Five Reasons For Choosing Forex
Here are five reasons are for foreign exchange trading than stock trading, unless you consider the long-term investment.
1. Liquidity
Currency is liquid by definition, if liquidity measures the ease of converting an asset into cash. More often it is taken as the amount of money in a market. On this, too, currency scores very high.
Turnover in the forex market was almost $4 trillion per day on average according to a survey by the Bank For International Settlements in December of 2007. It has probably exceeded that now.
This is considerably more than is traded on all of the stock markets in the world added together. In forex you are not limited to trading in your own country or on your own country’s currency, so the advantage to this trader of being part of this huge market is clear. You have a much better chance of getting the price that you see or the price that you want.
2. 24 Hour Market
One practical advantage of the forex market is that it is open for trading 24 hours a day Monday through Friday. This is because of the global nature of the market and the fact that it is always business hours somewhere in the world, excluding weekends and holidays. So a forex trader can work a day job and trade in the evenings or early mornings.
3. Leverage
Leverage is the trader’s most essential tool in that it allows a small fund to control a large position size, resulting in a massive proportional return on investment, assuming that you are profitable. The leverage offered by forex brokers tends to be higher than in stock trading.
In forex, 100 times leverage is seen as standard or low, 200 times is common and 400 is possible in some circumstances. Of course this makes forex trading extremely risky but for a successful trader it is a significant advantage because it means that more money can be made from less.
4. Openness
Another advantage stemming from the sheer amount of money in this market and its high trading volume, is the openness of the market. There is very little opportunity for insider trading in a market which deals with the economic performance of whole nations and involves every major financial institution in the world. This means that the retail trader is not at a disadvantage to the extent that might be true in the stock market and lends more weight to our forex stock argument.
5. Trade Both Directions
When you trade forex, you are always dealing with a currency pair, exchanging one currency for another. This means that you can trade in both directions. For example if you are trading EUR/USD, you can start by investing in either euros or US dollars depending on which one you think will rise. So you can buy or sell the pair (go long or go short).
In a sense this is like trading stock options or futures, but with more flexibility. The flexibility comes from the fact that currency values are relative to each other. They can never all fall at the same time, as stocks can. So this is another point for forex in the forex stock comparison.
Beginner traders often fantasize or wonder about how some people are able to achieve tremendous profits by trading stocks just a few hours on a daily or weekly basis.
So going farther than the hype & the bells and whistles that a lot of the called “trading gurus” like to invoke, the real “secrets” of the stock market game are enclosed within the trading set ups and market signals you rely on to decide how to CHOOSE stocks, as well as WHEN to BUY & when to SELL them, or even when to SHORT SELL those that are poised for a profitable fall.
So the clearer your set ups are, the faster you can spot a potentially profitable trading scenario and ACT ON IT reducing your risk.
Complicated technical systems and information overload can make you slow and confuse you right from the start, making you loose money instead of making your profits grow.
In essence, You can be sure that the trading method you employ to approach the stock market and pick stocks can make a big difference in your results as a trader. In order to succeed you will need to FOCUS on a set of simple trading strategies that you can implement without hesitation.
They focus on momentum stock trading strategies, that are practical and easier to apply than many other technical systems out there.
Stock trading doesn’t have to be complicated as many people perceive. But you do need to follow a well organized set of rules and tactics, that once you master them, you can aspire to replicate profitable trades with consistency.
Just as there are two dominant styles of investing, there are also two dominant styles for trading stocks. Growth investors buy and hold young companies with big potential.
Value investors buy what they perceive to be undervalued stocks, and hold them until their value is realized. Growth and value are styles for stock trading, too, but they differ from their investment counterparts.
The Difference Between Investing in Stocks and Trading Stocks
Investors buy and hold with the hope of long-term appreciation. People engaged in stock trading buy for the hope of a quick flip.
Some hope to hold for three weeks or even a couple months. Others want to hold their stocks for only a few days or even less than one day – some people engaged in trading stocks will buy and sell the same stock several times the same day!
Trading stocks that rapidly is a strategy of neither growth nor value, which are both longer-term strategies, even for traders. When talking about stock trading, as opposed to investing, long-term doesn’t mean decades or years, but just a few weeks or months.
Trading Stocks Strategy #1 – Value Plays
Trading stocks based on valuation is the more conservative of the two strategies we’ll explore. This strategy for stock trading relies on finding stocks with prices that are beaten down, and hoping for a turnaround.
