Tag: Forex education

  • How well are you doing?

    How well are you doing?

    5 min read

    How well are you doing?
    Hans Stam

    by Hans Stam – Trader, Mentor, Author 

    Impressive

    In my journey as a Forex Trader, I come across many different ways of thinking. 

    Some really think they are the only ones that are right, and everyone else is wrong. 

    Some contact me and tell me my claims are false or I do them on hindsight trading. 

    When I show my live accounts where they can see live trading and history, I’m usually getting a response like… Impressive.

    Others I never hear from again.

    It’s really our loss if we let ego dominate our thoughts.

    Always keep an open mind as there might just be something to learn.

    Spreadsheets

    When you are trading, we like to succeed at a given goal.

    One thing that happens a lot is that traders see a certain return, and start calculating. 

    Some make a spreadsheet and calculate their returns as being static.

    Then on their spreadsheet, you can see they are 5-10 years ahead and often millionaires.

    Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that in real life. 

    Long term goals are good once you have reached short term goals.

    What is realistic and doable for you?!

    Algorithms

    Now that you are all set up, you probably have developed your style of trading.

    It’s normal to want an outside opinion on your trading so some sign up for a company that has algorithms running. 

    But be aware, you might do perfectly in one group and totally fail in another.

    How is that possible?!

    Algorithms are being programmed by the opinion of the Programmer/Company.

    There’s a lot of difference on where their focus is and their results on your trading might be way off.

    I have had discussions with some of them, and in many cases, they had to agree they did not think of other things after seeing my live trading. 

    So, in the end, your results are just based on their opinion and how well you agree with them.

    Performances

    My suggestion would be to trade for a year and keep an eye on your results Quarterly, Six Months and annual returns. 

    Keep an eye on the DrawDown and Risks you took by exposure to the market. 

    Goalsetting is a tricky thing to do when Trading. 

    It might be best to focus on the number of deposits you are willing to make and set it as being a goal regardless of performances.

    You are the one that decides what you do and why. 

    It’s your money on the line so if you keep on losing ask yourself who you are following. 

    Is this really your plan or someone else’s plan?

    Nothing wrong with that, but it has to be your decision as well.

    Don’t just pick a trade because someone tells you if you don’t agree!

    So… How well are you doing?

    No matter what others say, you are the only one that can determine if you are doing well or not. 

    You have your own algorithm to perform to.

    What are your intentions?

    Is it you want to deposit $100 every month for a  year? 

    Is it you are focussed on not having a bigger drawdown than 25%? 

    So my guess is that you are the one that determines how well you are doing. 

    Did you reach your goals? 

    What works and what doesn’t? 

    Probably the profit-taking results will not work as the market is depending on movement, so maybe it’s better to focus on what you can control.

    Opinion

    When it comes to trading, you are your own boss. 

    Only your opinion counts as you are the one making the trades. 

    Now, that does not mean you never listen to anyone.

    Weigh the information, see if it makes sense, apply what is useful!

    Sometimes I get good ideas presented, and it doesn’t take long before seeing the goal which supports that idea.

    The idea itself may be good, but it doesn’t always apply to my goals.

    When I would try different outcomes for different goals, it might become mixed up which makes both goals fail. 

    Some people lose money fast, and they get very frustrated because their opinions were not their own.

    When you find yourself losing money because of someone else’s ideas, review and see why you are losing. And see how well are you doing.

    I’m lost?!

    When you are doing your thing and just came across a new idea, you might want to throw everything overboard and go for this new idea.

    You might feel you are lost once that is not working out. 

    What you could do is demo test this new idea first, but most don’t have the patience because of their excitement. 

    What you might do when you find yourself in that place is to open a subaccount and usually it is easy to transfer from one account to the other. 

    Use your idea on the new account if you don’t choose demo first and let your initial strategy run as usual. When this new idea is producing what you want to do, it will grow on its own, but you will always have a backup from where you already are having experiences.

    Easy

    It’s easy to do well as long as you have a clear target in front of you which you can control. 

    When you can’t reach your targets, don’t try to catch up, reduce the targets to a smaller target. 

