Taobao Direct Guide for users familiar with 3rd party agents and navigating taobao (with chrome google translate on, hence the title)

• Taobao direct consolidation and shipping is available in the following countries: USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan. This review is primarily geared towards the US as that’s where I live.

What is Taobao direct? Basically instead of copying and pasting the item URL into the agent website, you add items to your cart like a regular ecommerce site, check out, wait for items to arrive in the warehouse (similar to what happens when you use an agent) and then when all your items from various sellers are in, you request the logistics company to send everything to you.
Disclaimer: I have no Chinese fluency written or otherwise. I did everything through Google translate and my experience with how tb works through agents. If something goes wrong I will probably write off the item 🤣 if you communicate a lot with the ts who use translators it also helps get your point across. If you type in English in tb live chat they will redirect you to the HK/tw help staff who have medium English. Also I bought items I purchased previously with an agent or vouched for here on RL or had crazy high reviews/ratings.
Pros:

• Duck the agent fees and exchange rate bs
• Shipping is cheaper but EMS is the only option right now
• If you are overcharged for shipping you can get a refund
• It’s also easier to collect the discounts and coupons from stores (ymmv with agent)

Cons:

• Not good for reps or mainstream branded rep items as they can be marked as contraband by taobao and then you have to get a refund and return to the seller
• You pay 5% sales tax (see note at the end) and 3% on the total payment through alipay with a foreign cc (regardless if your cc does not charge forex)
• No qc pics and can't really control the declared value if that matters
• Other categories of items like make up brushes, liquids, powders, sharps, etc. are not eligible
• limited destinations
• 20 day hold limit apparently every day after that is charged 1 yuan per item per day

I think the ideal usage for taobao direct would be light items like innerwear, jewelry, soft/non fragile goods, generally clothing and shoes although I don’t know if they will include the box by default.
Please see here for the image guide for ordering Sorry in advance if my descriptions are wonky, I'm not great at following OR writing instructions but hopefully the screenshots make it easier to follow along.

1. Create an account (there are various guides out there for overseas members) and go into your account and add your home address (or the superbuy warehouse address)
   
2. Find your items and change the delivery location to "overseas", add to cart
   
3. When you're ready to check out hit check out, enter your cc info on the alipay (remember to use a card that doesn't charge foreign transaction fees) and confirm it goes through.
   
4. Wait for all your stuff to come in. When its in the tb warehouse it will show up in the "consolidated delivery" section tagged with a weight (usually volumetric or actual). The 20 day countdown will start once its available for international shipping.
   
5. After all your items are in, or you can batch up by selecting items on the consolidated delivery page, submit for delivery. Pay again through alipay.
   
6. Use the check logistics option to get the tracking info and wait for your haul!
   
7. After receiving but before you open, take photos of it on a scale and the lxwxh with a ruler as well. This is because they will overestimate your shipping but there isn't rehearsal shipping like with agents. You can request a refund after the fact with the "refund/complaint" option on the consolidated delivery page (mine says check refund because I've already gone through it)
   
8. Getting a refund: select the "only refund" option, "goods received" and "shipping cost does not match" and leave the full shipping amount in. Upload your measurement and weight photos (make sure the file size is not too big). Within 72hr they will reply and ask you to modify your application with the real amount owed (if any). It will go back to your cc through alipay (may take a few days).
   

Cost comparison: Even after the 5% sales tax and 3% alipay, it cost me $6.20 total from my credit card statement. A 39 yuan top up for sb is $6.53 as of today (if using paypal). For some the qc pictures and the longer storage period are well worth the difference. However a good compromise is the parcel forwarding option in sb. Instead of shipping to your house you can set up superbuy’s warehouse address and pay in taobao and wait for your items to show up in sb. You also have to submit the item link and the tracking # in superbuy so they can find your stuff. There's no sales tax and usually no shipping and you can select the coupons you want. I had a pair of pants make it to the sb warehouse almost 24hr after ordering, and another 24hr after entering my shipping info and item link in sb, it showed up in my account with free (non hd) pictures of the item. Then I cried putting together the shipping parcel lol.
This is a good way to dodge the sales tax and hold items for longer. However then you're at the mercy of the shipping costs (but you do have more options for delivery lines and you can customize how you want your items packaged too). The taobao warehouse will really throw everything in there, probably in a poly envelope.
The taobao shipping rates are 90yuan for the first .5kg and 48 yuan per every .5 after which is very competitive even after accounting for volumetric weight. Sb ems starts at 186 for the first .5kg and 61y every .5kg after. Of course rates and terms are subject to change with the times.
I had a package that came in at 277g when I measured it at home but I was charged for 1.6kg. After sending in the package images they refunded 144yuan (the true volumetric weight was about .97kg.) Taobao volumetric calculation is lxwxh (cm)/6000. Timeline wise I submitted 8/16 and received 8/28 although I think because it was so light they used epacket/china post because it was not an EMS tracking # big sigh. Still less than 10 days can't complain.
Hope this helps! I'm sure I missed something on this guide so feel free to leave any questions and I will update the post accordingly. Apologies this is very us-centric, I also cannot comment on getting a refund or exchange from sellers before you ship out but there is now english support (albeit a bit wonky) through chat and aliwangwang+google translate can get you pretty far.
Ps: highly recommend using the app too as its easier to get chat messages from the seller. You can screenshot and upload images to Google translate to read the text.

There are a lot of opportunities online for anyone that wants to make a little extra money. From a part-time hustle to an all-out digital career, there are loads of ways that you can make money with an electronic device, and a connection to the internet.
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1. Paid Surveys - Did you know that thousands of South Africans earn extra income by simply participating in online surveys to help local companies improve their products? Finally, now you have an opportunity to do this as well! You can find a list of the top survey sites for South Africa HERE
2. Selling Your Photos Online - Selling photos is a wonderful way to make money online if you have an aptitude for photography. Two popular platforms that you can try are Shutterlock and Unsplash. Every platform will have different requirements, but they will all pay you in hard cash. Though the photography market is quite hectic, it’s still a good method of gaining a passive income if you’re persistent and professional. Plus, the opportunity for additional sales is higher when your photos become popular. Many companies need photos of landscapes, and we all know that South Africa has some of the most amazing scenery in the world. In some cases, a smartphone is enough to get started, depending on the stock photo site you choose.
3. Be a Freelance Content Writer - Freelance writing is a serious online business. The internet enters most areas of our life, and the need for blog articles and various types of content is exploding. There are many kinds of online writing work, and many people need things like product descriptions or simple reviews. Before going further in this direction, you first need to set up a blog or website. This will be an amazing portfolio where you can demonstrate to potential clients or businesses that you can deliver great work. A LinkedIn profile can be created to function as an online portfolio as well. Don’t forget that many writing clients will want to see specialized work, so be sure to consider what area you would like to specialize in. The pay for online writing varies, but with some practice, you should be able to make a decent part-time income.
4. Sell Unwanted Goods - You can sell your unwanted stuff to people who want it and make your side business a real money maker. There’s plenty of options to use for sales such as Gumtree or Amazon. Don’t forget to do some research and see what assets have recently been sold so you have a target price. If you a business, you can sell other people’s goods as well. Many people don’t have the time or patience to sell goods online, and you can do it for them. If you charge a reasonable percentage of the sales, you can make a solid business out of selling used goods online.
5. Build a Personal blog/website - Not only can you write for companies to gain income but you’re also able to run your own blog to raise money as well. Set your expectations at a reasonable level because this job requires consistent practice and lots of patience. Bloggers make a profit, often through press coverage, advertising products, and writing sponsored guest posts. You will need to run the blog for a while before you can expect to see any profits, but it is very simple to get started. Check out some of the other ideas on this list for ways to leverage a blog for greater income, like selling drop shipped items.
6. Legitimate Remote Jobs can Pay Real Money - Many companies are heading to a work-from-home style of business since this type of model helps save money, and eliminates the risk of illnesses. People are completely flexible while working for a company and selecting where they decide to spend their time.CrowdSource, for example, hires remote writers, editors, and other jobs that can be done easily from anywhere. Companies like Fast Chart offer work-from-home options for medical transcriptionists. You can also try seeking opportunities at LiveOps, a call center staff. You might be surprised at how much time and money you save when you work at home. There is no transit, and you can cook for yourself. Think about it!
7. Become a Dropshipper - Dropshipping is not a strange term, especially when eCommerce is booming. Anyone can be a drop shipper since the work requires low investment at the beginning and also guarantees minimal risk. The system operates by purchasing the stock (goods) from a third party supplier or manufacturer, who then fulfills the customer’s request. You don’t have to shop or handle goods in advance because the product comes directly from the vendors whenever an order is placed by a customer. There are many dropshipping platforms out there, and some are basically free to use. You will need to figure out how to market the goods, which is where a blog or website comes in very handy.
8. Affiliate Marketing - Affiliate marketing is a popular method of making money online in South Africa and across the world. You can sell into a variety of markets with this business model, and make money almost anywhere. You can generate revenue from product sales. In other words, affiliate marketers will refer readers to a lot of products and get a small cut from them. Once a customereader buys products, you will earn a commission. A widely known approach is to start creating your own blog in a specific niche and to establish a trustworthy community that can purchase your promotions. Unlike dropshipping, you simply get a commission and have no other responsibilities. So easy! Check out SA’s leading affiliate network – https://www.affiliate.co.za/
9. Online Business with Etsy - Try selling DIY designs and crafts on Etsy if you’re a skilled maker. An Etsy shop is basically free to operate, and you can make real money with the platform. Once your registration is complete, you can start posting photos of your works, and people can purchase your products. There is really no limit to what can be sold on Etsy, but make sure that you are able to send your goods to other countries, as many buyers are likely to be in the EU or North America. A PayPal account is important to have and also a popular payment choice so that customers can pay you quickly. Take nice pictures of the items to help draw purchasers into a sale. Make sure that you have good customer service as well, or you won’t be selling on the platform for very long!
10. Forex Trading - You might have heard about trading FOREX or Contract For Difference (CFD) trading. The basics of this online money-making are simple. You will choose a currency pair, and bet on the direction of one currency vs. the other. For example, you could speculate that the EURO will appreciate vs. the RAND (or just about any currency). If you are correct, and then sell the contract, you will make profits. While this might sound easy, most people who do this lose money. In addition to currency, most retail FOREX brokers will allow you to trade in other markets, such as commodities, or shares. If you are looking for a reliable income, this probably isn’t right for you. On the other hand, if you don’t mind taking on risks, trading FOREX can be extremely profitable.

