What Is Slippage In Forex?

Posted by Ahmad Hassam On August - 28 - 2009

You should know the problem of slippage and how to avoid it if you want to successfully trade the news. Slippage occurs when the price you intend to enter or exit the market is different from your actual transacted price. Currency prices tend to move very fast during highly volatile market conditions. The risk of slippage is usually very high when trading the news.

Placing stop or market entry orders under such times do not guarantee anything. Slippage is the biggest problem when the market moves fast. These orders do get filled but mostly at different prices than you had intended.

Many market makers will wait till after the big move is over. Then they will fill your entry order. Sometimes, these entry orders may even get filled past your stop loss or profit target. This means that you would be left with immediate net loss.

Slippage is a trick that many forex brokers use in order to make profit by filling your position with a negative spread. Before filling your entry order with wide slippage, many brokers will fill your stop loss or take profit order. The wider the slippage, the fatter the profits the broker is going to make. Imagine the number of orders placed with each forex broker and the amount of profits the broker makes from one such single event.

Lets take an example. Suppose you have placed your long entry stop for EUR/USD at 1.2564. Your profit limit is 1.2594. The forex broker may first fill your take profit at 1.2594 and then fill your long entry stop at 1.2604 with a 40 pips slippage.

You were confident that you would make a winning trade. If the orders had been filled at the prices you wanted, your trade would have resulted in a profit. But now you have a net realized loss. If the trade goes against you, the forex broker may fill your stop loss order first and then fill your entry order with slippage after that so as to widen their profits. With slippage you cannot predict anything what the broker will do with you.

Suppose, you had placed your long entry stop at 1.2564. You place your stop loss at 1.2544. The broker could first fill your stop loss at 1.2544. Then fill your long entry stop at 1.2594 with a slippage of 30 pips. You now have a net loss of 50 pips due to slippage instead of planned 20 pips loss.

The more you stand to lose and the more the forex broker stands to make a profit, the larger the slippage you experience. You should know as an individual trader that during news when the market moves fast, your orders will be kept pending till you get stopped out or your profit limit is reached. Some forex brokers add slippage to any of your orders to increase their profits.

Many traders readily accept the risk of slippage as one of the realities of trading the news. However, they should know that slippage can eat up a huge chunk of profits and in the end affect their overall profit/loss. You can overcome the problem of slippage through the use of stop-limit entry order. More on it in the next article!

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Forex News Straddling Strategy (Part IV)

Posted by Ahmad Hassam On August - 27 - 2009

There are easily 15-20 daily economic data releases relating to the major currencies USD, JPY, CHF, CAD, EUR, GBP, AUD and NZD. Trading news can be a very profitable strategy if you know when and how to enter the market. Forex market react the most to the release of the US economic news.

This is not surprising given that US is the largest economy of the world and is the worlds major trading partner. This is the main reason why the US economic news announcements have the greatest potential to influence other countries economies and their respective currencies. An initial part of the news straddling strategy is to pick out the various market moving announcements that can have a big impact on the forex market.

Inflation, consumer confidence, trade balance, unemployment figure, home sales, interest rate decisions, industrial production, retail sales, manufacturing and business sentiment figures are of significance to the currency market. If these economic data released relates to US or Euro zone, the higher the impact will be.

These news releases are usually made around 12:00 GMT or 13:00 GMT. It is morning in US and the European markets are still open at this time. You should note the dates on your trading calendar if you want to trade these economic news releases. You should also note the time of that economic data release other than the dates. Many economic reports are released once a month.

News straddling strategy is an intraday trading strategy. It maybe more advantageous to focus on the more volatile currency pairs! It tries to take advantage of the high amount of volatility that is usually generated with the news announcement.

Since the US economic news is the most market moving, the news straddling strategy should be applied on currency pairs that involve the USD. Some good candidates for this strategy are the currency pairs GBP/USD, EUR/USD, USD/JPY and USD/CHF.

Try to focus on the currency pairs involving the Euro zone currencies as the European markets are usually open at the time of US news release. However, the Asian markets where the JPY is mostly traded are closed by that time. Thus, the four major currency pairs ERU/USD, USD/CHF and GBP/USD tend to be better candidates than USD/JPY. Even among these four currency pairs, certain currency pairs among the majors respond better than others when it comes to trading major economic news release.

Economic News Straddling strategy is only employed upon the release of significant scheduled news. Moderate to very high price volatility can be expected during the time of the news release. We can expect to profit from the resulting sharp market moves.

For this strategy, you should mostly concentrate on the EUR/USD pair based on its superior liquidity compared to the other major currency pairs. This strategy requires very nimble and fast entry and exit because currency prices usually respond very quickly in a knee jerk reaction to a move in one direction and may correct themselves very quickly.

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Your Forex Strategy Will Determine Your Profitability!

Posted by Mark Alison On August - 27 - 2009

Ask any trader of Forex currency. They will tell you the secret to their success. It is most assuredly different for everyone. Each person has their inside tip and strategy that will work for them. Each one can be viable and can be used effectively, but it really depends on the trading style of the trader.

In the past, those looking to profit from trading put their efforts into day trading of stocks. Most traders today realize that there is so much more profit potential in trading foreign currency than stocks.

One strategy you can try is the Forex managed account. This is a way to make your money work for you without having to lift a finger. Just find a good Forex managed account and they will let a trained broker handle the tuff decisions.

If you want to research the field, you can buy or rent books that will discuss the latest tips and tricks for “trend spotting” and how to read the charts and history. There is a lot of good information from the recently published books and magazines.

