Category: The Basics

The Primary Trade Size Forumla

Position sizing is something that comes up ALL THE TIME in the discussions among new and developing …

What do you trade and why?

A question came up on Trade2Win recently on a new thread. It asked the question of the …

Twenty-four Hour Forex Volume Distribution

The question of volume in the forex market is a common one seeing as there is no …

A little quiz on trading returns

A book I’m currently reading (which will be reviewed later) presents a set of choices to the …

It’s not your broker stop-hunting you

Stop-hunting is a very commonly discussed topic in the retail forex community – probably more so than …

currencies

The Most Traded Currency Pairs

Using central bank and monetary authority data, this article outlines the most active forex pairs, both globally and by region/center.

Noise Trading

One of the more interesting topics I’ve come across in my delving into research in the area of …

Influences on Price/Earnings Ratios

The Price/Earnings ratio (P/E) is a metric commonly used in fundamental analysis of stocks – both individually …

Positive Points, Negative Profits

A subject of conversation in the blogosphere in recent weeks has been the idea that you can …

Taxes and Cutting Your Losers

I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading on the subject of Behavioral Finance of late (and …

The Cost of Trading

Last week I wrote a post for the Currensee blog addressing a recent SmartMoney article attacking forex …

Top Factors Influencing Exchange Rates

During my usual roaming around the web I came across an entry from Oanda titled Top 5 Factors …

Ever Increasing Volatility in Forex

I came across a post in one of the groups on LinkedIn in which the author described …

Is the Forex Market Too Big to Manipulate?

One of the readers at Forex Live asked the question: “What would you say about the FX market …

How Markets Can Fall Without Actually Trading

One of the things many market participants fail to realize is that prices do not require transactions …

The Cost of Forex Trading

I was asked by frequent emailer Rod to address something he came across regarding the cost of …

Looking at Volatility Across Markets

The other day I commented on a post on a personal finance blog. The article was an …

Understanding and Using the Dollar Index

The folks on CNBC and elsewhere in the media are all over the fact that the Dollar …

System Back-Testing and Indicative Forex Data

Frequent emailer and commenter Rod sent me another good question yesterday, on the subject of trading system …

Forex Crosses Do Actually Trade

A question that comes up sometimes from new forex traders is whether the cross rate currency pairs such …

Price Movement Causality – Not What You Might Think

I saw the following statement made on the BabyPips site: Forex charts are nothing but a chart …

New Micro Forex Futures Contracts on the CME

Many forex traders (or would-be forex traders) look askance at trading in the spot market, especially through …

currencies

Most Active Forex Currency Pairs

It is often asked what the most actively traded currency pairs are in the forex market. This post provides answers to that very question.

The Trade that Hurts the Most

Way back in the day I was a newbie trader. I know, it’s hard to believe, but …

Some Not-So-Great Tips for Using Stop Orders

Stock Trading to Go posted 10 Great Tips For Using Stop Loss Orders Successfully the other day. …

Negative T-Bill rates?

Near zero and negative Treasury Bill (T-Bill) rates have been all the talk this week. Here’s a …

Efficient Markets: Should you even bother trading?

The question of whether the markets are efficient was broached again by a fellow blogger recently. The …

Stock Valuations Can Make a Difference In Your Trading Results

I came across a post on the Generation X Finance website yesterday which discusses the value of …

Trading is All About You

Chris Perunna wrote Focus on You on his blog yesterday. It echos a lot of what I wrote …

What is Your Trading R?

Do you know your trading R? Do you even know what R is? In trading parlance, R …

Understanding Open Interest in Futures and Options Trading

One of the less well understood statistics in the basic daily trading data set is open interest. …

Want to Learn Forex Trading?

The forex market (also known at foreign exchange or currency) is one that offers a great deal of …

Want to Learn Futures Trading?

The futures market is one that offers a great deal of opportunity to traders. If there’s a …

Why Was the Stock Market Closed for Good Friday?

Eddy at Cross Wall Street asked the question on his blog yesterday, “Why Is the Stock Market …

The Required Elements for Your Trading Plan

Now that we’ve gone through the personal trader assessment process as the precursor to developing your trading …

The Great Manic Depressive: The Markets

The markets are a lot like a manic depressive in that there are moments of incredible euphoria …

What is Scalping?

If you spend much time in trading circles you will almost certainly come across the term scalping. …

Tight Stops Make Me Nervous

Any time I see someone comment on a blog or in a forum, or hear someone say, …

Being Clear on Margin

One of the things which traders new to leveraged trading sometimes get a bit wrong is margin …

What is Commercial Paper?

Commercial Paper (CP) is something which has been in the news for the last month as the …

LIBOR? What’s that?

If you’ve been paying much attention to the markets of late you probably heard something about LIBOR …

The Discount Rate and What it’s all About

Some of you out there might not realize that the Federal Reserve actually sets two different rates. …

Liquidity, Fed Action, and all that Stuff

There’s been a ton of talk in the markets recently about liquidity. We heard about the Federal …

Interest Rates and PE Ratios

The other day I talked about the impact of interest rates on stock prices, and how higher …

Interest Rates and Stock Prices

After last week’s run up in interest rates, it’s worth taking some time to understand the link …

The implications of index trading

Something came up recently in one of the forums I visit from time to time. It had …

Understanding the value of trade

This post goes a bit off the normal path, but it’s something I’ve had on my mind …

Charting, data and the bid/offer spread

An important element in market analysis and in the development of and testing for trading systems is understanding …

Knowing the high volume forex trading timeframes

An extremely frequent question I see in the forex discussion boards and that I get in my conversations …

Trading Systems Defined

In my previous two posts I outlined my thoughts on some topics related to trading systems, especially …