After a few...especially trying...interactions with unhappy ban recipients today, I thought it would be fun to share a little info on what moderators do to keep this place clean. :)
The forex industry is full of shady characters. Any industry sitting on the intersection of financial independence, work, and money, is bound to attract them. There are many reasons for this; the lower barrier to entry compared to other markets, the lack of public knowledge on the subject, and greedy human nature to name a few.
Moderating a subreddit dedicated to forex (or anything trading realted for that matter,) presents extra challenges beyond your regular sub. Marketers and scammers are super motivated, and MLM / referral marketing is extremely popular right now, which can turn everyday regular users into sources of spam.
How we currently tackle this problem involves technology (scripts, bots, and automod,) a mod review workflow, and some smart sleuthing when needed.
The mod team and our scripts aren't perfect though... but the few false positives we get are a very, very small fraction of all mod actions taken (~1%.) Unfortunately, that means some otherwise sincere members get handled roughly, and that can really suck.. I wish there was a better way, but the alternative is this place becomes a wild west and starts looking like your gmail spam folder.
That said, here's my personal stats for JUST the last 24 hours:

• Bans: 14 [edit: 16 now before day's end, two more responding to a 'where can I learn how to trade' post.]
• All mod actions (including bans, post and comment removal, etc..): 63
• Ban appeals: 2

And I'm just one of the mods. . .
So what scammer and marketing trends are we seeing lately?

• Content marketing - Infographics with instagram handles watermarked in them, or a blog-like post with a embedded links to their own site.
• Personal/direct selling - trying to move the conversation out of public view, usually by taking things to DM, or promoting a 3rd party chatroom where the rules here no longer apply.
• Shills - Fake accounts used to boost the credit of another user, or service. It's no coincidence that a user asking about 'ULRA PRO SIGNALZ' will quickly have 5+ replies by low karma, new users, saying how great the service is. [edit: here's an example I just caught..]
• Fake P/L Porn - We see this quite often. It's easy to fake MT4 account statements and MT4 Mobile screenshots, and new users can't tell the difference so these posts will get a lot of undeserved attention. When people ask how OP made such mad cash, a sales pitch is usually coming right up.

Honestly, it can be really frustrating at times.. luckily the scripts we have in place make weeding out ~80% of these jokers quite easy and quick. Heck, we had one scammer who blew through 12+ accounts over the last few days trying to scam people but none of their posts ever saw the light of day thanks to the spam triggers I've written.
What motivates the mod team to keep this place clean? That's an easy answer: The majority of users here are new to trading. Making sure they aren't food for the wolves is important.
But even with all the measures we take, some bad actors still get through.
So here's where you can help: Use the report button! Anytime you see something that you think fits the descriptions listed above, or violates our sidebar rules, just report it. Even if you're not 100% sure, don't be afraid to use the report tool.. The worst thing that can happen is the mod team reviews and approves it, but the best outcome is you directly help keep this place clean and humming! :)
And the mod team is always looking to improve where it can: I've already talked about what we do to scrub away bad actors, but one place we could do better is education. The plan is to rewrite a good portion of the wiki to include the following sections:

• Spotting scams and scammers
• How to properly compare brokers and regulatory bodies
• The real reason why your old high school friend wants you to sign up to IML, and 10 ways to politely tell him to pound sand
• No, that hot instagram model won't sleep with you if you buy her online course
• Why all signal services are trash and can die in a fire

(Titles above are a work in progress ;P)
Are you a good writer and want to help out with this? Think you can write up a killer wiki article on spotting scam artists? Message the mods and let us know!
Finally, a reminder, we are still interested in taking on more moderators and will be revisiting that very shortly. If you'd be interested, read through this post and reply accordingly: https://www.reddit.com/Forex/comments/h7ok6k/seeking_more_mods_recruitment_thread/

I built my PC with the idea of becoming an Amazon seller (recently opened an account and have 5 sales, obviously nothing but it's a start), expanding from there where I can and also with some light gaming in mind.
I built it and was like, riiiight what do I do now... Going to purchase a product research tool. Watch some informative. videos.
I could learn a programming language, used to know a bit of HTML & CSS, or get back into graphic/Web design, build PCs... What are some other good and current options?
I know there's some legit survey sites where you can make money, but don't really think they're worth it. Any other good ways of making money I'm interested in. Dunno if forex is worth getting into. Bitcoin for sure.
Plan to download and play Steam of course.. Happy to take the best game recommendations..
Any programs / tools that are fairly profitable to learn? Like WordPress?
Any programs that you highly recommend?
Just kinda stuck with what to do minds all over lol.
Downloaded Firefox and some add-ons like Mozilla Color, spiced it up a bit.

Creating a blog couldn’t be easier and yet more complicated in 2020.
There are so many different things to think about, and yet so many different platforms you can use to streamline the process.
Understandably you’ll already have an idea of what you want to write about, I, unfortunately, can’t help you with that, but what I can do is show you how you can set up a killer blog that will drive readers to your website.
We’ll take you through what you’ll need to get started, our five steps to setting your blog up, the best blogging platforms to use, how to get your blog discovered, and the do’s and don’ts of blogging.
But first, we need to establish what type of blog you want to set up.

What type of blog?

Firstly you’ll want to have a goal in mind. What are you aiming to achieve through your blog?
Do you want to pull in more users to your sales pages by writing about your brand, to increase its publicity?
Do you want to build a blog that promotes brands and products from other companies?
Or do you just want to set up a blog documenting your travels around the world?
In order to pick the right software for you, you’ll want to have a grasp before you start of how big this blog is going to be, whether you’re going to monetize it, and what type of blog it’s going to become.
For example, if you’re planning on building an affiliate blogging programme, where you promote other brand’s products and call readers to action to but the products, you’ll be writing a lot of content and will benefit from having a more comprehensive blogging system with lots of plugins to promote sales.
But if you’re looking to just set up a personal, or a personal brand blog talking about yourself and your brand, you may not perhaps need as many comprehensive features as you would if you were building an affiliate blog.
You may also want to build an online portfolio of your work, which could require an entirely different piece of blogging kit, as opposed to the traditional blog that hosts articles and journals.

What you’ll need to get started.

There are 3 key things you’ll need to get up and running.

1. A blogging platform.

After you’ve identified the type of blog you want to set up, plus whether you’re going to make money from it, you’ll then need to pick a blogging platform tailored to your needs. Many people chose to operate on WordPress as it is one of the most comprehensive blogging systems going, but they forget platforms like Wix and Squarespace that are great for both helping you save and make money and are great options for those who are less tech-savvy and are new to the blogging game. Plus if you’re blogging for business, you might want to think about using LinkedIn for your business blog.
We’ll go into more detail on what blogging platforms are best for your needs shortly, but make sure to keep in mind your objectives and technical experience when choosing the right platform for you.

