up home page bottom

French German version Spanish version Italian version

header image

Learning About Forex Trading

August 8, 2008 – 4:08 pm

I started trading Forex relying on EA (expert advisors) robots, magic formulas and secret systems because I was too distracted by other things in my life (my son just hit the Terrible Twos, I’m still trying to learn how to be a good parent and I’m trying to keep up with my blogging) to sit down and learn more about Forex Trading.  But lately I’ve been making too many blunders with my Forex Trading that I’ve woken up and accepted the fact that I can’t allow this to continue. 

I’ve been taking punts which are causing me to lose more trades than I win, with my most recent costing me my entire account.  Although I have been using the EA and the IFPS calculator, I’ve been ignoring the instructions and using them on my own terms.  Yes, my mistake because I don’t really understand how they work and here I am experimenting with them.  A costly mistake because now I have to wait for my Paypal account to build back up (which is basically income that I earn through blogging) before I can get back into the Forex Market again.

When I received a message in the mail about a Forex Trading Course by Bill Poulos that teaches you how to be an independent Forex Trader, I was piqued.  Bill talked about being an independent in the sense that you will no longer be reliant on information that other people tell you.  Instead, you will be able to make your own educated decisions.  Now that was how I wanted to be.

Although his course was too expensive for me to sign up at present, he did offer a free short course that provided lots of useful information about Forext Trading which is still available here. 

While I still find it convenient to use FAPS and IFPS, I like understanding more about Forex and why things happen and that is the primary motivation I have for wanting to learn more about Forex Trading.  I would like to be able to make more educated decisions where trading is concerned and to understand why things happen the way they do.

By admin | Posted in foreign exchange | Comments (4)

Instant Forex Profit System

July 28, 2008 – 5:38 pm

I bought the Instant Forex Profit System (IFPS) because it was recommended to compliment the Forex Autopilot system (FAPS).  IFPS is basically a calculator that tells you when to buy and when to sell but you have to initiate all the orders on your own. 

You need to do your calculations at the beginning of every week and place your orders as soon as the Australian/New Zealand market opens.  The good thing is that you can use this calculator with any Forex trading account, unlike FAPS which requires you to use a trading account that uses MetaTrader.

It is fairly simple to follow and in my first trade using a practice account, I made $800 but subsequently lost $300.  I can’t really provide a very good review on this product at present because I haven’t used it enough to comment on how good or bad I think it is. 

Although I have had it for over a month, the limiting factor is that you can only use it at the start of the week because it uses the previous two weeks highs, lows and closes to calculate when to enter the market.  Calculations done during the week are not advised so it means I only get one chance a week to test it.

Currently, I am more inclined to review it positively since I have had some pretty good results with it, however, I suggest coming back to this blog at a later date when I have had a better chance to test it out more thoroughly.

Next up - learning to trade in the Forex Market.

By admin | Posted in foreign exchange | Comments (6)

Forex Autopilot

July 28, 2008 – 4:52 pm

The third program I tried was called Forex Autopilot.  It is basically a Forex robot that can be attached to your trading platform.  It opens and closes trades for you so you don’t have to do anything - if you don’t want to. 

I’ve been using this robot for nearly two months with mixed results.  In my first month, I made $220 from a $500 investment, which I thought was pretty good and I was quite happy with the results. 

Towards the end of the first month, I received an email advising that there was a new update to the robot.  I downloaded the new robot and uploaded it to my trading platform.  It worked really well for the first four days for the second month.  I made $530 in four days.  I was ecstatic.  I thought I had found the answer to trading the Forex Market.

In the following week, I lost everything I made.

What happened?

A couple of things. 

1. Firstly, I didn’t follow instructions to the letter.  To put it bluntly, I got greedy and I started investing aggressively.  Unfortunately, the amount I was investing can’t take such an aggressive approach.  It worked well for me in the first month because I was extremely conservative.

2. When I uploaded the new robot, I didn’t use the new settings that came with the new robot.  I used back what I had saved previously.  One of the settings was not set correctly and cause a number of my trades to close on a loss - something I couldn’t figure out until it was too late.

Would I use the program again?  Yes, but this time, I will be less aggressive.

Would I recommend the program?  Yes, definitely.

Next post - Instant Forex Profit System.

By admin | Posted in foreign exchange | Comments (1)

My Auto Forex

July 26, 2008 – 4:42 pm

The second Forex Trading program I tried was called My Auto Forex. The program is run by expert Forex traders who trade with you.  Basically, by paying a monthly subscription to the software, you will be notified whenever they make a trade - i.e. they tell you exactly when to buy and when to sell.  How much you want to invest when you trade is completely up to you.

What I didn’t like about this is that it isn’t very helpful to beginner Forex traders, especially if you want to be held by the hand and taught step-by-step how to do things.  The assumption with this program is that you already know how to trade and all you need is advice on when to open or close a trade.

For me, I found that one of the biggest flaws with this system is that you are required to constantly check your emails so you can enter and exit the market at almost the exact time the experts do.  Since they only trade when they see a trend coming, sometimes there can be only one or two trades a month so if you miss it, you miss your chances for trading that month.

The system is supposed to allow you to request notification to your mobile but I couldn’t get it to work for me.  Since I can’t be online 24/7 to pick up the trade notifications as and when they come, I found it a rather impractical system for me.  By the time I received notification to trade, I had usually missed the boat so I can’t really say how successful the experts were or even what the potential of this system is.  

The only people I could see this being useful for are those people closely monitoring the Forex market on a daily basis who just want the additional tips for when the market is about to have a good run.  So unless you’re a regular forex trader with a blackberry or are constantly by your computer, I wouldn’t recommend this program.