    If your first targets failed, then catching up is even more difficult. 

    Adjust to what is doable for you, and keep the goals closeby and short. 

    If you commit to depositing $500 a month for the next 5 years, you might want to adjust to depositing $400 for the rest of the year and review in December. 

    Did your circumstances change? Was it easy to do? Do you want to dedicate more?

    You might have lost your job, or got a raise? Lot’s of things can happen in between the plans you make. 

    Keeping your goals close makes you reach them faster, if you fail the goal, reduce the goal to what fits you at that time. 

    You can do this!

    All the best,

    Hans Stam
    [email protected]

  • Question everything, it is a vital part for your trading

    Question everything, it is a vital part for your trading

    Forex Education Part 5

    Hans Stam
    by Hans Stam – Trader, Mentor, Author

    Interview

    You must question everything.

    Recently I received a request for an interview.

    This was a rare invitation going out to the best traders available to share some wisdom.

    Most of the questions were easy for me to answer, but there was one I had to think about for a while, and I would like to share it with you as this might be useful to you.

    You see, I’m not a wealthy man at the time of this writing, so let me be an inspiration to you.

    Patience is better than a quick fix, experience and knowledge are greater than gambling your way to success.

    Best advice

    One Question that stood out for me was,

    What is the best advice you gave give to other traders?

    My answer was…

    Question Everything, then make up your own mind!

    This may not be advice about how to spot a trend, or how to manage funds, but it really is an answer I like to explain.

    You see, in my years of trading, I have tried a lot of ways to make a decent profit.

    You may recognize yourself trying to make it all work for you.

    As in many cases, the most talented people are also the ones that have made a lot if not all mistakes possible.

    The thing that stands out is the way they solved those problems.

    Question Everything...

    Question everything

    Especially in trading, you can’t just accept what you are being told without any credentials.

    There is a lot of misleading going on in the Forex Industry, I rather see proof.

    Of course, there are many ways to trade, but even the fancy guru’s don’t always provide you the insight on how to do it yourself.

    What I’ve learned in my years of trading is to question everything, and to make up my own mind.

    I suggest you do the same.

    Example

    I’ll give you an example of how to apply this to your trading.

    Let’s pick a random scenario.

    Some guy tells you he found a great strategy but conditions apply.

    And every time it fails, you didn’t understand the conditions or this was a rare case of where you had to take a loss.

    Let’s say he claims to win by watching a combination of candlesticks, and whenever that pattern emerges, you have to buy or sell.

    When you investigate the claim, and compare it to a monkey pressing buttons, who would win?

    Then, I don’t care about the times it works, I’m more concerned about when it fails.

    What happens when it fails and why? Is it really worth it or could I just as easy trade the other way around and get the same results?

    Does it make any sense to you and are you willing to lose your money on that claim?

    It’s up to you to decide.

    Make up your mind

    Keep in mind, no one on the other side of your trading cares when you lose.

    Also, keep in mind, there are people ready to take your money and even might provide you with false signals just because they have to give signals they are selling.

    Whatever signals or tools you are being given to work with, ask yourself the question, is this really benefitting me?!

    Can this tool cause me to lose? Can this signal be explained and what causes the failing trades?

    You have to be very skeptical about everything you hear or read.

    Does it make sense to you, does your own trading make any sense to you.

    I have provided some serious advice to some people around me, and even though they knew it was working, they still used their gain to waste it on trying something else.

    To me, that was frustrating to see, but on the other hand, it’s their money and they too can try and question everything, including what I tell them.

    Success ratio 1:5

    I had a question earlier by someone who asked how to get a 1:5 success ratio.

    While understanding what he was trying to achieve, this question also was a bit silly to me.

    Why would you want to have 20% failure in your trading?

    Wouldn’t you rather have less losing trades than that?

    What causes the 20% losing trades?

    Why would you take those trades anyway?

    No one can predict the market?

    If that would be true, then why are some more successful than others?

    Don’t you think that when other traders are consistently winning their trades, they have another mindset?

    In this article, I’m asking a lot of questions rather than give you the answers right away.