1. A hosting platform.

Every website needs a web host to store their website’s information on the internet. A web host is an online service provider that will store your website’s information on one of its online servers. This will put your blog out there to the world. The best web hosts will perform a variety of functions for you, for example, Wix is an all-in-one package that will host your website for you, allow you to register a domain name, and has easy to use website design tools to help you start your blog.
Web hosting can be expensive though so make sure you pick the best value for money host that can cater to the amount of traffic you have running through your website. Check out our post on the 11 best hosting providers. [Insert blog link here]

1. A domain name.

I’m sure by now you already know what sort of blog you want to set up, whether that’s a travel, blog, a blog accompanying your online store, or perhaps an affiliate marketing product review blog. You’ll have a niche and an idea and now all you need is a name. Every website online has what’s called a domain name. It’s included in the website address at the top of your search bar, for example, our domain name is www.digitalsupermarket.com.
You’ll need to register a domain name after you purchase a hosting plan, to enable customers to find your site quickly and easily. One good tip is to find a hosting platform like Bluehost or GoDaddy that will provide you with a free domain name when you register for one of their web hosting plans as domain registration can be fairly pricey. Pick a great domain name that is easy for customers to read and type into Google so they can find it easier online.
TOP TIP: To increase your blog’s search engine ranking, and to help more people find you on Google, try to pick a domain name that has either a .com or .co.uk ending. These domains often rank a lot higher in Google searches than .org’s, .net’s, and .info’s, and for that reason can be slightly more expensive, yet can help boost your site’s reach and credibility.

The Best Blogging Platforms For You.

There are a wealth of platforms out there catering to all your blogging or online portfolio needs. We have listed some of the main ones below shedding some light on what needs they service and why they might be a great option for you.

WordPress - The best software to give you full customisation.

WordPress is perhaps one of the most renowned blogging platforms in the world, running approximately 35% of the internet. It’s favoured highly by professional bloggers because it gives you total freedom to do whatever you want with your blog. WordPress can help you build your blog using one if its search engine optimised themes, you can customise using its drag and drop website builder tool to create a stunning blog.
What’s more, is you’ll be able to use its professional blogging service to post your content online and take advantage of the hundreds of third party app plugins, you can integrate into your blog, to improve automation, add new features, and drive traffic to your site. The only downside of WordPress is that it can be quite technical and can take some time getting used to, but once you’ve got the hang of things, you’ll have great control over everything on your webpage.
Pros:
Cons:

• Full customisation
• Domain name registration
• Fully scalable
• Tons of third-party plugins and apps
• Technical and can take some getting used to
• Not the best if you’re not tech-savvy or are just starting out.

Wix - Best for monetizing your site.

Wix is probably the most streamlined and easiest blog providers. It’s so simple and easy to use, it’s therefore great for anyone just starting out in the blogging world. You can customise one of its stunning templates with Wix’s drag and drop editor, and then upload blog posts to your site by slotting in pictures, gifs, social media buttons, sidebars, and other widgets that will help your blog stand out.
One of the coolest features about Wix is its marketplace integration, where you can install a whole variety of third-party applications to your blog to provide your users with greater features and usability. Wix is the perfect all-in-one blogging solution to help you easily build a platform to amplify your business to the world, helping you to make more money, but it can also save you a lot of money as it’s cost-efficient plans roll up, web hosting, blog posting, and domain registration all into one product!
Check out our Wix review and our comparison of Wix and Squarespace for a deep dive into Wix’s main blogging features. [Insert link here]
Pros:
Cons:

• Streamlined and easy to use blogging software
• Includes as a package, web building tools, domain registration, and web hosting
• Tons of third-party plugins and apps on the Wix marketplace
• Great platform to help make money and save money on its reasonably priced subscription plans
• Don’t get the same full control as you see with WordPress
• Locked into using Wix’s templates.

Squarespace - Best for creating visually stunning blogs.

Squarespace is very similar to Wix, in that it is an all-in-one web building and blogging platform that can help you build a blog you can monetize efficiently. It sets itself aside though through its better design and customisation features, making it one of the best platforms on the marketing if you’re looking to design a visually aesthetic blog. I’d recommend using this platform if you are a business operating in some sort of design, arts, or culinary industry.
Although it offers minimal template options, Squarespace’s templates are works of art and offer you great customization when building your blog. Plus Squarespace offers a great blogging tool that lets you schedule posts and customize your blog to suit more mobile audiences.
Pros:
Cons:

• Streamlined and easy to use blogging software
• Can build a visually stunning blog on Squarespace with its streamlined tools
• Excellent blogging features
• All-in-one web host, domain registrar, and web builder
• Can’t add third-party applications on Squarespace

LinkedIn - Best for blogging businesses.

Aside from setting up a blog on your own site, corporate entities can use LinkedIn to enhance and amplify their presence online. LinkedIn has more than 575 million users, most of whom are professionals and members of corporate conglomerates, and you can use this social platform to target some of the most influential people in the world.
If you’re blogging about business this is the perfect platform to use a pre-existing community of people to enhance your social standing. You’ll then be able to build connections and followers on your profile who can easily share your blog on their platform through a couple of simple clicks.
Pros:
Cons:

• Utilise LinkedIn’s pre-existing community of business people to amplify your brand
• Target corporate directors and influential people directly through LinkedIn
• Check out what people are looking at on LinkedIn and tailor your content to that market
• Again you are confined within what LinkedIn’s platform will let you do, it’s not your site and you don’t have full customisation

Instagram - Best for the Artists.

Instagram is one of the biggest blogging sites in the world and without realising it, we are all technically bloggers in some way with our Instagram accounts, right? Ultimately for professional use, it is great for building a portfolio that has some form of visual or graphic eye-catching media around it. Instagram lets you post videos, photos, boomerangs, even write a blog in the photo’s caption if you wanted to!
Best of all, Instagram is free, and you can use its business software to link up your online store, to drag users away from your profile, using its product tagging features, and land them in your online checkouts. Our top tip for using Instagram is to post regularly and keep on the theme of your blog. Don’t go off-piste as you’re followers will catch on quickly and unfollow you. And with 1 billion people using the platform each day, it is a great way to gain people’s attention and build your brand’s presence online.
Pros:
Cons:

• Best for the creatives.
• Totally free and easy to use interface.
• Access to a pre-existing community of people.
• Online selling capabilities.
• Again you are confined within what Instagram’s platform will let you do, it’s not your site and you don’t have full customisation

The Do’s And Don’ts Of Blogging

Here are a couple of top tips to bear in mind when building your blog to help you create an awesome, lead driven platform.

The Don’ts

Don’t use complicated language too soon.

With that in mind, do include language that your target audience will understand. But remember they are still here to learn, so don’t drop people in at the deep end right away by using complex jargon off the bat. Define terms and spell it out in layman’s terms for people at the outset, and as the post goes on, then introduce more complex writing. Introducing technical jargon at the start of your posts is an instant turn off for most readers.

Don’t waffle - Keep it succinct.

People want to get to the punchline now. 43% of people admit to skimming through blogs to get to the information they need, meaning to get your blogging site converting leads, you need to engage the reader early on and offer information succinctly throughout your post.
Plus don’t make your blog too long. Depending on what you’re writing, a lot of people will see large volumes of text and will switch off immediately. There is no set limit for what a good and bad amount of text is, that’s something you’ll have to figure out per your industry, but from my experience, the shorter, the better.

Don’t make headlines too long.

Also ensure that your headline is not more than 60 characters long. If it gets too long it won’t rank well in search engines and people just won’t want to read it. Check out this headline analysis tool which will analyse the effectiveness of your proposed headlines.

Don’t plagiarise or use credited images.

Copying other people’s work is lazy and can land you in a lot of hot water in extreme cases if you breach a copyright regulation. But it’s also just unfair on the person who has worked hard or been creative to write that work. The same goes for images, people need to make a living from the content and photos they’re taking so don’t steal that off them.

The Do’s

Do write killer headlines.

People are like goldfish. You only have about 3 seconds to get their attention. That’s why it is important to write catchy, funny, and enticing headlines to draw your reader in. One good way to do it is to use the “How To” and “10 Best” strategies. These sorts of titles telling people ‘How to set up a blog’ or ‘the ten best web hosting platforms’ are search engine optimised, lead winning titles that rank highly in Google searches. Try them out and see!

Do post regularly.

The key to creating a great blog that builds leads is posting regularly. Although it is not the best idea to post regularly. Ideally, you want to post 3-4 times a week to get the best influx of traffic to your site. You’ll also want to check out when’s best to post for your target audience, for example, if you’re in the FOREX market, you’ll want to post your blogs perhaps at 8 AM, before the markets open when city workers are on their staring at their phones on their morning commuter trains to the city.

Do share on social media.

Share your content far and wide on your social platforms. Everyone is on social media these days and its outreach is simply phenomenal. That’s why you should always share your posts to your social channels to get greater traffic on your website, and include share buttons all-around your blog to invite your readers to share your articles too!

Do use SEO keywords to drive more traffic.

In a nutshell, SEO keywords are the phrases people put into search engines when they are looking for information on a certain subject. They are how you get found on your website. Depending on what you are writing about, there is always a set of keywords relating to that topic that you can implement, to help you show up higher in people’s google searches. For example, people might regularly search in google, ‘what is the best compost for growing sunflowers?’ When you come to writing about growing sunflowers in your blog, you might want to use these words or incorporate this question into your blog somewhere, to help you rank higher on Google.

Do use call’s to action to take your readers to the next step.

