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Forex Trading

Shorting Stocks

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Most people know that you buy stocks and wait for a price appreciation to take place in order to make a capital gain. Can you make a capital gain when there is price depreciation in your stocks? Many beginning investors get confused when they realize that it is possible to make money when the stock falls in price. In practice, shorting a stock is as easy as buying stocks once you get hang of it. When the market is falling, investors sell short a stock with the goal of profiting from the fall in the price of that stock.

Short selling is confusing for new traders. It shouldn’t be. It is simple. The difference between the selling price and the buying price in case the price goes down is your profit. You borrow a stock from your broker and sell it with the intention of buying it back at a lower price in the near term future and returning it to your broker when you short a stock.

When the price of a stock goes down, you make profit. You are anticipating further fall in the price of the stock when you short a stock. However, if the price of the stock instead of going down starts to go up, you get a loss.

So shorting a stock without proper risk and money management is not wise. Theoretically a stock price can go up and up making your loss as big as infinity. However, before that happens most probably you will receive a margin call from your broker that leads to a forced sale before your losses reach unmanageable proportions.

Some people are against the strategy of shorting stocks. In the stock market crash of 2008, many financial companies went bankrupt due to the short selling of their shares by the speculators. A temporary ban was put on shorting for sometime during that period.

Swing trading is all about looking for making a quick profit by riding the trend in the market for a few days to a few weeks. In swing trading, we are simply looking to profit from the ups and downs of stock prices. When the price of a stock goes down, short selling is the best swing trading strategy. However, the goal of short selling is not to drive the price of a stock to zero and put the company out of business.

One reason why swing traders love short selling is due to the velocity of the moves! Negative news like poor earning, credit rating downgrade or a poor product launch can bring down a stock price in a matter of minutes and wipe out the steady gains made in months.

Short selling is an integral part of options writing. Short selling is also used in portfolio risk management. Shot selling can be a good hedging strategy for long term investors too. So if you a long term investor, you can lessen the impact of the sharp price drop on your portfolio by using a short selling hedging strategy. Swing traders always look for big winners and this brings them to the short side of the market. When the price of a stock starts to fall, chances are it will fall more before the market stabilizes and the price starts to rise again.

Mr. Ahmad Hassam is a Harvard University Graduate. Try This Cash Printing Forex Signal Service From Heaven! Learn Swing Trading! Grab a totally unique version of this article from the Uber Article Directory

Forex Trading

Autotrading Exposed

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Autotrading is common in the currency trading. Many hedge funds and other entities that manage money through forex trading use some form of autotrading in their daily activities.

Previously these autotrading programs also known as Expert Advisors or Forex Robots were expensive costing like thousands of dollars and only wealthy individuals or big institutions like hedge funds could afford them.

However, the recent advancement in computer programming has made it possible for professional forex traders to team up with a software expert to develop their own autotrading systems. Many private individual traders have also begun to adopt autotrading to execute their thoroughly backtested and highly optimized forex trading strategies.

The recent advancement in computer programming has made these Expert Advisors cheap. The price of these Expert Advisors has come down to around a few hundreds that can be easily purchased by ordinary investors like you and me. Metatrader platform makes it real easy to program such type of Expert Advisors.

So what is autotrading? You must have heard or read a lot about the benefits or advantages of autotrading. Recent advancements in computer programming has led to the development of trading platforms that allow an API ( Application Programming Interface) which connects the trader’s system to the dealer’s trade execution structure through the trading platform.

The trading system needs to be ruled based and mechanical in nature with clear cut entry and exit rules. Once all of the trading rules and criteria are determined by the trader, programming an API can be relatively straight forward for anyone with programming experience. APIs requires programming skills on the part of either the trader or a programmer hired by the trader. After the specific trading rules and criteria are determined, the trading strategy is backtested with positive results.

The development of an autotrading system depends more on your trading skills as compared to your programming skills. When this occurs not only trades entered when predetermined technical criteria is met but trade exits in the form of stop loss and take profit rules can also be programmed into the API. Autotrading is almost as simple as flipping a switch to begin the trading process.

However, an autotrading system should be thoroughly backtested and forward tested to make sure the likely success of the autotrading system before being put on live trading. This creates an entirely self contained autotrading system. So autotrading can actually execute real trades on current real time market prices. When a predetermined signal emerges, the software actually places a trade automatically.