    I do that to make you think for yourself, to question everything and to let you make up your own mind.

    To me, this is the basis of becoming successful.

    This has to work for you because You will need to make the decisions which trade to pick.

    Something to think about

    Hopefully, this has given you something to think about, because nothing will change if you stick to being ignorant.

    You could read all the articles in the world, pay for whatever service, or follow a stock picking money,

    as long as you don’t start to Question Everything and make up your own mind, it will lead nowhere, and nothing changes for you.

    Dedication

    The chapter most of you will want to read has come.

    How do I make money?!

    I hear a lot of people telling me, this is my dream, I really want to do this, etc.

    Unfortunately, statistics show dedication sticks to words and not often become a reality.

    Some people seem to forget it took me about 30 years to figure out what works and what doesn’t.

    Also, a lot of people think they can start at $100 and hopefully be rich next week.

    Their way of doing that is gambling which most likely will blow their account.

    Be smarter than that, do whatever it takes and make educated decisions.

    As mentioned before, this really is a career, and you can decide to do it or not.

    But it does take action and patience, that seems contradictory but it is what you will need to do.

    OPM

    Other People’s Money (OPM) is a way to make money faster, once you built your track as mentioned before, you will want to use your talent to make money using OPM.

    The way to do that can vary, and usually is done by attracting investors and trade through a MAM or PAMM, which are basically the same technically speaking.

    How does that work?

    You have your own trading account, and the software will copy your trading to sub accounts.

    These subaccounts are in the investors’ name and you have agreed on a fee or commission.

    After both have signed all legal documents, the investor funds his account and trading will be done as you trade your own money.

    The agreed earnings are then automatically transferred directly into your trading account.

    How to get Investors

    You might think to yourself, I don’t have any investors, so now what?!

    There’s good news for you if you really are talented or educated.

    If you are prepared to deposit a fair amount on your trading account and let your results being tracked by A.I. you can get a Track that can be used by a Broker linked to that specific software, and it will make it possible for you to get funded.

    How to get funded?

    I will go through this simple process step by step.

    Step 1. First, sign up for a Live Trading account  by clicking here

    Step 2. Then sign up for the Free Tracking software  by clicking here

    Step 3. You keep on trading the way it works for you, and you will automatically be funded once you have gone through the process of 6 months and if your score is 75 or higher.

    Step 4. Progress through the system, and 4 months later you are a Pro Trader if you are doing well.

    Step 5. Once you already received funding from the Broker, you are now ready to be introduced to the Investors market. No way to tell where that will lead you but it is Free money for doing the same thing.

    If you have questions or need help, then  Click Here and I’ll help you the best I can.

    Experience

    Since I’ve been in the market, this really is the best way I have found to start making money while trading the Forex market.

    There are other similar programs, and I have had many discussions with several others, but I couldn’t manage to come to a fair arrangement.

    Another reason why I promote this one is that there are a lot of options here to make a solid income.

    Sounds like a big commercial but this is my experience, the choice is yours.

    If you are serious about making Forex trading your career, these are some good tips to your benefit.

    If you like to ask me any other questions, I’m here for you.

    Click here to contact me

    Best Regards,

    Hans Stam

  • Creating strategy for Forex trading

    Creating strategy for Forex trading

    Forex Educational Series – Part 3

    Forex strategy

    Trading Forex is the area to focus on

    by Hans Stam – A Forex trader

    Creating a strategy

    We left off in the previous chapter talking about creating a strategy of your own.

    It’s obvious you do not want to lose money, your aim is to be right on your trading as much as possible to make a profit.

    So how can you create a strategy that will work for you?

    I mention specifically it has to work for you because many will sell trading signals on their analyses, but once you try to implement the signals, your timing could be off and totally miss the trade.

    Then again, who knows if that signal is very successful and why would you trust other traders signals?

    Of course, that’s a personal choice to make, but once you would decide to create your own strategy, here are some tips.

    Demo testing before creating a strategy

    While creating a strategy that works for you, you obviously do not want to spend a lot of money so you will use virtual money using a demo account.