If you don’t challenge your reader at the end of your blog to follow you on Instagram, or check out your sales pages, you’ll never get the leads or sales you are looking for. With that in mind, build compelling calls to action at the end of each of your posts, to pull readers into taking the next step. Check out our post on landing pages to see a couple of cool ways on how to implement calls to action on your site [insert link here].

Do identify a target audience.

People will often tell you to write as though you were in the shoes of the person you’re looking to bring to your website, but it’s true! Identify what type of people you’re writing to, for instance, if you’re writing a business blog about FOREX trading, you’ll write with potential traders in mind who have one eye on the stock market and the other on your blog. Or if you’re a wedding florist, you’ll set your portfolio up to target those people looking to get married in the next year.

Leads, Sales, Results.

Blogging is one of the most influential marketing strategies in the world and the best bloggers can reap some awesome rewards for producing some truly awesome content.
It is fairly straightforward to get started and we advise if you’re a small business, or someone with minimal blogging experience, to try out Wix or Squarespace first before you jump into using more technical platforms like WordPress. Once you’re up and running remember our top tips on what to do and what to avoid when writing your blog. Plus don’t forget to think about optimising and adding useful applications to your site to help you build and grow your content. Check out these 39 awesome blogging tools you can use to drive greater traffic to your site!
Found this article useful? Make sure you share it with your friends on Facebook and Twitter and let us know in the comments if you have any other useful blogging tips.

I built my PC with the idea of becoming an Amazon seller (recently opened an account and have 5 sales, obviously nothing but it's a start), expanding from there where I can and also with some light gaming in mind.
I built it and was like, riiiight what do I do now... Going to purchase a product research tool. Watch some informative. videos.
I could learn a programming language, used to know a bit of HTML & CSS, or get back into graphic/Web design, build PCs... What are some other good and current options?
I know there's some legit survey sites where you can make money, but don't really think they're worth it. Any other good ways of making money I'm interested in. Dunno if forex is worth getting into. Bitcoin for sure.
Plan to download and play Steam of course.. Happy to take the best game recommendations..
Any programs / tools that are fairly profitable to learn? Like WordPress?
Any programs that you highly recommend?
Just kinda stuck with what to do minds all over lol.
Downloaded Firefox and some add-ons like Mozilla Color, spiced it up a bit.
I

Back in 2016, I dabbled into checking up how to start a digital business career. I scramble on various materials online on how to make money.
Oh shit! I wouldn't like the one that would want me to invest something first as I feared risking in a business I didn't know much about. I can say my risk believe system on online investment was zero.
My first knowledge in online business was in domain parking and flipping yet that will require you buy the domain from godaddy.com , namecheap.com, justdropped and many of those sites. I was looking for one that is free and I can park to earn me small bucks. But none!
I check up other ways like blogging especially I learnt that one can set up a free WordPress, blogger, tumblr and other free to use sites but your domain name will have there suffix in the dotcom. I innocently set up dailycashlife.wordpress.com
I put up some little articles on it which talks about making money online and some of the articles I have read on the niche.
Fast forward to 2017, I had absorbed much learning online especially on running facebook ads for businesses. I summoned a courage to chat a company I found their website online and I shared my experience. I was sincere to let them know that I am just starting out as a digital marketer but with much zeal to help any firm to turn in more sales and double their revenue.
I was given the chance to start up handling all their social media platforms with my little experience in graphics design.
That was when I made my first $20 for that service. Though I never expected anything as I couldn't consider myself to be an expert.
After making this bucks for a constant 3 months, I started trading forex from part of it and I made few profits too. Though I lost also but my capital management strategy worked out for me to turn in $200 from a $75 trade within 2 months.
That was how I started multiplying my investments online taking up more chances and today, I may not be so rich as you may think but I am comfortable with my strategy of earning online consistently doing so for barely 3 years now.
I doubted the article I read in 2016 on how one can start an investment with $0 capital. I think I owe the writer an apology for my doubting act.

The majority of this sub is focused on technical analysis. I regularly ridicule such "tea leaf readers" and advocate for trading based on fundamentals and economic news instead, so I figured I should take the time to write up something on how exactly you can trade economic news releases.
This post is long as balls so I won't be upset if you get bored and go back to your drooping dick patterns or whatever.

How economic news is released

First, it helps to know how economic news is compiled and released. Let's take Initial Jobless Claims, the number of initial claims for unemployment benefits around the United States from Sunday through Saturday. Initial in this context means the first claim for benefits made by an individual during a particular stretch of unemployment. The Initial Jobless Claims figure appears in the Department of Labor's Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report, which compiles information from all of the per-state departments that report to the DOL during the week. A typical number is between 100k and 250k and it can vary quite significantly week-to-week.
The Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report contains data that lags 5 days behind. For example, the Report issued on Thursday March 26th 2020 contained data about the week ending on Saturday March 21st 2020.
In the days leading up to the Report, financial companies will survey economists and run complicated mathematical models to forecast the upcoming Initial Jobless Claims figure. The results of surveyed experts is called the "consensus"; specific companies, experts, and websites will also provide their own forecasts. Different companies will release different consensuses. Usually they are pretty close (within 2-3k), but for last week's record-high Initial Jobless Claims the reported consensuses varied by up to 1M! In other words, there was essentially no consensus.
The Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report is released each Thursday morning at exactly 8:30 AM ET. (On Thanksgiving the Report is released on Wednesday instead.) Media representatives gather at the Frances Perkins Building in Washington DC and are admitted to the "lockup" at 8:00 AM ET. In order to be admitted to the lockup you have to be a credentialed member of a media organization that has signed the DOL lockup agreement. The lockup room is small so there is a limited number of spots.
No phones are allowed. Reporters bring their laptops and connect to a local network; there is a master switch on the wall that prevents/enables Internet connectivity on this network. Once the doors are closed the Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report is distributed, with a heading that announces it is "embargoed" (not to be released) prior to 8:30 AM. Reporters type up their analyses of the report, including extracting key figures like Initial Jobless Claims. They load their write-ups into their companies' software, which prepares to send it out as soon as Internet is enabled. At 8:30 AM the DOL representative in the room flips the wall switch and all of the laptops are connected to the Internet, releasing their write-ups to their companies and on to their companies' partners.
Many of those media companies have externally accessible APIs for distributing news. Media aggregators and squawk services (like RanSquawk and TradeTheNews) subscribe to all of these different APIs and then redistribute the key economic figures from the Report to their own subscribers within one second after Internet is enabled in the DOL lockup.
Some squawk services are text-based while others are audio-based. FinancialJuice.com provides a free audio squawk service; internally they have a paid subscription to a professional squawk service and they simply read out the latest headlines to their own listeners, subsidized by ads on the site. I've been using it for 4 months now and have been pretty happy. It usually lags behind the official release times by 1-2 seconds and occasionally they verbally flub the numbers or stutter and have to repeat, but you can't beat the price!
Important - I’m not affiliated with FinancialJuice and I’m not advocating that you use them over any other squawk. If you use them and they misspeak a number and you lose all your money don’t blame me. If anybody has any other free alternatives please share them!