Any nondiscretionary technical trading strategy that has clear cut, unambiguous rules is a good candidate for autotrading. In fact, if the trader has optimized and perfected this type of black and white trading strategy that runs devoid of human judgment, autotrading is perhaps the best way to achieve it. Autotrading effectively eliminates all human biases, errors and emotions in the trading process.

There are a number of successful autotrading systems now available in the market for the ordinary retail investors. The best two are FAPT and Ivy Bot.

Mr. Ahmad Hassam is a Harvard University Graduate. Try This Cash Printing Forex Signal Service From Heaven! First practice on your Forex Demo Account! Grab a totally unique version of this article from the Uber Article Directory

Forex Trading

Backtesting Explained (Part II)

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The first was doing automated Backtesting. Automated Backtesting is easy. The second method of Backtesting is performed manually and visually by the trader. The trader would take the historical data and scroll back in time on a chart and manually apply the trading strategy as if it was in a real time environment.

One of the major drawbacks with manual Backtesting is hindsight. How to eliminate the hindsight factor while doing manual Backtesting? The trader would advance the chart bar by bar in order to refrain from seeing price action subsequent to the trade at hand. This eliminates trading in hindsight that is detrimental to an objective backtest.

Manual Backtesting is complicated and difficult. It requires a lot of patience on part of the trader. The major disadvantage of Backtesting as compared to automated testing is the significant potential for human error in executing simulated trades and recording performance results.

Emotions are your enemy in trading. When you do manual Backtesting, these emotions can cause problems for your Backtesting results. The normal range of human emotions and biases that often interfere with actual trading can be a detrimental factor in achieving objective backtest results. Furthermore, it takes a great deal of work and discipline to simulate trades manually over a large data set without straying from the strict rules of the trading strategy.

These were some real disadvantages of manual Backtesting. However, this provides valuable trading experience although simulated but still a valuable trading experience that no automated backtest could possibly provide. Backtesting manually can provide the trader with the real feel for actually trading the strategy.

Backtesting can save traders a great deal of time and money that might otherwise had been wasted on trading unprofitable strategies. Backtesting whether done manually or automatically can be one of the most important elements of building a solid trading strategy.

Any mechanical trading system can be backtested. This leads us to the important question of autotrading. Autotrading is the latest fad especially in forex where the number of major currency pairs is only six and this makes programming autotrading easy. These autotrading systems are popularly known as Expert Advisors or Forex Robots.

The US Stock Market has got more than 50,000 stocks listed with them as compared to the forex market where there are not more than six major currency pairs. This makes programming a stock trading robot a bit complicated. However, during the past decade major breakthrough in computer programming has been made.

An autotrading system needs to be thoroughly tested before being put to live test. The only way to do this is through Backtesting. Backtesting is one of the most important components of testing an autotrading system. Big institutions like banks, corporations and hedge funds have always been taking benefit of these autotrading systems.

What type of trading strategies can be backtested and autotraded? These types of strategies are primarily technical in nature, and they must necessarily have rules and criteria that are unambiguous. Backtesting and autotrading are two important components of implementing trading strategies that generally do not rely upon the trader’s judgments or discretion.

Backtesting gives you the benefit of testing your trading system on a large historical dataset. Backtesting allows the trader to determine if a given strategy would have been profitable using past price data, which is an indication of how it might potentially perform in the future. In contrast, autotrading actually executes real trades automatically according to a pre – programmed set of instructions that sets trade entries, stop losses, and profit limits.

Mr. Ahmad Hassam has done Masters from Harvard University. Try This Cash Printing Forex Signal Service From Heaven! First practice on your Forex Demo Account! This and other unique content ‘forex’ articles are available with free reprint rights.

Forex Trading

Trading Divergences

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Divergence trading is one of the ways to trade the market. Though divergence trading is not often used but if used correctly it can be highly profitable. Divergences are often used as important trading signals. But it doesn’t mean that divergences will always predict a reversal correctly. Price oscillator divergences have long been acknowledged by technical traders as a solid indicator of potential price reversals. Well defined divergences particularly on the long term charts can be surprisingly accurate in many instances.

Catching a major price reversal at the correct time can be so profitable that only a few accurate divergence signals are needed to offset the inevitable false signals. Price divergence oscillators can be spotted with just two elements on the price charts.