    Once you have set up your demo account, you can start trading as if it was real money, but more importantly, you get to know the trading station you will be using later on.

    You see all kinds of options, and most will not apply to you so you will have to figure out what you will use or not.
    For instance, the chart used.

    If you like to open a demo account.

    Charts

    Most will stick to candlestick charts but there are many other types of charts to choose from.

    Also, there are timeframes you can choose from.

    In this example, we’ll stay with candlesticks but many other types of charts will have similar info.

    A candle represents what the price did in a specific timeframe.

    If you pick an hourly chart, it shows candlesticks and the info of the price in an hour.

    Main info a candlestick is giving you the Opening Price at the beginning of that hour, the highest price, the lowest price and the closing price of that hour.

    The next candle would start its opening price where the previous candle ended its closing price.

    (If that is not the case we speaks of having a gap, but that’s not common)

    If you would change your hourly chart to a 5-minute chart, it would give you a lot more information whereas the hourly would give you the bigger picture.

    It’s for you to decide what you do with that information and how you would apply that in your strategy or not to apply it at all.

    Indicators

    Forex strategy

    Using charts you will also have indicators. For example, you can use a curving line which follows the Simple Moving Average of the price known as SMA.

    Others are MACD or RSI to name a few. There are countless indicators, and it’s up to you to use some of them or to ignore them.

    Every indicator you would use has its own specific purpose and shows you the result of what that indicator is designed for.

    We can’t go through all of them, so if you choose to apply you can do some research on a specific indicator.

    Most commonly are MACD, RSI, Moving averages, often in combination with trendlines, Channels which form, Support/Resistance, Fibonacci or Elliott Waves, etc.

    It’s up to you what you want to use or go a completely different way in your trading.

    Trends

    Forex strategy

    Often when patterns emerge from the charts it shows a direction to where the price is heading.

    If you see a clear direction you could translate that to yourself as seeing a trend.

    As we talked about previously, we would like to figure out what most other traders would do, and seeing a trend could be useful.

    If you build your strategy, you could make up some rules for yourself to test and see what result that gives you, one of them could be catching those trends.

    The beauty of trying that out on a demo is, it will be virtual money, so even if you lose, no harm is done. But it is very useful while creating a strategy.

    Stick to what works

    While trying out your strategy starting from scratch, you will notice some things work, others don’t.

    Try to figure out what causes losses, and eliminate those reasons by altering your strategy to where that won’t happen again.

    Then go test it again on your demo.

    You decide when you think your strategy is working properly, then you can try to trade real money and go make a profit.

    As soon as you notice it’s not working, stop trading and go back to demo trading, see what caused it to fail, and alter the strategy.

    Rules

    When you look at how others trade, they often have rules. Institutions also have rules which you cannot break if you want to work there.

    The big advantage we have as private traders is that there are no rules at all.

    We can make up our own rules. It’s our money, our strategy, and whatever anyone else says, you can choose what to apply or not.

    The broker you work with could have some rules, but other brokers might not have those rules at all.

    Choosing a broker may be of importance when you want to trade your strategy.

    It really takes some creativity and patience to create your own style, but once you have done that, the rewards will be all yours.

    Mentor

    If you think to yourself, it’s hard to do all that work, can’t I just get a mentor?

    Well, that may be harder than you think.

    Often when people look for a mentor they end up in a strategy that can be incredibly difficult to follow.

    The alternative is to just let some robot trade which is programmed by these “companies”

    Real mentors will learn you how to think for yourself, and if what they have tried and tested makes sense.

    The reason why a mentor is very valuable to you

    …is that you will have to make your own decisions in the future.

    You can’t rely on anyone else to make all the decisions for you, because what would happen to you when that mentor decides to just quit?

    Or what would happen when that mentor starts to charge you $1.000 a month just to follow instructions?

    If that would happen, the information may or may not be that valuable, but you would still have to make more to end up with a profit.

    A good mentor will take you by the hand and walk you through all your questions, pointing out the stones on the road so you can find your way in the dark.

    I once met a man who had sold over a thousand courses for the price of $300.