How the news affects forex markets

Institutional forex traders subscribe to these squawk services and use custom software to consume the emerging data programmatically and then automatically initiate trades based on the perceived change to the fundamentals that the figures represent.
It's important to note that every institution will have "priced in" their own forecasted figures well in advance of an actual news release. Forecasts and consensuses all come out at different times in the days leading up to a news release, so by the time the news drops everybody is really only looking for an unexpected result. You can't really know what any given institution expects the value to be, but unless someone has inside information you can pretty much assume that the market has collectively priced in the experts' consensus. When the news comes out, institutions will trade based on the difference between the actual and their forecast.
Sometimes the news reflects a real change to the fundamentals with an economic effect that will change the demand for a currency, like an interest rate decision. However, in the case of the Initial Jobless Claims figure, which is a backwards-looking metric, trading is really just self-fulfilling speculation that market participants will buy dollars when unemployment is low and sell dollars when unemployment is high. Generally speaking, news that reflects a real economic shift has a bigger effect than news that only matters to speculators.
Massive and extremely fast news-based trades happen within tenths of a second on the ECNs on which institutional traders are participants. Over the next few seconds the resulting price changes trickle down to retail traders. Some economic news, like Non Farm Payroll Employment, has an effect that can last minutes to hours as "slow money" follows behind on the trend created by the "fast money". Other news, like Initial Jobless Claims, has a short impact that trails off within a couple minutes and is subsequently dwarfed by the usual pseudorandom movements in the market.
The bigger the difference between actual and consensus, the bigger the effect on any given currency pair. Since economic news releases generally relate to a single currency, the biggest and most easily predicted effects are seen on pairs where one currency is directly effected and the other is not affected at all. Personally I trade USD/JPY because the time difference between the US and Japan ensures that no news will be coming out of Japan at the same time that economic news is being released in the US.
Before deciding to trade any particular news release you should measure the historical correlation between the release (specifically, the difference between actual and consensus) and the resulting short-term change in the currency pair. Historical data for various news releases (along with historical consensus data) is readily available. You can pay to get it exported into Excel or whatever, or you can scroll through it for free on websites like TradingEconomics.com.
Let's look at two examples: Initial Jobless Claims and Non Farm Payroll Employment (NFP). I collected historical consensuses and actuals for these releases from January 2018 through the present, measured the "surprise" difference for each, and then correlated that to short-term changes in USD/JPY at the time of release using 5 second candles.
I omitted any releases that occurred simultaneously as another major release. For example, occasionally the monthly Initial Jobless Claims comes out at the exact same time as the monthly Balance of Trade figure, which is a more significant economic indicator and can be expected to dwarf the effect of the Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report.
USD/JPY correlation with Initial Jobless Claims (2018 - present)
USD/JPY correlation with Non Farm Payrolls (2018 - present)
The horizontal axes on these charts is the duration (in seconds) after the news release over which correlation was calculated. The vertical axis is the Pearson correlation coefficient: +1 means that the change in USD/JPY over that duration was perfectly linearly correlated to the "surprise" in the releases; -1 means that the change in USD/JPY was perfectly linearly correlated but in the opposite direction, and 0 means that there is no correlation at all.
For Initial Jobless Claims you can see that for the first 30 seconds USD/JPY is strongly negatively correlated with the difference between consensus and actual jobless claims. That is, fewer-than-forecast jobless claims (fewer newly unemployed people than expected) strengthens the dollar and greater-than-forecast jobless claims (more newly unemployed people than expected) weakens the dollar. Correlation then trails off and changes to a moderate/weak positive correlation. I interpret this as algorithms "buying the dip" and vice versa, but I don't know for sure. From this chart it appears that you could profit by opening a trade for 15 seconds (duration with strongest correlation) that is long USD/JPY when Initial Jobless Claims is lower than the consensus and short USD/JPY when Initial Jobless Claims is higher than expected.
The chart for Non Farm Payroll looks very different. Correlation is positive (higher-than-expected payrolls strengthen the dollar and lower-than-expected payrolls weaken the dollar) and peaks at around 45 seconds, then slowly decreases as time goes on. This implies that price changes due to NFP are quite significant relative to background noise and "stick" even as normal fluctuations pick back up.
I wanted to show an example of what the USD/JPY S5 chart looks like when an "uncontested" (no other major simultaneously news release) Initial Jobless Claims and NFP drops, but unfortunately my broker's charts only go back a week. (I can pull historical data going back years through the API but to make it into a pretty chart would be a bit of work.) If anybody can get a 5-second chart of USD/JPY at March 19, 2020, UTC 12:30 and/or at February 7, 2020, UTC 13:30 let me know and I'll add it here.

Backtesting

So without too much effort we determined that (1) USD/JPY is strongly negatively correlated with the Initial Jobless Claims figure for the first 15 seconds after the release of the Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report (when no other major news is being released) and also that (2) USD/JPY is strongly positively correlated with the Non Farms Payroll figure for the first 45 seconds after the release of the Employment Situation report.
Before you can assume you can profit off the news you have to backtest and consider three important parameters.
Entry speed: How quickly can you realistically enter the trade? The correlation performed above was measured from the exact moment the news was released, but realistically if you've got your finger on the trigger and your ear to the squawk it will take a few seconds to hit "Buy" or "Sell" and confirm. If 90% of the price move happens in the first second you're SOL. For back-testing purposes I assume a 5 second delay. In practice I use custom software that opens a trade with one click, and I can reliably enter a trade within 2-3 seconds after the news drops, using the FinancialJuice free squawk.
Minimum surprise: Should you trade every release or can you do better by only trading those with a big enough "surprise" factor? Backtesting will tell you whether being more selective is better long-term or not.
Hold time: The optimal time to hold the trade is not necessarily the same as the time of maximum correlation. That's a good starting point but it's not necessarily the best number. Backtesting each possible hold time will let you find the best one.
The spread: When you're only holding a position open for 30 seconds, the spread will kill you. The correlations performed above used the midpoint price, but in reality you have to buy at the ask and sell at the bid. Brokers aren't stupid and the moment volume on the ECN jumps they will widen the spread for their retail customers. The only way to determine if the news-driven price movements reliably overcome the spread is to backtest.
Stops: Personally I don't use stops, neither take-profit nor stop-loss, since I'm automatically closing the trade after a fixed (and very short) amount of time. Additionally, brokers have a minimum stop distance; the profits from scalping the news are so slim that even the nearest stops they allow will generally not get triggered.
I backtested trading these two news releases (since 2018), using a 5 second entry delay, real historical spreads, and no stops, cycling through different "surprise" thresholds and hold times to find the combination that returns the highest net profit. It's important to maximize net profit, not expected value per trade, so you don't over-optimize and reduce the total number of trades taken to one single profitable trade. If you want to get fancy you can set up a custom metric that combines number of trades, expected value, and drawdown into a single score to be maximized.
For the Initial Jobless Claims figure I found that the best combination is to hold trades open for 25 seconds (that is, open at 5 seconds elapsed and hold until 30 seconds elapsed) and only trade when the difference between consensus and actual is 7k or higher. That leads to 30 trades taken since 2018 and an expected return of... drumroll please... -0.0093 yen per unit per trade.
Yep, that's a loss of approx. $8.63 per lot.
Disappointing right? That's the spread and that's why you have to backtest. Even though the release of the Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report has a strong correlation with movement in USD/JPY, it's simply not something that a retail trader can profit from.
Let's turn to the NFP. There I found that the best combination is to hold trades open for 75 seconds (that is, open at 5 seconds elapsed and hold until 80 seconds elapsed) and trade every single NFP (no minimum "surprise" threshold). That leads to 20 trades taken since 2018 and an expected return of... drumroll please... +0.1306 yen per unit per trade.
That's a profit of approx. $121.25 per lot. Not bad for 75 seconds of work! That's a +6% ROI at 50x leverage.

Make it real

If you want to do this for realsies, you need to run these numbers for all of the major economic news releases. Markit Manufacturing PMI, Factory Orders MoM, Trade Balance, PPI MoM, Export and Import Prices, Michigan Consumer Sentiment, Retail Sales MoM, Industrial Production MoM, you get the idea. You keep a list of all of the releases you want to trade, when they are released, and the ideal hold time and "surprise" threshold. A few minutes before the prescribed release time you open up your broker's software, turn on your squawk, maybe jot a few notes about consensuses and model forecasts, and get your finger on the button. At the moment you hear the release you open the trade in the correct direction, hold it (without looking at the chart!) for the required amount of time, then close it and go on with your day.
Some benefits of trading this way: * Most major economic releases come out at either 8:30 AM ET or 10:00 AM ET, and then you're done for the day. * It's easily backtestable. You can look back at the numbers and see exactly what to expect your return to be. * It's fun! Packing your trading into 30 seconds and knowing that institutions are moving billions of dollars around as fast as they can based on the exact same news you just read is thrilling. * You can wow your friends by saying things like "The St. Louis Fed had some interesting remarks on consumer spending in the latest Beige Book." * No crayons involved.
Some downsides: * It's tricky to be fast enough without writing custom software. Some broker software is very slow and requires multiple dialog boxes before a position is opened, which won't cut it. * The profits are very slim, you're not going to impress your instagram followers to join your expensive trade copying service with your 30-second twice-weekly trades. * Any friends you might wow with your boring-ass economic talking points are themselves the most boring people in the world.
I hope you enjoyed this long as fuck post and you give trading economic news a try!

I saw a discrepancy when looking at FX quoting conventions.
In Schweser Notes it says this: https://imgur.com/a/IJ5FNFN +It is also the same way on the CFA L2 learning portal.
On Investopedia is says this: https://imgur.com/a/vDJ3KpW +During work training (Sales & Trading), I was also taught that this is the standard convention. +It is also like this on sites like Forex.com.
Which one is correct? For example, ABC/DEF, which one is the base currency ABC or DEF? Which one is the price currency?
Thanks.

