| Determine what time frame you're trading on: Many traders get in
the market without thinking when they would like to get out, after all the
goal is to make money. This is true but when trading, one must extrapolate
in his mind's eye the movement that one expects to happen. Within this
extrapolation, resides a price evolution during a certain period of time.
More info on currency trading Attached to this is the idea of exit price. The importance of this is to
mentally put your trade in perspective and although it is clearly
impossible to know exactly when you will exit the market, it is important
to define from the outset if you'll be 'scalping' (trying to get a few
points off the market) trading intra-day, or going longer term. This will
also determine what chart period you're looking at. If you trade many
times a day, there's no point basing your technical analysis on a daily
graph, you'll probably want to analyse 30 minute or hour graphs.
Additionally it is important to know the different time periods when
various financial centers enter and exit the market as this creates more
or less volatility and liquidity and can influence market movements.
How To Trade
Currencies
FOREX SIGNAL
Time your trade: You can be right about a potential market movement
but be too early or too late when you enter the trade. Timing
considerations are twofold, an expected market figure like CPI, retail
sales or a federal reserve decision can consolidate a movement that's
already underway. Timing your move means knowing what's expected and
taking into account all considerations before trading. Technical analysis
can help you identify when and at what price a move may occur.
If in doubt, stay out: If you're unsure about a trade and find
you're hesitating, stay on the sidelines.
Trade logical transaction sizes: Margin trading allows the FOREX
market trader a very large amount of leverage, trading at full margin
capacity can make for some very large profits or losses on an account.
Scaling your trades so that you may re-enter the market or make
transactions on other currencies is generally wiser. In short, don't trade
amounts that can potentially wipe you out and don't put all your eggs in
one basket. We offer the same rates regardless of transaction sizes so a
customer has nothing to lose by starting small.
Gauge market sentiment: Market sentiment is what most of the market
is perceived to be feeling about the market and therefore what it is doing
or will do. This is basically about trend. You may have heard the term
'the trend is your friend', this basically means that if you're in the
right direction with a strong trend you will make successful trades. This
of course is very simplistic, a trend is capable of reversal at any time.
Technical and fundamental data can indicate however if the trend has begun
long ago and if it is strong or weak.
Market expectation: Market expectation relates to what most people
are expecting as far as upcoming news is concerned. If people are
expecting an interest rate to rise and it does, then there usually will
not be much of a movement because the information will already have been
'discounted' by the market, alternatively if the adverse happens, markets
will usually react violently.
Use what other traders use:
In a perfect world, every trader would be looking at a 14 day RSI and
making trading decisions based on that. If that was the case, when RSI
would go under the 30 level, everyone would buy and by consequence the
price would rise. Needless to say, the world is not perfect and not all
market participants follow the same technical indicators, draw the same
trendlines and identify the same support and resistance levels. The great
diversity of opinions and techniques used translates directly into price
diversity. Traders however have a tendency to use a limited variety of
technical tools. The most common are 9 and 14 day RSI, obvious trendlines
and support levels, fibonnacci retracement, MACD and 9, 20 and 40 day
exponential moving averages. The closer you get to what most traders are
looking at, the more precise your estimations will be. The reason for this
is simple arithmetic, larger numbers of buyers than sellers at a certain
price will move the market up from that price and vice-versa. |
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