It was reported by CNBC this past week that hedge fund manager John Paulson has lost over $1 billion of his own fortune due to the plunge in gold prices since the beginning of the year. I can tell you with confidence that many trend following commodity trading advisors are making millions on the opposite [...]
Read More...Most people view the futures markets as a dangerous alternative investment that should be avoided altogether. This is due to the amount of leverage available in the futures contracts themselves. For instance, the margin on a Japanese Yen contract is just under $3,000, and this contract controls 12,500,000 yen, which is equivalent to over $100,000. [...]
Read More...Traditional proponents of employing the trend following doctrine in futures markets suggest that a trader needs to trade a diversified portfolio of markets in order to have the best opportunity to exploit trends when they come along. This is most certainly true, but not all markets are created equal in this regard. A review of [...]
Read More...For investors seeking to diversify their portfolios, currency futures are an excellent place to start. Currencies are the best trending markets to trade, and therefore it is relatively easy to build trading strategies around these markets. Furthermore, trading a portfolio of currency futures can provide investors with solid returns in markets that tend to be [...]
Read More...Professional traders approach trading in a different manner compared to the average person. Professional traders approach trading in a similar manner to how a martial artist develops their skills as a fighter. They first determine their trading doctrine, which is their overall approach to trading in the markets. They then develop strategies in accordance to [...]
Read More...Many years ago I discovered that a friend of mine from college worked for a very famous futures trader at an offshore location. I immediately contacted him and we had the opportunity to talk about a few trading war stories. I had only been trading for a couple years and had made some money using [...]
Read More...In their book “Street Smarts” published in the mid-1990′s, Larry Connors and Linda Raschke gave one of the strategies they presented the tongue-in-cheek name “Holy Grail.” The beauty of the strategy was its simplicity….you look for a strong trend, a pullback to a 20 period moving average, and then resumption of the trend to enter [...]
Read More...In the world of futures trading, you will often hear about the concept of “trading with an edge.” This concept is equally important in the stock market as well, but most market pundits will simply tell the uninformed investor that the market goes up in the long run, so the edge is to simply stay [...]
Read More...If you are new to futures trading, I highly recommend you consider the currency futures first, and forget about day trading. Why the currencies? Simply because they trend better than any other market. I’ve found that most new futures traders want to jump head first into trading anything that moves, and they are particularly fond [...]
Read More...I participate in a few investing forums, particularly those dealing with alternative investments such as futures trading and forex trading. What I find most prevalent among the participants in these forums is that they are looking for some sort of holy grail methodology that will propel them to riches over night. For instance, I read [...]
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