funny to see that subject pop up again. it was what drove me insane enough to find this sub in the first place.
at any rate, the problem is not the bots. I thought it was, but those are just part of the parasitic ecosystem.
but to get that, first we need to take a few steps back on web history, ad serving, UX, tracking technology and media advertising.
too lazy to gather links, but you know, do your googlin'.
I assume that most of you are fairly web literate here, but I'll try to go down into the bare bones as much as possible for those who aren't.
so let's start with a basic question - what is a web visitor anyway?
from the standpoint of a normal person, that would be a person browsing a given website or piece of content. from the standpoint of technology however all you know is that some device has downloaded content from your server using the http protocol. thanks to the wonderful technology of web browsers, you can plant browser cookies on a visitor - stuff that's used to remember if they logged in, what their preferences are, stuff that your service can read from the device. it also serves usually very basic telemetry like last visit time, session time, and so on.
this, over time has evolved in what we call browser fingerprinting, a convoluted bunch of technology that allows websites and web services to uniquely identify you.
it still doesn't know if you're a human or not, but from the standpoint of the web technology, you're a visitor.
now back in ye old days of the web, when the first banner ads were springing up, these were important questions. most consumers were still to be reached on traditional media channels, and ad spend would have to be justified somehow on the risky ventures of online business. so beyond traditional polls that would infer the value of visitors, websites would start tracking number of visitors, time on page and so on. these were used to milk the advertising cow so to speak, and it gave in to some funny developments like the creation of the popup ad - if I recon correctly on geocities, where they would just but the ads everywhere until some big auto company noticed that they're appearing on porn sites. so - put the ad in the popup, and you can claim it's not in the context of porn!
around this point in time the online ad business is still pretty low tech. you actually have to call a physical human being, they send you ppts and pdfs, you send back image files and excel sheets, you wire money, the ads run, and so on. this is called direct sales, and it's tracked again by counting a bunch of visitors, and telling you how much impressions and clicks your marvelous creatives and ad budget generated.
now enter google - or more precisely, a technology firm called doubleclick that was to be acquired by google. they developed a tool for automatic ad serving, later to be called programmatic advertising, that keeps the pesky sales dude out of the loop and achieves reasonable amounts of scale for a more hefty price - after all, if the sales are automated, you get a bidding war for attention between different advertisers, and you're paying for clicks.
so you can see how this was a strategic move for google - they already had the most valuable data available in this situation. they were seeing in real time what people were searching for, and using the programmatic ad serving system, you could effectively bid not just for general attention - but for attention with an intent to buy.
...and the way that google got this data is because they indexed the web, using bots. at least GoogleBot would identify itself as a site visitor, but in the meantime they developed a service for websites to comprehensively track their own visitors and where they were coming from and what they were doing on your website. incidentally, you could also put on google's ads on your webpage to earn quite a bit of money, as content relevant ads would be shown through the doubleclick system.
this kicked off two things:
one, the ability to classify your website visitors into different clusters and segments allowed businesses to start tailoring the appearance of the website or service to fit that specific audience segment, starting off the great fracture - segmentation of the web (in the sense that two people viewing the same website at the same time were not seeing the same thing)
two, it created a very strong financial incentive for people to trick google into thinking they were having actual human visitors that would click on ads, when in fact they were bots. in an even funnier twist, some of them were from browser hijackers, commonly known as malware at the time, which google cross-financed. look up download valley and crossrider.
at the cross section of the above two, you had one interesting twist: websites that would appear differently to the security bots or the compliance officers of Google as they would to fake visitors or malware jacked human beings. the former would get a benign looking website, while the latter would get bombarded with auto clicking ads.
this kicked off the billion dollar arms race called online advertising fraud.
I'm not here to shed a tear for big money corps bleeding money. the real fallout lay somewhere else, but for that you have to understand that you never really saw the real internet, you only saw your corner and the one that was personalized for you.
but if you ever had the pleasure of watching daytime TVs or off channels and witnessing the ads, you could kind of infer what kind of audience must be watching these shows generally. from quite clear rip offs to magic number lotteries and television fortune telling, these sorts of programming was aimed at the most gullible, bought for pennies, where the smallest audience portion had to be converted into a money making operation.
...and with audience segmentation and data gathering, that was now possible at unprecedented scale, automatically. so big was the scale in fact, that it gave birth to an entire new beast of an industry called affiliate marketing, where instead of a regular payroll, you'd get a cut of the sale should you figure out an angle on where to push whatever fucking bullshit the vendors were offering to whoever the fuck would be dumb enough to click on an ad and buy. (the funniest story I recall was someone pulling five figures a month because he figured out that if you buy ads on anime-hentai pages and sell PUA shit courses and e-books you'd make a killing)
at any rate, affiliate marketing brought with it the killer landing page, the thing that's supposed to hammer the nail in the coffin once you get through the banner ad. the earliest form of deceptiveness in memory comes from various pirate sites, that had fake download buttons as banner ads and virus alerts as the landing pages. but then at some point, some schmuck realized that for certain type of products, like diet pills or forex trading or whatever, the best lander is in fact a fake news page that comes packed with comments and all. that would convert like crazy, because it had the appearance of social proof.
until at least the lawsuits came raining down, and these sorts of landing pages and campaigns for being banned left right and centre on all platforms. which just launched a new arms race as the campaigns would be disguised for the bots doing the checkups, and aged facebook profiles would start selling for like 5K USD - these people were making 30-40k a day, they could afford to spend that much to continue running the shop.
speaking of facebook - it came just about the right time for the shit to brew max total. first they were unprecedented in the amount of data they were getting off of their users, and they came just in time to catch the full swing of what we call the 'responsive web' - that no user at the same time would see the same thing on their page, it was all allocated through an intricate web of recommendations, running real time, based on previously gathered and forecast behavioral data.
it also ran on one simple premise: take over the starting page position from google for most people, then they do not have to justify, ever, any ad spend that takes place on their platform, as long as it performs. furthermore, it was completely lacking any revenue share sort of scheme (save for the short period of facebook gaming, see Zynga), thus there was no incentive for the amount of bot traffic that the previous internet era had bred. instead, it came with an entirely different one - bots that would offer social proof in the way of shares and likes, but would not directly risk the business model, thus giving no incentive for facebook to fight them. (note that google didn't do much jack shit either besides indiscriminately penalizing websites it deemed suspicious when they reached critical payout thresholds)
the rest of the story you kind of sort of know. how the obama campaign was brilliant in using the new social media to inspire hope and blah blah blah, kicking the door open for big money politics who could hire the best snake oil salesmen in the market, who had the data and as you can see from the above, had the ethical standards of a shoe. at around 2014-2015 the press (the mainstream media) started to raise question about the duopoly, the buzzword of filter bubbles started appearing, not entirely unrelated to the fact that facebook by this time cannibalized their traffic with a fucking embedded share / like button and started charging money for them to reach their own audience. after 2016 the cries of fake news were everywhere, because there was no online space left which everyone was viewing the same way, and you had no way to verify what the person next to you was looking at.
since then, we've all become grandpa yelling at the television set, with nobody around us seeing what we're seeing on the screen, so we're being accused as bots and looking for bots under the carpet.
but it's been a long way coming, and the bots are honestly the least of our worries. trust me, I went bankrupt over that one. truth or fake doesn't even begin to describe the magnitude of the problem: more like we entered the phase where every word, event or picture is defined by who ever the fuck wins the auction over it, as the marketers of human attention grind the gears of the money mill without even understanding how fast they're digging towards hell.
don't believe me? look around the marketing and advertising related subs these days. the priests are eating the indulgences, and we're only now entering the period of deep fakes, good algo generated audio and good enough NLP. and in the meantime, the shadowrunners running up between two corp headquarter-highrises are skinning your belief systems.
so the best you can do is really, not litter the remnants of cyberspace which are not being mined, astroturfed or being pulled apart by the algos. no human connections on a nuclear trash heap mate.

The Daily Autist

03/24/20

Hot Off The Spectrum

TLDR of the News to Inform Your Moves (Monday was a lot. Even my post is long)

