FOREX REVIEWS

It is always said - with very good reason - that the biggest obstacle to trading systems profitably is the trader him or herself. There are many reasons why this is the case but perhaps the large amount of self-sabotaging, the inability to trade through draw down periods and the second-guessing about the profitability of different strategies is what makes unprofitable people turn their accounts into dust in the longer term. It is therefore interesting to ask ourselves if there is a way to measure this psychological hardship and estimate if a given system will or will not be difficult to trade from a mental stand point. It becomes clear that some systems - even if account wiping in the long term - are very psychologically easy to trade while systems that are very robust and long term profitable tend to be extremely hard to trade (and therefore almost never traded). On today's post I will share with you my solution to this problem - the pain index - which is a measurement of how hard...

If you asked me what the most important aspect of trading is I would say : to preserve capital. This is something which is common to at least all the professional traders I know and something all new traders seem to lack. People new to forex trading like to trade their money like when they are gambling - the focus is to make money - while professionals trade so that they take the least possible risk on their capital (the focus is on preservation). I remember that when I was a new trader it was very hard to see when I was taking excessive risks, since the focus for new traders is in short term results, the real risk characteristics of the systems they use don't seem apparent until the market cashes on this risk and wipes the account or causes substantial losses. On today's article I am going to give you some pointers that will let you know if you are trading with excessive risk. Certainly they won't cover all risky scenarios but you can be absolutely sure that if you feel i...

On today's article we will be discussing a very interesting indicator which forms part of Bill Williams "chaos trading" theory in which several indicators are used to attempt to trade the markets profitably. This indicator- called the Awesome Oscillator - was developed as a means to get an idea about short term momentum on a given trading instrument. Within the next few paragraphs you will learn more about how this indicator's values are calculated, what it really tells us about the market and how we can use this information for the building of likely long term profitable automated trading systems. As a part of the "indicator series" this article will attempt to give you an idea about the essence of the indicator and the real nature of the information it conveys. So what is the Awesome Oscillator about ? What makes it so awesome ? This indicator - usually plotted as a histogram - uses a very simple calculation to measure what we would call "market momen...

There is a general myth in trading saying that anyone who stares at a trading screen long enough will start to gain some understanding about the underlying aspects of the market and how to trade it successfully. Many people spend a lot of time going through historical data and trading live demos so that this sort of "eureka moment" kicks in, a moment where finally everything starts to make sense and the person starts to just "see it clearly" and trading becomes an easy thing to do. Sadly trading is not something you can tackle this passively and obviously there are different degrees of success depending on how you face the challenge of becoming a long term profitable trader. I have to be truthful with you and tell you that time and effort spent alone do not guarantee success in trading and that you could spend a decade trying to learn to excel at this job without achieving your first profitable year. Not only does this depend on the personal aptitude of the individu...

One of the most interesting ideas in forex trading comes from what would seem to be a fundamental market inefficiency that would seem very easy to exploit by most market participants. Three way arbitrage is a trading technique that seeks to exploit inconsistencies in exchange rates arising from trading activity, inconsistencies that supposedly lead to tradable market inefficiencies. On today's article I will write a little bit about three way arbitrage, what it is, how it is traded and what the potential rewards may be. I will tell you why I think this cannot be done successfully by regular retail traders and why the rewards - if any - would be much lower than those of a regular long term profitable trading system. When we have a large group of currencies and all their combinations are available as different currency pairs there is a basic consequence that leads to the trading of several pairs being equivalent to the trading of some crosses. For example if you are buying 1 lot EUR/...

Through the past 4 years all of us have used the metatrader 4 platform for most of our automated trading Forex needs. Although this platform is not the only one available with such capabilities (tradestation and ninjatrader do this same thing) it is in fact the only one which is available to all retail traders since the platform is free to download and the live feed and historical data is also entirely free. A large part of Metatrader's huge success focuses on this free character which makes its use by people new to forex and aspiring traders a reality. This alone has generated a very large automated system sales industry, showing that the decision to make a platform and its price data freely available is indeed an excellent one. Up until now we didn't seem to have any alternatives with similar free character and the potential to become so massive but now we seem to have a new competitor that may want to take Metatrader 4 and 5 to the boxing ring. Today I will share with you so...

If you have been reading my blog recently you might be aware about the development of a trading tool I have built to use the metatrader 4 strategy tester as a "live" trading platform that would let us speed up the process of manual or discretionary system evaluation to a great extent. The tool allows us to use the visual backtesting feature of the strategy tester to trade on "live evolving charts" as we would trade the real market. You can read more about this tool and what it does here . On today's post I want to talk about the meaning of the word Umaki and how you can get this useful tool to increase the speed in which you learn to trade manually and understand the forex trading market. What does Umaki mean ? Contrary to my general expert advisors which use words in Quechua or Nahuatl as their names (all experts of the Watukushay project use them) this trade-learning tool uses a word in Zulu, the language of a very well known group of Southern African tribes, ...

Sure, we have all heard about the huge effort and thousands of hours that traders need to put into this business before they even start to turn a profit. One of the first thing that people new to the market first fight with is this inevitable need to acquire experience and the painful but real fact that demands this experience to be acquired through actual real trading, experience that needs to be taken by watching the screens and by losing money on the market (demo or live). If you want to become successful in trading then you will probably need to trade live for years before you actually come up with a true system (mechanical or discretionary) that has a positive long term statistical age and some - even remote - guarantee of bringing you stable profits. Is there any way to short-cut this road through effort ? On today's post I want to discuss with you a way in which I believe that the time invested in trading can be exponentially reduced, reduced to the point where you will be a...