The first element is the price and the second element is an oscillator that runs either above or below a price level. This second element can be Stochastics, RSI, MACD or any similar oscillator.

Many traders use Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD- pronounced McDee) as their sole confirming indicator. The MACD is among the most popular technical indicator or an oscillator invented.

Some traders also take trading signals exclusively from MACD. MACD is a multifaceted indicator that acts as a sign of trend momentum by representing the relationship between two moving averages.

You must have used MACD in your trading. MACD is basically the difference between two moving averages. MACD can be traded by taking signals from the crossovers of two lines, crosses above and below the zero line. Relative Strength Indicator (RSI) is another popular oscillator that provides a measure of price momentum.

RSI is an indicator that gives overbought and oversold signals in ranging markets. However, its usefulness like most other indicators tends to diminish during a trending market. RSI may also be used for divergence purposes. Stochastic indicator may also be used for divergence trading.

Technically speaking what is a divergence? When there is an imbalance between the price element and the oscillator element a divergence occurs. This is the point when the oscillator is providing a strong hint that price may be losing its momentum and a change in price direction may therefore be impending. Both the price action and the oscillator begin to go separate ways and start telling opposite stories.

A bearish divergence occurs when the price hits a higher high while the oscillator hits a lower high. A bearish divergence is a hint for an impending reversal back down.

What does a bearish divergence means? It is an indication that price may soon turn and go back down as the higher high in the price may lose its momentum and begin falling in case of a bearish divergence.

On the other hand, a bullish divergence occurs when price hits a lower low while the oscillator hits a corresponding higher low. A bullish divergence hints at an impending reversal back up.

When used in conjunction with other trading tools, divergences can be a remarkably effective method for helping to time major market events. Divergences are often used as hints of possible turns and reversals. However, divergences are not frequently used as a full fledged self sufficient trading strategy.

Mr. Ahmad Hassam is a Harvard University Graduate. Try These Cash Printing Forex Signals From Heaven! Learn Fibonacci Retracement Visit the Uber Article Directory to get a totally unique version of this article for reprint.

Forex Trading

Backtesting Explained (Part I)

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With Backtesting, traders can actually test their trading strategies and how well they would have done if executed in the past. Backtesting any trading strategy allows a trader to simulate its expected performance using historical price data.

Any trading strategy that does not have any ambiguity in its rules can be backtested effectively. Example of a simple trading strategy that can be backtested can be as follows.

When the MACD histogram has crossed above the zero line and the DMI+ is above DMI-, go long when the 5 period moving average has crossed above the 20 period moving averages.

When DMI- is above DMI+ and the MACD histogram has crossed below the zero line, sell short when the 5 period moving averages has crossed below the 20 period moving averages.

This one example is just meant to illustrate that any trading strategy having clear cut rules can be backtested with the historical data. However, using the past price data to simulate future results often misleads traders into thinking that their backtested results will also give into similar results in actual real time trading.

Many potential factors can and will make hypothetical performance and actual performance differ significantly. So you should not fall into the trap of thinking that Backtesting may be a perfect method for identifying the most profitable trading strategies.

A trading strategy that may have worked very well over the past three years may work in an entirely different manner for the next three years as the market changes and evolves. One of the most important facts that you should always keep in your mind is that market change considerably overtime.

Often technical indicators that have been giving profitable signals in the past are subsequently unable to replicate their performance in the future. This may frustrate you. But this is exactly what makes trading a challenging endeavor.

Secondly in term of trade execution, a trading strategy in real time may be much different from the way the trading strategy behaves on Backtesting. These differences can potentially skew the results.

However, Backtesting is still the best available method for evaluating a trading strategy without actually trading it in real time environment. Backtesting can provide a trader with a reasonable expectation of the trading strategy’s potential worth and usefulness.

Backtesting can be done by using two methods. The first one is the automated Backtesting. This is the most popular method. Automated Backtesting entails using a specialized program. The trader inputs the specific rules and criteria for the trading strategy into the Backtesting program.

Automated Backtesting is very easy. An entire picture of the past performance is created with the help of that software program. The software automatically applies those rules to the past price data and tallies the past hypothetical profits, losses and other information.

Mr. Ahmad Hassam is a Harvard University Graduate. Try This Cash Printing Forex Signal Service From Heaven! First practice on your Forex Demo Account! Click here to get your own unique version of this article with free reprint rights.