products. It is usually not that important because they are rarely held until expiration.
The CBOT was started about 1848 for the benefit of the farmers and merchants. The exchange was to regulate both the quality and quantity of the actual crop that was being traded. Today the CBOT offers many contracts on items like wheat, silver, corn, bonds and soybeans.
The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) was created in 1919 and has managed a futures market in such things as pork bellies, live cattle and the SP500 index.
In London the big financial futures exchange is the London International Futures and Options Exchange (LIFFE). Here financial instruments such as the FTSE100, the GILT and Short Sterling are traded, the exchange is relativily new and opened around 1982.
EUREX started life as the DTB, the German futures exchange. The DTB has always been an electronic exchange and started around 1990, when electronic exchanges were still considered to be inferior to the open outcry system.
The German Bund was a heavily traded financial contract and one of the biggest markets on the LIFFE.
Many futures markets have very high volumes and hence very good liquidity, these are attractive markets for traders. The high leverage means that profits can be made very fast when the market moves, however money can also be lost very fast. If you want to learn to trade futures, or are even thinking of trading futures make sure that you learn as much as you can before using real money.
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Diversify Your Investments Today
Mar0
Diversification, the concept of spreading your investments among different baskets of assets that don’t rise and fall in unison, has for a while been considered one of the safest and surest moves you can make with your portfolio. Of course, if any one basket falls apart, the majority of your brood should stay intact. Then along comes a market crash like the one of 2008-09 that scrambles all of your eggs, leaving you considering what to do.
You can go broke diversifying. TV speaking heads are interrogating the value of spreading your gambles. And Googling the phrase “diversification is dead” returns half 1,000,000 hits. But using the monetary crisis to realize that diversification is purposeless because stocks, bonds, and other assets will move in tandem forevermore is a misreading of up to date history. Stock market behaviour during the past 2 years was down to the “yelling fire in a production theater” effect. Just as the theater audience would rise in unison and race for the exits, financiers move in synchronization away from risk and toward safety in a money disintegration, as they went and did in 2008.
Once the all-clear is sounded, investors march into the stock market today together, bidding up all sorts of assets. It’s only when business conditions start to come back to ordinary — after the movie’s over, in effect — that financiers, and investments, move independently again. That is when diversification reasserts its case, and this is where the markets are today.
This snap back can happen quickly, as it probably did following the recessions of 1980 and 1981 and the Asian currency crisis in 1997. So what must you do now? First, be aware of where you are investing. In 2008 and 2009 that did not matter.
Now that regions are recovering at different paces — Europe’s economy, for instance, is anticipated to grow 1 percent this year, America’s more than 2 percent, and China’s just about ten percent — stock and bond markets are probably going to behave unpredictably. So take care you’re invested in the whole world, not solely in the U.S. For safety’s sake or in red-hot undeveloped markets chasing a gigantic score. 2nd , focus on costs.
In 2008 assets went down generally because they were well priced. Last year they were under-priced, so they deserved to go up. Today, following that strong rally, the situation isn’t so clear. That is why it is going to be necessary to concentrate on attractively priced areas. They include beaten-down blue chips in the health-care and business sectors, which underperformed the S&P 500 in 2009 but are leading it this year.
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