Some examples of stocks like this in the current market are eBay (EBAY), Intel (INTC), Microsoft (MSFT), and Yahoo! (YHOO).
People who like stock trading on value love it when we enter a bear market. They view it as a buying opportunity! If you begin trading stocks this way, you need to buy on the “dips” – each time a stock goes down in price, and sell on the “pops” – each time it bounces back up.
Also, you probably want to stop stock trading altogether when the market is on a big bull run. After all, from your perspective, there won’t be any bargains to be found.
Trading Stocks Strategy #2 – Growth is Good
Growth traders are pretty much the exact opposite of value traders. While value traders love it when stocks are “on sale” during a bear market and get out of the market altogether when things are bullish, growth traders love it each time stocks hit new highs and stop stock trading when things turn bearish.
Growth traders tend to rely very heavily on charts, and what is called “technical analysis.” By contrast, value traders prefer “fundamental analysis” – examining a company’s income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow in order to determine its real value.
Growth traders pose the question that if you keep buying on “dips,” what if your stock turns out to be Enron? They say that buying each time a stock hits a new high makes more sense, because a stock can’t really fly unless it continuously hits new highs.
Growth traders say that you should always, no matter what, sell any stock if it falls 7 or 8 percent below your purchase price, and this way, you’re guaranteed not to lose too much. Meanwhile, if you keep buying on the highs, some of your stocks are going to go through the roof, more than making up for any of the 7 or 8 percent losses you might sustain.
The Truth – Trading Stocks Requires Discipline
Each of these strategies for stock trading has its merits, and both have worked, historically. Where most traders go wrong is failing to stick to their game-plan.
If you’re going to be involved in trading stocks, you must develop a strategy, and by all means, stick to it!
The old battlefields of the middle ages are not gone, they have merely changed form. Hundreds of years ago normal men would set out to build their empires by conquering lands through the force of arms. Today, normal men like you and i set out to build our financial empires by conquering markets throught the force of self. The blood soaked battlefields of yesterday have made way for the cash soaked commercial battlefields of today, with the large private armies of Family warlords making way for large pools of family capital. Just as armies were needed to shape empires of the past, so too is capital needed today in order to put modern commercial plans of conquest into action.
In there, lies the reason as to why many forex traders fail. They go into battle risking too many soldiers (capital) and without the knowledge of tactics needed to win the fight.
Lets look at that again. 1. They risk too much capital, 2. They do not understand Forex markets.
Many traders both successful and miserable have made these mistakes, the main reason for me writing this article is so you can learn this lesson here and do not have to make this mistake and lose money, or at the very least be cautious enough to minimise your losses.
No general will risk a majority of his men in a battle that he has no plan for and where he has no idea about his enemy. So my question to you is, why would you risk your capital in market conditions you know nothing about? Luckily two remedies exist for the forex general who finds himself in this situation.
1. Make it a rule to only risk 1% of your capital in any one trade. This is to minimise your losses.
2. Educate yourself so you can recognise your chance to strike but also recognise when it is neccessary to withdraw. Learn to read the conditions of the forex battlefield. Great generals of the past would spend years learning battlefield tactics, luckily we can achieve this in a couple of months.
So in summary only risk 1% of your capital in any trade, and educate yourself about how forex markets work.
In this year, the stock market should present you with a wide variety of NEW hot stocks in 2009. Many of them are going to be new technology stocks that come from the nanotech, biotech, financial, energy, healthcare & communications sectors.
Most of them might seem promising, but the truth is that a good number of these trading & investing opportunities could be extremely risky, while others are simply not as good as they look. That’s why it’s very important to know how to choose among the best especially if you want to day trade them.
When you know how to pick and approach the best hot stock trading opportunities, you are able to generate a consistent and respectable amount of money in a very short period of time.
Experienced day traders recognize that trading hot stocks on momentum can be the fastest way to make money in the stock market, especially on uncertain times like these.
If you decide to day trade stocks just keep always in mind that for a trader to survive and be consistently profitable, its necessary to keep things as simple as possible. To much confusion and technical indicators will most of the time make you slow in your decisions and froze you up when a good opportunity is right in front of your screen.
In the end, stock market day trading is all about picking the best daily stock opportunities and following your buy and sell signals with ease and simplicity. Once you learn to master your trading decisions, you can aspire to produce consistent profitable results.