What’s up sluts. I’m back with another burst of autism. I’ve been Rick fuggin Rollin in the tendies (AKA not hemorrhaging money) and these posts have been fairly accurate. I’ll be adding plays to the NostraLosses section as a result to bring more clarity to my dumbass takes.
FIRST THINGS FUCKING FIRST THE ORIGINAL AUTIST ARTIST WHO DREW THE OLD LOGO HAS COME TO LIGHT IM SO FUCKING HAPPY. We’ll never get it back, but sometimes closure on it’s own feels good enough. What am I a fucking teenager? The rest of the sub was shit yesterday/this morning.I was shadowbanned for posting “Fear mongering Corona Content,” and yet 75% of the sub’s hot posts are exactly that but with even less info than I had. Rest is memes. No plays or info. Honestly kinda sad.
https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/fnpz20/hey_yall_i_drew_the_original_baby_ama/
Obligatory Corona Dump (Monday news could not stop throating COVID content)
Things are in such a Twilight Zone State Amazon is getting credit for being “altruistic,” like they didn’t hike up prices since late January themselves and only altered their practices once Trump threatened Defense Production Act (DPA) notice they’re also only suspending, so once things are just slightly back to normal please price gouge errthang.
https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3076638/amazon-suspends-almost-4000-seller-accounts-unfairly-priced-products
Costco is also getting unwarranted credit. They won’t take back your tower of toilet paper or tub of hand sanitizer, which COSTS them money they already made. Did they have any problem hiking the price, refusing to limit sales per person, not give their employees PPE, or donate any relief from their excess food products due to banning eating at the location and numbers going down? Nah? ok. So the good guy is the company that profited off of fear and won’t provide the minimum financial relief to those who thought it was that extreme. Stop demonizing your fellow worker citizens.
https://brobible.com/culture/article/costco-toilet-paper-returns-hoarders/
Companies getting high praise and both articles implying a return to normalcy soon. How does that affect the markets? Normies are being told everything is okay and they will follow suit. Is everything okay? Absolutely not. These MFs in charge just announced unlimited QE yesterday nothing’s okay financially. Retard normie pump coming in.
Financial News:
Trump is saying that unless 10,000 die in the streets soon he’s gonna “re-open” the economy after the 15 days. At this point it’s a bit of a walking Onion article. Thursday?” ITS A WAR WE WILL CAPTURE AND KNIFE COVID’S ASSHOLE”. Friday? “This is serious. I do not want to use any drastic measures but I will. This is very verry serious.” Monday? “Isn’t being stuck inside fucking wack? Let’s open the pit up bro” I recommend watching the video with subtitles to get a transcript of his speech patterns.
https://www.reuters.com/video/watch/america-will-again-and-soon-be-open-for-id701434357?chan=9qsux198
I predicted the Fed couldn’t devalue the dollar as fast as other countries could want it and it seems to be holding up. A very small dip from the news they’re willing to print unlimited moneys? The global economy is in trouble if that's still the stability bearer. Puts are lookin good, but they need to be farther out. 04/17 soonest for my comfort. Especially with the temporary re-open of the US economy. Seeing Reuters use “money bazooka,’ multiple times in the last week has been fantastic.
https://www.reuters.com/article/global-forex/forex-dollar-slips-as-feds-money-bazooka-raises-hopes-of-easier-cash-supply-idUSL4N2BH2AF
Italy’s debt, tax, and unemployment relief are all being held up by congressional disputes and an ability to only handle a tenth of the paperwork that comes in. Sound familiar? Maybe ominous? The population density in regions of Italy is our closest analog to how a free (eat my dick South Korea) country is gonna get hit. Their healthcare system is also tainted by for-profit companies and insurance so it’s also pretty similar medical coverage wise per capita.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-banks-insight/banks-struggle-to-ride-to-the-rescue-in-europes-cash-crunch-battle-idUSKBN21B0OE
United Airlines is threatening to fire workers if they don’t get a bailout. I hope to fuck this is the tipping point and the government forces United to hand over their payroll list so the gov. Provide financial relief to their employees while United liquidates their assets or sells to some Saudi Conglomerate. Effect on market? PUTS ON UNITED BITCH THEY GOIN OUT
https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/03/20/819401028/united-airlines-threatens-to-cut-jobs-if-coronavirus-aid-package-isnt-passed (From 03/20 but was drowned out by other news. Looks more and more likely airlines won’t be bailed out)
Everyday Fox business posts something for Boomers to buy more Ford or Dine stocks (idk what old people buy) and today they have some good ammo. Overnight futures were up. Pre-market today as of 06:31 EST is $234.72 after touching 238. Looks like today is going to be the bull trap day as the rumors of stimulus are hot again. If it gets passed I expect a 245-248 top before the unemployment numbers Thursday fist everyone. Market effect? Short term calls as everyone gets high on optimism and long term puts for when they come down.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/stock-futures-gain-ground-as-congress-moves-closer-to-a-stimulus-deal
Crypto is taking off after tanking yesterday. Overnight rally (NZ markets followed by Asian markets) carried it up 14% in the last 16 hours. It started to rise slowly after the QE announcement but really flew overnight and this morning. Cooling off now but already had a dip to 6650 and right back up to 6700+ While not always correlated, crypto is a key indicator right now in speculative confidence while people are budgeting for maintaining their lives versus increasing their future wealth. No link because every crypto site is owned by a Ponzi schemer. Fight me and my tinfoil fucking hat. Here are some squigglies and bars
https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/BTCUSD/?exchange=BITBAY
My NostraLosses Prediction? The rumors of stimulus and the passed unlimited QE will provide market optimism today and tomorrow. Thursday’s unemployment numbers is the next scheduled big news so I wouldn’t get any short term puts unless scalping. If anything unexpected news could bring the market even higher with it being random good news versus any random catastrophic news. Market open will be up about 6% from the previous day’s close, so I expect a short term dip at open which would be a good spot to get quick calls to then ride the pump. Market closes above 235 and if stimulus passes along with more false optimism statements by Trump there’s possibly a sharp bull run to 245-248 by end of Wednesday.
Plays to follow:
SPY: 240c 03/27 once the first dip of day happens. If your bankroll allows for a few days farther out I would go for it. If SPY does hit 240, SELL call and BUY put for 228 04/01 at soonest.
DIA: 190P 04/17 It hasn’t fallen nearly as hard as it should (another 5% imo) and the industries making it up are going to have numbers showing how bad the payroll cuts and profit loss has been. During today’s pump get some not so fucking expensive puts (made sure not to say cheap)
Any Stupid Tech Company: Retarded OTM call for 03/27 or later. With so many people being stuck at home the last week or so the tech companies are outperforming the market with the idea that: The high user rate means more $$$, but if there’s more people on because they are not working or laid off, how do they have the money to buy shitty sponsored products on their feed? The kicker here is ads have always had near useless efficacy rates on social media so the fact they will continue to do a shit job might not change much. Anyway people are fucking dumb and tech gonna continue to rally this week. Signed, someone with 1.5k in TWTR Puts expiring over next 4 weeks.
Most people don’t even give you one play. I’m giving you multiple ways to lose your money.
TLDR of my TLDR: Companies who profited off the crisis getting karma points for no reason. Normies think the crisis will be over next Friday. International currencies are still erratic but the markets are rallying today globally (sign of lacking underlying stability for said rally). Italy can’t pass anything or handle the paperwork from their previously set up process (AKA USA in 7-10 days under current stimulus proposals) and they don’t have a solution in sight. Stimulus has everyone rock hard for calls again, ride the short term rise and pick up puts while you’re up there. Just be a long term gay bear experimenting with bulls depending on the day.
Results on my thoughts from last post 03/23: I was incorrect on circuit breaker open but was only 1% away and it did run up mid-day as called. So if you sold at 218 to buy calls to sell a few hours later, we nailed it boys. If you were aiming for price instead of time, it never hit 234 again which was a key test and you’re likely sitting on a fat red option right now. I was about half right which is all you need to be. I’ve also switched up Market affect and effect because I’m retarded and am unsure which is right anymore. Nvm grammarly fixed it.
And again, I mean this sincerely,

This is just a plain list that records the notable cases about China's recent economic woes.
China is rumoured to delay indefinitely its US-China phase one trade deal (fact sheet PDF) implementation that includes the increase of China's purchasing American products & services by at least $200 billion over the next two years, which is almost twice the size of what China purchased before the trade war began.
Okay.
And according to Tianyancha (天眼查), Chinese commercial database that compiles public records; more than 460,000 companies in China closed permanently in Q1 2020, with more than half of them having operated for under three years. [LINK]
Of course, this is mainly caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, what's interesting to me is the following part: "more than half of them having operated for under three years." What happened three years ago?
Once you figure out how big the trade war has played in China's recent economic woes (the article samples listed below may help),
the real question is whose investment or money in China was getting destroyed especially for the last three years.
Other than the article samples listed below, two other data elements that would need to be assessed are: 1) financial loss from the US' blocking Huawei mobile OS & 5G and 2) financial loss from BRI projects.
With CCP, who has been working with Huawei as a team for a long time? [1] [2] [3]
........................................
☞ Tale of How Shanghai clique and Prominent Globalists Got Together.
........................................
Sep 09, 2015 -- Fortune Reports: The real ticking time bomb in China’s economy [LINK]
"[China's] Local governments have borrowed this money with the blessing of China’s central government. In fact, China’s much-lauded $570 billion stimulus package in 2008, which dwarfed the American response to its crisis relative to each country’s respective GDP was funded mostly by local government debt. That program helped power China’s economic growth since 2008, but the dividends are now drying up. As Chinese growth slows, the central government is worried about the local governments’ abilities to finance the debt.
China could continue to kick the can down the road by bailing out its insolvent local governments. But this would run counter to President Xi Jinping’s efforts to curb the power of local officials and shift China’s growth model from investment led to consumption led. Last week, Beijing placed a $16 trillion yuan cap on Chinese government debt, up $600 million yuan from a cap it set last year. And this is after the government has been swapping debt with local governments, buying up real estate-financed local debt in place of government debt officially backed by the Chinese government."
Aug 24, 2016 -- SCMP: Wanted posters for fugitive debtors and runaway bosses symptoms of China’s economic woes [LINK]
"In the first seven months of this year, there were 38 instances of default by 18 bond issuers on the mainland, six of them SOEs. The defaults involved 24.8 billion yuan, more than double the total for the past two years combined. And while only a third of issuers in default this year were SOEs, they accounted for about two-thirds of the amount in default."
Jul 12, 2017 -- The Nikkei Reports: China government auditor flags dodgy books at key state companies [LINK]
"China's National Audit Office) delved into financial statements from 20 of the 101 state enterprises directly controlled by the central government, focusing on filings from the year 2015. The records are notoriously difficult for outsiders to access, as many of the companies are core unlisted units of major state-backed business groups.
Improprieties were unearthed at 18 of the 20, including 200.1 billion yuan ($29.4 billion) in revenue inflation over the last several years and roughly 20.3 billion yuan in improperly booked profit. Culprits included China National Petroleum, one of the country's largest oil producers; China National Chemical, or ChemChina, which recently acquired Switzerland's Syngenta, the world's top maker of agrochemicals; and China Baowu Steel Group."
........................................
2018
........................................
Jul 16: China’s $42-Trillion Debt Bubble Looms Larger than Trade War [LINK]
Oct 10: Financial woes build for HNA Group, forcing sale of subsidiaries and property [LINK]
........................................
2019
........................................
Jan 25: Sinopec Says It Lost $688 Million on ‘Misjudged’ Oil Prices [LINK]
Jun 11: China’s debt disease might wreck its uncrashable housing market [LINK]
Jul 18: More than 50 companies reportedly pull production out of China due to trade war [LINK]
Jul 19: China Minsheng Investment says it cannot repay the principal and interest on US$500 million of bonds as its debt woe deteriorates [LINK]
Sep 06: China Injects $126 Billion Into Its Slowing Economy [LINK]
Oct 06: China's foreign exchange reserves fallen to mere $3.1 trillion USD [LINK]
Nov 06: China Embraces Bankruptcy, U.S.-Style, to Cushion a Slowing Economy [LINK]
Nov 25: China Faces Biggest State Firm Offshore Debt Failure in 20 Years [LINK]
Nov 28: Chinese navy set to build fourth aircraft carrier, but plans for a more advanced ship are put on hold [LINK]
Dec 02: Tech Firm Peking University Founder Welches on USD 284 Million SCP, Has USD 43 Billion Debt [LINK]
Dec 02: Sinopec Group Slims Down Amid Push to Reinvigorate State Firms [LINK]
Dec 13: Fact Sheet: Agreement Between The United States Of America And The People’s Republic Of China Text [PDF LINK]
Dec 19: Money has been leaving China at a record rate. Beijing is battling to stem the tide [LINK]

