The DOW Jones is off over 100 points in intraday trading today. Poor earnings results from General Electrice (GE) and Bank of America (BAC) have led investors to swoon at the markets. This comes despite over 80% of economists reporting that the recession has ended. All the while unemployment and foreclosures are [...]

A Contrarian trader is one who generally does the opposite of what the mainstream is doing. The Contrarian believes that if everyone is doing something, then everyone can’t possibly be right. This is precisely something that Mark Fisher stresses in his ACD System lectures. He specifically calls them Retail Bus People. [...]

The Baltic Dry Index is one of the few leading indicators we can use to judge market price action. The futures market can be used as a short term indicator to gauge stock market opening price, but does little to predict prices outside of a few days. The Baltic Dry Index on the [...]

A very popular trading strategy of late is to trade the news in forex. This refers to sitting in front of your computer waiting for a major news announcement to hit the wires such as the Non Farm Payroll, GDP, or other high impact releases. There are many problems with trading the news [...]

The Federal Bailout of over 2 Trillion dollars has taken a little time to get rolling, but we are already starting to see its effects on the financial markets. Strikingly, Gold has risen to over $1,000 an ounce and Oil has climbed above $70 a barrel. The commodity gurus like Jim Rodgers and [...]

Trading psychology is one of the most important factors in a traders success. A person can spend countless hours studying the market, taking courses from big time wall street executives, and buying the most sophisticated trading software and still fail. What a lot of people do not understand is that their mental personality [...]

Rummaging around the online forums where many beginner traders hang out, it is not uncommon to hear a trader exclaim, “I found the holy grail! If I just buy and sell when the MACD gives me a signal I will be rich!”. But is there any merit to this?
 
Many of the popular [...]

John Bollinger developed an indicator that simply takes a simple moving average and plots two standard deviations away from it on a chart. This forms the Bollginer Band indicator. The advantage of the Bollinger Band is that it automatically adjusts to volatility because the measure of standard deviation is always assessing what the [...]

John Bollinger developed an indicator that simply takes a simple moving average and plots two standard deviations away from it on a chart. This forms the Bollginer Band indicator. The advantage of the Bollinger Band is that it automatically adjusts to volatility because the measure of standard deviation is always assessing what the [...]

The Awesome Oscillator Technical Indicator is a simple 34 period moving average, plotted through the middle points of the close of each bars on the chart ((H+L)/2). Then these are subtracted from the 5-period simple moving average, built across the central points of the bars (H+L)/2.
 
The EA can be downloaded from FXCM Here
 
Expert [...]

Today we will start the first article in a series of posts focused on reviewing free expert advisors and analyzing their trading results over the last several years. We will backtest each one of these systems on high quality M1 history data just like we do for The Fade Machine and The Trend Machine
 
 
Linear [...]

Metatrader’s Strategy Tester allows you to optimize your expert advisor to find the most profitable settings for the multitude of possible input variable combinations. You can optimize an expert advisor on a specific chart for a specific time period to find out which input values produced the highest returns and lowest drawdown.
 
However, it [...]

The Forex market has greatly expanded in both number or participants and trading instruments in the last five years. Despite the addition of the Chinese Yuan, Mexican Peso, Gold, Silver, and CFD’s the major currencies still make up for half of the trading volume in forex.
 
The Major pairs and their respected trading [...]

What is a swap in forex? A swap is the interest differential between a pair of currencies. If you go long the EUR/USD essentially you are shorting the dollar and buying the Euro. In this case you must pay any interest due the dollar, but you will receive interest owed to the [...]

What is a Mangaged Forex Account?
 
A type of forex account in which a money manager trades the account on a client’s behalf for a fee. Managed forex accounts are similar to hiring an investment advisor to manage a traditional investment account of equities and bonds. Returns and fees between managed accounts can vary greatly; therefore, [...]

In previous articles I derided those that continuously attack their brokers as an excuse for poor trading performance. While, the majority of complaints against brokers is unfounded there are a few situations in which the brokers are hurting trade performance. As I will explain again I do not believe it is massively intentional, [...]

I am always amused when I read trading forums and the resounding theme is that that brokers are crooks.  While, it may be true that some companies are chop shops, the majority of the larger firms are likely providing an honest service.  The excitement for retail trades moving over from equities to forex was the [...]

Are you new to forex? If so, you should open a demo account and start familiarizing yourself with how things work. Here’s how:

The Forex market has gained massive popularity in the last five years.  Market participants have increased drastically each year.  Besides offering free streaming charts and massive leverage the forex market is commission free.  How can they possibly make money? 
 
The typical spread on the EUR/USD currency pair in the forex market is 2 pips.  This [...]

Stop hunting is a commonly misunderstood process in the forex markets.  The forex market is the largest and most leveraged market in the world.  Its trading volume in one week is greater than the US stock markets yearly volume.  In forex trading it is critical to use stop loss orders to maintain proper money management.  [...]

Okay, so you’ve completed your backtest using Metatrader Strategy Tester. Now let’s look at the results.

There are four tabs to look through: Report, Graph, Results, and Journal

When selecting a forex broker many people are concerned with whether or not that broker is registered with the NFA (US National Futures Association). This is especially true of US customers. The critical misnomer that many people do not really understand is that the NFA will not protect your funds like the FDIC [...]

So you’ve just gotten your hands on a hot new expert advisor and you need to know if this thing is really going to work. It’s time to get your hands dirty and start testing. There are two types of testing you should do: forward testing and backtesting.
 
But first, make [...]