Tomorrow - Forex Autopilot.

By admin | Posted in foreign exchange | Comments (4)

Freedom Rocks

July 25, 2008 – 7:45 pm

The first Forex program I signed up for was Freedom Rocks. 

Freedom Rocks is a Multi-Level Marketing Company that offers a Forex Trading system for beginners.  What they sell is a “system” that helps you decide when and how much to buy and when to sell based on how much you are willing to invest.  Once you have learned how to apply the system to your trading account, all that is required from you is about 5-10 minutes a day to check your trades and make any necessary changes.

Recently, they added another product to their portfolio called “managed accounts”.  This is intended for traders who want to invest in the Forex market but do not want to do the trading themselves.  A minimum of $1k is required to open a managed account.

I did not try out the managed account so I can’t really comment on how well it works, but I did use their system for about three to four months.  Based on my experience, I would say that as far as trading in the Forex Market goes, I think Freedom Rocks offer a pretty conservative method of trading which is about as “safe” as you can get.  It is not a get-rich-quick system but if you apply it diligently, you should be able to make money in the long term.

Freedom Rocks taught me one method of trading in the Forex Market which I thought was rather valuable.  Even if you don’t have their software to calculate how much to buy and sell with each trade, you should still be able to apply the concept when trading on your own.

The benefit of Freedom Rocks is that it offers both a business and a method for investing rolled into one.  Because of the nature of the product, customer retention is pretty good.  Additionally, while you are building your MLM business, you can also start an investment portfolio in the Forex Market.  Freedom Rocks offers a good combination for financial planning.

Since this post is supposed to be about investing, I won’t go into the details of the business.  If you are interested to find out more, you can click here.  All in all, it is not a bad method for investing in the Forex Market, however, the methodology is nothing unique.  If you read up enough about the various methods for trading in the Forex Market, you will come across the methodology utilised by Freedom Rocks.

Freedom Rocks is great if you want someone to take you by the hand and tell you step-by-step how to open a Forex account and start trading.

Tomorrow - MyAutoForex.

By admin | Posted in foreign exchange | Comments (4)

Invest, Invest, Invest!

July 25, 2008 – 12:51 am

When I was younger, I used to think that I needed to have a lot of money saved up before I could start investing.  I suppose that was because, back then, the only forms of investments I was aware of was the stock market and property.  Back then, you couldn’t enter the stock market unless you could purchase the minimum number of lots which usually put most of the bluechip stocks out of my reach.

When I read about Warren Buffet buying a small farm at the age of 14 through his savings from delivering newspapers, needless to say, I was inspired.  Even if all I could put aside every month was a couple of hundred dollars, I was going to start an investment portfolio. 

I initially began with Unit Trust.  Simply because it was easy and I didn’t need to know much to get involved.  I could make monthly contributions as a form of enforced savings and I could rest a little easier in the knowledge that I was at least doing something about my retirement fund rather than relying solely on my EPF. 

Unit Trust is basically good if:

  • You don’t have a lot of money to invest
  • You don’t know much about investing
  • You don’t want to take too much risk

But I wasn’t content to stick with Unit Trust.  I wanted to take a more active role with my investments.  So I entered the stock market with a couple of thousand dollars from my savings account to invest.  That also meant I could only buy a couple of lots of a relatively cheap share. 

Admitedly, I didn’t know much about picking stocks but I was pretty lucky to get good advice.  Unfortunately, my mistakes lay not in the stocks I chose but in making the right decisions of when to buy and sell.  Firstly, I took too long to decide when buying my stocks so I usually caught them when they were going up.  Then I would try to make up for what I lost by holding for too long instead of selling them.

In the end, when the market dropped, I was left with a handful of shares that I couldn’t sell because they below the value I bought them at.  On the up side was that these were relatively reliable shares that I could hold on to.  As for the ones that I wasn’t sure about, I had to make the painful decision of cutting them early and accepting the losses.

With the stock market on the dive I turned my eyes elsewhere.  Yes, I have heard that if you know how to invest properly you can also make money with the stock market regardless of whether it is rising, falling or stagnant.  Unfortunately, I haven’t learned how - so I guess we’ll leave that one for now.

Although I knew about Foreign Exchange Investing for a while, it wasn’t until recently that I started investing in it.  Since I didn’t know the first thing about investing in the foreign exchange, I started following some trading systems and using trading robots with varied success - which I’ll write about tomorrow…

By admin | Posted in foreign exchange, stock market, unit trust | Comments (0)

Introduction to My Blog

July 23, 2008 – 11:57 pm

I am a Stay-at-Home-Mum who gave up my day job so I could look after my son.  Blessed or cursed (depending on your perspective) with a Type A personality, I have never really been thrilled about the idea of not being able to make my own money.  As a result, I looked towards the internet as a means of generating a replacement income to what I used to earn in the corporate world.

Although most of my focus has been towards starting businesses and running them online, I have always been interested to invest in the stock market.  So over the past year or so, I started dabbling and recently, I discovered foreign exchange trading. 

Although I have made some hits, I have also made a lot of misses.  If I look at the way I have been managing my investment portfolio, it really is no better than if I had taken the money, gone to a casino and played the black jack or poker tables in hopes of building my retirement fund through gambling.

Definitely not the way to go…  Especially since I am not the sort of person who believes in gambling or luck to make my fortunes.

So I have decided that it is high time I got myself educated to enable me to plan my investment portfolio more wisely and not be reliant on heresay and the judgement of others.  This blog details my journey from investment ignorance to investment savvy.

What you will read about:

  • investing in the foreign exchange market
  • investing in stocks
  • investment planning
By admin | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)