April 25, 2009
Not a bad little trading system. I have been using it for (apparently) one month. I am quite happy with it but the practice account only lasts for a month unless you have a proper account with them.
So, I am still looking for a practice account, preferably with spread betting, for the FOREX where I can place trades on live data but with ‘virtual’ money.
Anyone got any ideas?
April 19, 2009
I set up a set of related trades as detailed in my previous post. The trade did a false break out of the triangle on the sell side through the support. This closed my trade on its stop with a minor loss. The breakout was significantly large to trigger my sell trade, but has since re-entered the bound area but not yet hit the stop for this second trade.
The trade has gone against me twice, but because I have set up my stops properly, the losses will be very small.
I am considering adding another trade to buy as the trade travels further within the bound range with a limit about 75% up into the triangle. However, I will probably leave this one to see where it goes.
April 9, 2009
I have across and nice application that is free and allows you to trade FOREX major currency pairs in real time in a practice environment. It is from FXCM.
You can download their software for free without having to sign up giving your life story and all your important documents. The trading and charting environment is good as well.
You can trade right from the charts at the point where you click on the chart which I like too.
Does anyone know of a practice FOREX spread betting account that you dont have to send off your passport etc to?
The url is http://www.fxcm.co.uk
It is not spread betting, but the principle is the same with long and short capabilities in amounts in multiples of 10k lots.
I started with £5K virtual money on Monday and it’s now Thursday and I am up using the strategies I know from trading stocks and from the book ‘FOREX, patterns and probabilities‘ by Ed Ponsi.
My account is now £117 up which is just over 2% in four days.
The book is quite good and I would recommend it for anyone who is starting out trading in FOREX and needs a refreshing or wants to learn the standard strategies for technical analysis as they relate to FOREX.
April 7, 2009
I am reading and working through the book ‘Mathematics for Economics and Finance’ at the moment by Martin Anthony and Norman Biggs.
I am learning the mathematics that is detailed in the trading course ‘Certificate in Quantitive Finance’ to prepare myself both for working in finance and building my trading platform.
At the moment I have just learnt about First order linear recurrence equations and how this relates to working out capital gained on compound interest in an account with a constant percentage rate.
I have always worked this out before in Excel with arduous calculations for each year, now I have the maths to do it for any year in one calculation. It is quite a buzz to see the power of mathematics at work in real life.
Why didn’t they make it this interesting at school!
Standard First order linear recurrence for compound interest can be expressed in maths as:
yt = ayt-1 + b
where y is the capital at year t, a is (1 + r) where r is the interest rate as a decimal, and b is zero.
This gives
yt = (1 + r)ty0
or Capital after t years = (1 + r) to the power of t multiplied by the initial capital.
If the equation is reversed, then we can see how much we need in the bank to achieve a target t years in the future.
y0 = yt / (1 + r)t
or
capital needed is the desired target amount divided by (1 + the interest rate) to the power of the number of years.
Easy as pie!
