Friday, February 20, 2009

5 Tips For Dealing With The Trading Blues

Can't seem to pick a winner? Tired of the sideways market? The trading blues are quick to set in and ruin your future trades. Depending on the trading style, you may be more or less prone to the trading blues. Day trading and scalping are very quick, nerve-wracking professions and can be easily impacted by a series of losses.

However, there are five ways in which you can improve your trading environment, allowing you to overcome your trading blues.

1. Skill-Building Activities - Taking a look back to the basics of your trading plan blueprints can help you overcome the trading blues. Skill-building activities, such as drawing trendlines on short-term movements or analyzing candlestick patterns, can help you feel comfortable again with your own trading style. Go back through the step-by-step instructions of your trading plan and fine tune any possible variables in your trading plan - these activities will all help you avoid losses.

2. Trading Seminars - Listen to what others have to say about the markets, find what will work best for you, and incorporate the trading philosophy into a trading plan planner. Trading seminars allow a different perspective on the same market, letting you see the market from someone else's perspective.

3. Take Some Time Off - Take some time off from the computer and rest your mind. Day trading is very tiresome, both mentally and physically. A brief escape from the constant flux of the markets will give you some time to relax and rewind. Consistent profits are best achieved after a restful break from the drama of the market.

4. Establish an Emergency Fund - Even professional traders have their bad streaks. The key is to ride out each bad period for times of prosperity. Establishing an emergency fund for day to day expenses can take the worry out of living off your trading capital. The stress of knowing you have to deliver results to make money can be devastating to your trading accounts.

5. Have a Complete Trading Plan - A complete trading plan should take into account the worst of times. You should be prepared for anything, including steps for trading in bear markets and what to do in case of a large draw down. A complete trading plan should also include ways to re-up your brokerage account after large losses. A trading plan planner will help set up a plan for even the worst scenarios. Anything short of nuclear war should be included in a complete trading plan.

About the Author:

Leroy Rushing is an active, professional day trader; trading coach; and author. He is the Founder and CEO of Trading EveryDay, a distinguished provider of educational trading products and services that are available worldwide.

A man walks past a Citibank branch downtown Washington, February 20, 2009. (Yuri Gripas/Reuters)Reuters - Bears could have the upper hand again next week if Wall Street fails to get assurance that major banks can be rescued without being seized by the U.S. government.

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Sunday, February 15, 2009

Trading Forex Using 1 Minute and 5 Minute Charts

Many forex traders attempt to trade using the very short term 1 minute and 5 minute charts, but most of these traders will inevitably end up losing money. So why is this, and why is short-term trading so difficult to make consistent profits from?

Well forex trading overall is quite difficult, but I've personally always found short-term trading using 1 minute and 5 minute charts to be even more difficult. The trouble you have is that you can have the best system in place that will find a perfect high probability trade for you, but then the pair may only move 5-10 points in your favour at most before reversing again.

So you can make a winning call a lot of the time, but because you're trading over such a short time frame, the movements will often be very small. You also have the spread to contend with because with a spread of 3 or 4 points on a lot of pairs, you need a decent sized move just to break even, let alone make a profit. Plus there's also the fact that a lot of forex brokers do not like scalpers and will often ban traders who do this.

If, however, you use a longer time frame you could use the very same system to trade the 1 hour or 4 hour charts, for example, to make a lot more points profit because the moves would be a lot bigger.

It's also of course a lot less stressful trading the longer time frames because you have more time to analyze the markets and plan your entries and exits. If you're trading lots of intraday positions it can be very stressful because you have very little time to think and react to situations. You also have instances of requotes and broker downtime which can destroy an intraday position, whereas these things won't have as big an impact if you are trading the longer term charts.

Of course there are traders who make money from very short-term trading, but they are few and far between. The majority will eventually be wiped out not matter how effective a particular trading system may initially appear.

In my opinion you're better off looking at 1 hour charts at the very least because the longer time frame you use for your charts, the more reliable your chosen technical indicators will prove to be in general. You can still be a profitable daytrader trading several times a day using 1 hour and 4 hour charts, and the moves will generally be a lot bigger as well, so there really is little point, in my opinion, in basing your main forex trading strategy on the 1 minute and 5 minute charts.

Click here to read James Woolley's review of ZuluTrade and to discover all the latest forex tips and strategies.

President Barack Obama talks on his phone as he steps out of his vehicle to visit with a friend in Chicago February 15, 2009. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)Reuters - President Barack Obama has decided to launch a government task force for restructuring the struggling U.S. auto industry instead of naming a "car czar" with sweeping powers, a senior administration official said on Sunday.

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