    So he made over $300.000 just by selling his course and in addition, he lets his students pay an additional $30 a month just to get access to “Hindsight Trading” on YouTube.

    When I talked to him, he did know a lot about indicators, etc. but frankly, I thought he didn’t know what he was talking about as he was guessing just as we would too.

    He’s a great salesman, but that is not a guarantee you will get value for your money.

    In the end, results count and you will be the judge if it is worth your money or go look for another mentor if you would need one in the first place.

    Q&A

    If you like me to cover a specific item regarding trading, just let me know by sending me an email, and I’ll try to clear that up in the coming articles.

    Best Regards,
    Hans Stam

  • What is needed to trade on Forex?

    What is needed to trade on Forex?

    Are you disciplined?

    2 min read


    What is needed to trade on Forex? To come to the answer we must clear several things.

    CONCEPT OF FOREX TRADING

    Forex represents the foreign exchange/currency market. The word forex itself is made of two English words: foreign and exchange and signifies the purchase of currencies from different countries.

    Unlike other stock exchanges, Forex does not have its physical seat in a city. It exists in an electronic network consisting of large financial institutions.

    Today, Forex is the largest financial market, which has a daily turnover of around $ 5.5 trillion a day.

    You can complete this whole process online

    The term currency market means the sale of one currency with the simultaneous purchase of the other. As currency pairs are traded, in order to profit from the shift in the exchange rate, you need to buy the currency that you think will strengthen and sell the other.

    There is no need to wait for a growing market to profit. At any moment, one currency will strengthen in relation to the other.

    The FX market is constantly creating opportunities for investment

    What is needed to trade on Forex, the essential part

    Since nothing concrete and tangible anything is bought and sold, this type of trade can be a little confusing. You should think that you are buying a part of the value of a country. If you buy a Japanese yen, you are buying a part of the Japanese economy that is in direct correlation with what the market thinks about the current and future health of the Japanese economy. Generally, the established exchange rate of the two currencies is a ratio that reflects the state of one economy in relation to the state of another economy (the state, the currency).

    Forex is opened 24 hours a day, except on weekends, so that Sunday trading starts on Sunday from 21:15 CET and runs until Friday at 23:00 CET. During the day there are several time intervals that coincide with the working hours of the world’s largest stock markets.

    Who trades on the Forex market?



    Forex traders can be classified into two groups, hedgers and speculators.

    Hedgers: governments, companies (importers and exporters) and some investors who are exposed to exchange rate changes.

    Speculators: This group, which includes banks, funds, corporations, and individuals, creates artificial pressure on the course in order to profit from variations or price movements.

    Basic terms

    Pip
    Represents a change in the ratio of the currency by one decimal. It is the smallest unit change course. Pip is the last decimal in a currency relationship

    Stop and Limit – Orders
    Often the trader wants to limit the loss in the position he has opened (in that case he sets the “stop” order) or wants to take profit at a certain level, which is acceptable to him (in this case he sets a “limit” order).

    Long – Tremin used for the purchase order,
    Short – tension used for a sales order,
    Bid – bid price,
    Ask – the price that is claimed,
    Buy – Shopping,
    Sell – sale,
    Spread – the difference between the sale and purchase price,
    Chart – graph
    Time frame – time period,
    Candlestick –  Candlesticks show that emotion by visually representing the size of price moves with different colors.

    What is needed to trade on Forex?

    Before you start trading the currency, you need to open an account with a Forex broker. Our recommendation is that before you decide on trading on Forex, open a demo account with one of the brokers so that through the use of the platform, you will continue to monitor market activities and learn more.
    What is needed to trade on Forex

    Conditions for Success

    You must have a good knowledge of technical and fundamental analysis, as well as managing your account. You should also know the psychological aspect of the trade and that you are disciplined. To be able to trade Forex successfully, there is a whole world of education, really extensive analysis and countless hours of tracking a very large number of relevant and potentially relevant information, all without any guarantee that the right decision will be made.

    So once again, the investment rule has been confirmed: high risk must be taken to achieve high income.

    To learn more about Forex trading follow Educational series HERE

    Risk Disclosure (read carefully!)