There is the Automated Fores Robot. this is an automated system that will do all the bidding for you. They can scan the market constantly and even make you money while you sleep. You need to leave the bot on 24 hours a day, but some services offer to run them on their servers so you can turn off your computer.

You can also talk strategies with Forex chat rooms and message boards. These are meeting places for fellow traders who will talk shop with you and usually will give tips and heads up on things to bid for.

In conclusion, there are enough resources to help you plan your next Forex trading tip. Just use a little elbow grease and perseverance to find out your personal strategy. Remember the trader’s golden rule. Buy low and sell high!

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Earning More Money by Stock Trading

Posted by Bob Jones On August - 27 - 2009

Very few investors are successful at stock trading. There are various factors that can influence the success or failure of a stock market investor. If you want to keep on making big money, there are several things that you need to do. What are these things? First of all, you need to know more about money management. You will be making a certain sized investment for stock trading and so you must learn to manage it well.

Your trading funds must be managed effectively. All traders have to have rock-solid methods to ensure success in stock trading. Without it, all your trading will be just fair to middling guesswork and you will probably suffer large loses. For successful trading, you must fix the account size and answer questions like: Is your trading system profitable? By how much? How much is the risk for every share deal?

In order to gain profit, you will need to know your exit strategy? Your investment choice decides how long you can remain in the stock market to keep stock trading. Skilful investors don’t really need huge investments because they already have enough knowledge about how to trade wisely. It should be possible to enter the stock market with only a relatively small amount of investment capital, but you will need to control the risks involved in each deal.

You need to ensure that the risk is always lower than 3% for every trade you make. For example, if your account is $10,000, your loss per trade must lower than $300. Even if the account grows, you still need to maintain the risk at 3%. By following this strategy, you can minimize your loses per trade. The system you’re using should be profitable, so you can not afford to lose lots of money per trade. You must be able to estimate the ‘edge’ or your system’s profit potential and if you achieve the estimated amount over a certain amount of time, then your system is a successful one.

Your system should include a target profit, so that you always know when you will enter and when you will exit the market. Correct ordering is vital, so that you can earn more profits. The trading system is indeed very important. Whenever you buy a certain stock, the risk should be low. Your account will continue to grow if you know when to enter and exit the market for a certain stock. You must follow a trading plan with a rigid set of trading strategies.

You have to ensure that you follow your rules very strictly. It is vital for you to try to uncover which stocks will move to your advantage. Every stock investor has a favourite game plan or trading strategy and you must have one too. When you’re just starting out in stock trading, you ought not be a rash investor. Take your time and familiarize yourself with the state of the current market. You need to study everything, even the slightest details.

Get yourself a good broker and you will have a guide on how to go about the trading process. If you want to earn more profits in stocks trading, you should know how to manage money effectively. You must have a decent trading system and you should make use of the different kinds of orders. Stock trading is not that hard to understand but you should be willing to learn all the basics and some of the advanced methods, so that you can ensure continuous success. Take your time and analyze how the stock market is moving. Learn from the experts and their previous mistakes. That way, you can better guarantee your success.

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What is News Straddling? (Part III)

Posted by Ahmad Hassam On August - 26 - 2009

You should understand the discounting effect in the forex market. Often new traders get confused and ask why a particular currency has rallied despite the negative economic figures about that country. Sometimes, the currency can decline on the release of positive news.

These types of effects confuse and bewilder new forex traders. When there is good economic news about United States, commonsense says that US Dollar should appreciate. Similarly when there is bad economic news and there are signs of economic weakness, like unemployment and huge budget deficits, commonsense tell that US Dollar should depreciate.

What is the reason that a particular currency goes up despite bad economic performance of that country or the currency goes down despite good economic performance of that country? This can be attributed to the discounting mechanism of the forex market.

Traders try to take into consideration the future expectations about the currency in their present trading decisions. Traders think long term. Markets function on the basis of expectations, what the traders think will happen in the future. The markets inbuilt discounting mechanism is formed by the anticipatory reaction of the traders.

Traders will be bearish on JPY and go short now, if they think that Japan will suffer from the rising oil prices in the near or medium term, thus pushing down the currency. But the traders will be bullish on JPY and go long now, if they have a positive view of the Japanese economy, thus pushing up the currency.

You must have heard the famous saying: Buy on the rumor and sell on the news. This is somewhat similar to this saying. Currency prices integrate the markets expectations about the future in this way. Market has already made up its estimates of those figures based on the work of analyst and economists in the major trading institutions like banks or funds even before the economic data is released for public consumption.

Suppose, the market thinks that the US Consumer Confidence Index to show a worse figure than the previous month. The efficient market hypothesis says that all available public information is immediately compounded into the prices of the securities. So the market has already compounded that information in the exchange rate of say EUR/USD way before the US Consumer Confidence Survey results are released to the public.

The currency pair EUR/USD was rallying due to poor market sentiment for UAD. When the US Consumer Confidence Survey figures are released, what will move the market is the amount of deviation between the expectation and the actual figures.

If the released figures are almost the same as expected, this is old news for the market. This information has already been compounded into the currency prices. No surprise was caused in the market.

The release of the anticipated data or news can often cause the currency price to move in the opposite direction initially to where the market had positioned itself before the release of the news. This is due to traders closing their positions on the release the news and taking profit. After sometime the market adjust itself and the status quo prevails.

EUR/USD pair may even end up declining with the USD strengthening even in the face of a negative consumer confidence number if the US Consumer Confidence Index figures turn out to be almost the same as expected.

Thus the lack of any deviation between the expected and the actual figures may cause the currency pair to move sideways or even move in the opposite direction as the status quo remains. This contrarian market reaction is the result of traders who had gone long on EUR/USD closing their positions and taking profit on the news release.

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