Isn't hassle free profit from the forex market all we want ? Definitely the goal of every person that starts to look for an expert advisor - or most at least - is to find a trading system they can simply "set and forget", a trading system that just collects money from the market in a consistent manner with minimal or limited draw down. A "holy grail", so to speak. However, it becomes obvious after a while of being in this business that if it is too good to be true it probably is and that no trading system can provide the owner with profit without an effort to develop knowledge and understanding. However the fact that the other road seems plausible makes a lot of people continue to search for this nonexistent trading system, a quest that brings nothing but disappointment and financial loss for most new traders. On today's post I will be giving you a logic based demonstration that shows why easy profit in automated trading is impossible and why this search is ...

A week or so ago I wrote a post about tick volume in forex and how I believed it could be used for the development of long term profitable strategies. Inspired by a currency trader magazine article, I decided to explore this issue even further to discover if I was capable of coming up with some 10 year volume-based profitable strategies. Of course - as I had mentioned before - the first problem comes when you realize that tick volume is different between each broker and that some sort of normalization must be carried out before even attempting to come up with something useful. Within this article I will talk to you about how I sorted this obstacle and how I came up with my very first volume-based system with 10 year profitable results. Evidently there is no such thing as true market volume in forex since the amount of money exchanged by all market participants cannot be accurately determined in an "of the counter" type of market. This lack of "true volume" informati...

Perhaps only a few other businesses in this world have such a steep learning curve as forex trading. Thousands of traders begin their journey towards becoming profitable every year and only a handful ever make it to what seems to be a very exclusive club of successful people. In my mind the fact that profitable traders are not that common makes this journey a lot harder for new people, if finding someone whose example you can follow is so dramatically hard, then the journey has to be repeated for each traded who wants to become profitable. It's an odyssey every time, time and time again. Then you also have a problem dealing with the actual achievement of profitability since the strategies and methods used by one person who achieved this goal may simply not work for another either for time availability or psychological restrictions. Through the past few months I have been thinking if there is a straight "A to B" way in which new traders can achieve profitability, a set of ...

Certainly there have been a lot of new expert advisors being released every month and writing a post review for each one started to seem like a huge task that didn't make a lot of sense since many of the trading system's being released don't even have the slightest hint of reliable evidence of profitability. Due to the fact that I consider reviews very important but due to the fact that I also consider that my written posts can be devoted to more practical and educational matters I have decided to give my reviews a total turn around, changing the way in which they are done and shared. On today's post I will be sharing these changes with you as well as the first monthly update of expert advisor video reviews :o) The problem was actually very simple. There are many new expert advisors coming up every month and writing reviews for each one of them would have taken a lot of time and typing hand-stress. However stopping my reviews never seemed like a very good option because...

In my career as a professional currency trader and through my whole experience with Asirikuy members I have been able to gain some great insights into how new and experienced traders think. There are several thought processes that seem to change from the time you start to trade to the time when you have your first profitable year and develop your first profitable system but I think none of them is so crucial as the evolution of your focus in trading. The way new people see trading and the way in which experienced profitable traders see it is absolutely and completely different. The main difference - if anyone asked me - is the focus in money. During the following few paragraphs I will attempt to explain a little bit how new experienced traders view their trading and how the view of professional traders is very different, focusing not on the money, but in the way in which this money is to be obtained. Viewing things like a new trader is actually not very hard since we all have walked th...

It is funny when you see how new traders talk about their first experiences in trading and what they believe happens when they start using a given system. Time after time I have found out people in forums saying that whenever they start to run a system it goes south and that this is merely a consequence of their terrible, terrible bad luck. As a matter of fact there are many reasonable explanations to these phenomena and a clear argument that shows us why most people are bound to start trading systems within draw down periods. Today I want to talk about this "luck" aspect of trading, why people get this perception about their own trading experience and the psychological effect it tends to have in the end. So why do most systems go into draw down right after you start using them ? The answer to this question is surprisingly simple and tells us a lot about both trading systems and trader psychology. To understand why this is the case we first need to take a look into the way in...

Can I disable Friday trading ? This is perhaps one of the most common questions I hear from people who try automated trading systems. Certainly the reason why most people are concerned with Friday trading can be easily understood but when you really look into the evidence people have to avoid trading this day of the week you will find that - for most systems - it is nothing more than a senseless superstition. What is so wrong and different about Fridays ? Should you avoid or not avoid Friday trading ? On today's post I will try to address these questions. I will first explore the reasons why traders avoid Friday trading and what the evidence actually says about trading the last day of the week, after that I will give you my conclusions about Friday trading and what you should do in order to know if you should or should not avoid trading Fridays. What is the problem with Friday ? There are many reasons traders - especially new ones - give when you ask them why they are so reluctant ...

I have always believed that the best trading techniques are the simplest ones. I have realized time after time that complexity is not always the key to success in forex trading and system development and that the use of very simple trading techniques that tackle fundamental aspects of market behavior brings us better results and -more importantly- far more robustness than the more "fancy" and complex trading techniques. One such trading technique which I have always found simple and very good at giving us a general picture of overall market behavior was developed by Daryl Guppy, an Australian trader. Within this article I will talk a little bit about the idea behind the GMA technique (Guppy Moving Averages) as well as its application for the development of successful systems. The Guppy Moving Average method - which is how I believe it should be called - is nothing more than a simple template that puts certain indicators on the chart in the hopes that they will make trending p...