19 Jul 2010

After talking about the advantages of the full-time Forex trading I’ve felt that it wasn’t fair without listing the disadvantages of such an approach to the foreign exchange market. Only few of the active Forex traders switch to the full-time trading and there are several good reasons for that:

  1. It takes time. If you are a successful Forex trader you probably want to spend more time with family or for yourself personally. You earn enough for that but if you trade full-time you won’t have more time than an average non-trader. After all, Forex is good because it can offer a financial freedom, which should lead to more free time, and a full-time Forex trading approach just ruins that.
  2. Overtrading. Following the market all day is a straight way to overtrading, which in its turn is a bane of many currency traders. Only emotionally strong and experienced traders will be able to avoid constant overtrading when sitting in front of the Forex trading terminal for all day.
  3. Having to trade short-term. If you trade full-time you have to constantly search for the trading opportunities. The long-term trading opportunities aren’t that frequent in Forex and you’ll have to either take the short-term ones too or be bored with a simple monitoring of the market. Both choices are unacceptable for the long-term Forex trader.
  4. Dependence on Forex profit. If you trade Forex full-time the chances are that you don’t have any other source of income. This means that if you enter a series of losses you won’t be earning money and you might even lose your initial deposit. If you have a daily job and trade Forex only occasionally you don’t depend on Forex earnings too much. So, if you plan to go full-time you better be sure that you’ll have enough money for living and upholding the necessary account balance even after several huge losses.
  5. Focusing on unnecessary things. As it often happens when you have a huge inflow of information, you’ll get a lot of unnecessary data, which will mislead you. If you trade Forex all day, you’ll be trying to find the opportunities in the chart formations and fundamental events that don’t have anything important in them. It’s not overtrading because you’ll soon understand that these opportunities don’t let you trade on them, but it’s still a waste of time, your time, which is precious.

This list says my second and the last word about the full-time Forex trading. Although the number of disadvantages is less than the number of the respective advantages, it’s all about the importance of each of them for the particular trader. It’s up to you to decide whether the full-time trading is for you.

If you have some interesting thoughts or questions regarding the listed disadvantages of the full-time Forex trading, please, feel free to share them using the commentary form.

14 Mei 2010

Installing your trading system on a dedicated server with a full-time connection to the trading server and no need to reboot, restart or be turned off is a great advantage that can seriously enhance your profit results. If you trade with MetaTrader expert advisors there is a great selection of VPS services available for you — starting from as little as $9/month they can guarantee you a 99.9% uptime of your trading robot. This is a list of 5 main reasons to use Forex VPS:

  1. Uninterrupted 24/7 run-time of your expert advisor ensures that it uses all the trading signals. You won’t miss any opportunities. Your EA will be also able to close other positions on time and won’t need to store its internal variables in a file to load them after restart — there’s simply no need for it to restart during trading sessions.
  2. No need to run the expert advisor from your home or office PC. Now that your expert advisor is trading on a real account from a VPS, you can stop running your MetaTrader platform all the time. You can also safely reboot your PC and turn it off when you don’t use it. And there is no more stress when suddenly you get some critical software error.
  3. Because VPS is a dedicated server that runs only your trading platform and EA, it can have a much better performance, processing the incoming data and sending orders much faster than your own PC could do. That can really help to get better quotes, deal with the requotes and use scalping systems.
  4. You can choose a VPS, which is located physically close to your Forex broker’s trading server, ensuring even faster connection and order execution. For example, if you trade from New Zealand and your broker is located in United States you’ll always have some network latency due to the distance. But installing your EA on a VPS, which is hosted in U.S., will remove this latency.
  5. Usually, VPS can be accessed anywhere from any computer. So, if you travel a lot you won’t need to move your expert advisor from your PC to your notebook or some mobile device. Your EA will always remain on VPS and you will be able to control and monitor it by logging into your VPS control panel from any place with a connection to internet.

Of course, your EA should be a profitable one and your monthly profit should be high enough to cover the cost of the VPS or otherwise there is no point in using it. You can also use VPS hosting for demo testing your EAs but that’s quite an expensive endeavor. If you have any questions or opinions please, use the commentary form below.

25 Apr 2010

I've been through a lot of (non-trading) issues since I last wrote.My family and I have moved halfway across the nation, we've gotten new jobs, and had to take care of a million minor items that occur when you relocate your life. Sorry for the lack of updates.I have been doing a little manual trading here and there.The AUDJPY has been failing in the 87.xx range for most of this month. Greece,

18 Feb 2010

No, that's not a typo. It's a rip-off of a line from the Back To The Future movie. Anyway, this post is another in the series of theoretical considerations with respect to various robot building strategies.In this scenario let's consider fixing our maximum total position size across a specific price range. For example, perhaps we are willing to purchase 10000 units per 1000 pips (remember, I'm

17 Feb 2010

The AUDJPY has had a nice run just recently.However, the 1HR is showing a small double top. Obviously, we might be looking at the beginning of a range discovery action or perhaps even a reversal if we get renewed panic concerning Greece or similar situations.Be patient and look for good opportunities.Now if only I can take my own advice... ;)

10 Feb 2010

Finally, something has happened to lift the pall from the AUD/JPY market.What happened? The Australian economy showed signs of heat. We have recent employment numbers that absolutely blew away expectations.Apparently, today, the AUD/USD moved from a value that gave a 25% chance of a hike in march to a 50% chance of a hike in march. Do you remember me talking about the need for a upside

4 Feb 2010

While I've been talking about the cake being baked we've just done nice big double top over the course of October 2009 through February 2010 on the daily charts.Obviously, this doesn't have to "fire" but it does invite a big panic drop to retest the July 2009 low of 70.75 or so. Considering today's rapid plummet of 300 points at this point who can say.As I noted on my last post I do think people

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