Money was leaving the country at a record clip earlier this year through unauthorized channels, according to analysts. That's bad news for China, which needs to keep financial reserves high to maintain confidence in its markets.

........................................
2020
........................................
Feb 03: Coronavirus May Delay Hard-Fought U.S. Trade Wins in China [LINK]
Feb 16: China's Evergrande to offer 25% discount for all properties on sale in Feb, March [LINK]
Apr 02: Luckin Coffee stock tanks 80% after discovery that COO fabricated about $310 million in sales [LINK]
Apr 08: Chinese e-learning king TAL Education admits inflated sales [LINK]

Chinese law prohibits Chinese companies from submitting to normal U.S. auditing standards, and four Senators have already introduced a bill requiring them to do so. Should Trump be reelected ... either Beijing will relent on auditing standards or Chinese firms may start to face U.S. delisting threat.

Jul 14: Chinese $2.8bn memory chip project goes bust [LINK]

A Chinese company that launched a $2.8 billion government-backed semiconductor project four years ago is going bankrupt after it failed to attract investors, even as China tries to become self-sufficient in computer chips.

Jul 16: TSMC plans to halt chip supplies to Huawei in 2 months [LINK]
Jul 16: The $52 Trillion Bubble: China Grapples With Epic Property Boom [LINK]
Aug 26: U.S. Penalizes 24 Chinese Companies Over Role in South China Sea [LINK]
Aug 31: China’s Economy Shrinks, Ending a Nearly Half-Century of Growth [LINK]
Sep 09: Hongxin Semiconductor, promised China's first 7 nm chips, has gone bust [LINK]

A government-backed semiconductor manufacturing project based in the central Chinese city of Wuhan has gone belly-up, with key operator HSMC mired in debt. The local government said the project amounts to nearly RMB 128 billion (around $18.7 billion) in investment.

Sep 22: Huawei chairman urges U.S. to reconsider 'attack' on global supply chain [LINK]
Oct 13: EU imposes 48% tariffs on aluminium products from China [LINK]
Oct 18: China's economic growth drops to the lowest level since 1992 [LINK]
Oct 27: China’s Failing Small Banks Are Becoming a Big Problem [LINK]

The reality is that Beijing doesn’t have the wherewithal to guarantee the future of hundreds of smaller, provincial financial institutions that together sit on 73.4 trillion ($11 trillion USD) of yuan of total liabilities.

​
------------------------
☞ Go Back to the Short Story.
----

Introduction
Just thought it might be interesting to discuss the thought that one day the CS market will die.
With real-life markets, there is the expectation that companies, currencies, and commodities will continue to be relevant/traded for decades. This means that they can be invested in for long term gains.
Can the same be said for the CS:GO market? The prices in the market are determined by a multitude of factors, but the most important of which is simply the demand/relevancy of CSGO.
I personally don't think it will happen for at least a few more years. But seriously think, will there be a market for CS items in 10 years? 20 years?
It just interests me because I always see people say they're 'holding items for the long term' but how does that translate when the market lifespan could be finite.
_
About me (if you care)
I've been playing CSGO on and off since my late teens and started investing since Cologne 2014.
Back then I thought a Katowice sticker selling for more than £10 was a joke.
For transparency, The main investments I hold are Cologne 2014, Dreamhack 2014, Katowice 2015, Sticker capsule 2s and Winter offensive cases. All bought during their respective steam sales.
Most of my investments have been cashed out recently (thank you China) with my inventory only being around 20% of what it once was.
IRL I'm involved in financial management for work but I do not regularly trade on the forex/stock market. My knowledge of markets and trends is from parts of my professional qualification and personal experience.
_
What would be the cause of the markets death?
There are a few factors that could cause CS GO and the demand for items to fall to near zero:

• Slow decline in player numbers - As the game ages, the player base could move on to other games/commitments or Valve could put out bad updates or. So far this isn't the case since the player base is still growing.
  
• Fast decline in player numbers - A sudden drop due to a new game with its own market. This would cause a mass migration of cash/assets from one game to the other.
  
• Market/Game glitches - As seen with the recent TF 2 bug, the risk of holding virtual items is high. The incompetence of a developer could cause your items to be worthless overnight.
  
• Legislation (cases) - Quite simply an unforeseen change to loot box mechanics could drastically change the way items themselves are generated.
  
• Legislation (cashing out) - Valve or other third parties could enforce stricter rules of sites like Bitskins that cut-off the liquidity of items. We've seen some crackdown of this type in the trade bans of betting sites and 7-day restriction.
  

_
What are the factors that could extend the longevity of the market?
These are quite obviously the opposite of the above factors.

• CS maintains its popularity and entices new players either with new updates or marketing - We can see one example of this with the recent push for CS in China. I know its a stretch but could we one day see CS blow up in India?
  
• CS Cements itself in the industry as the gold standard for shooters and transcends the limits of time, kind of the same as above - Whether this is by maintaining a competitive scene or by pushing updates, including graphical updates. We can already see that the game has become F2P which means it has a long potential life.
  
• If we avoid any of the negative factors.
  

_
Questions

• When do you think the market will die? (Or will it stay around forever?)
  
• Do you think it will be a dramatic crash or a slow death?
  
• Considering the sizeable risk involved with the market, shouldn't investors adopt a prudent approach to cashing out profits? Eg regularly cashing out at different points to mitigate the inherent market risk?
  

Thanks for reading and I'd be interested to read other peoples thoughts.

Almost every day people come to this subreddit asking the same basic questions over and over again. I've put this guide together to point you in the right direction and help you get started on your forex journey.
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A quick background on me before you ask: My name is Bob, I'm based out of western Canada. I started my forex journey back in January 2018 and am still learning. However I am trading live, not on demo accounts. I also code my own EA's. I not certified, licensed, insured, or even remotely qualified as a professional in the finance industry. Nothing I say constitutes financial advice. Take what I'm saying with a grain of salt, but everything I've outlined below is a synopsis of some tough lessons I've learned over the last year of being in this business.
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LET'S GET SOME UNPLEASANTNESS OUT OF THE WAY
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I'm going to call you stupid. I'm also going to call you dumb. I'm going to call you many other things. I do this because odds are, you are stupid, foolish,and just asking to have your money taken away. Welcome to the 95% of retail traders. Perhaps uneducated or uninformed are better phrases, but I've never been a big proponent of being politically correct.
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Want to get out of the 95% and join the 5% of us who actually make money doing this? Put your grown up pants on, buck up, and don't give me any of this pc "This is hurting my feelings so I'm not going to listen to you" bullshit that the world has been moving towards.
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Let's rip the bandage off quickly on this point - the world does not give a fuck about you. At one point maybe it did, it was this amazing vision nicknamed the American Dream. It died an agonizing, horrible death at the hand of capitalists and entrepreneurs. The world today revolves around money. Your money, my money, everybody's money. People want to take your money to add it to theirs. They don't give a fuck if it forces you out on the street and your family has to live in cardboard box. The world just stopped caring in general. It sucks, but it's the way the world works now. Welcome to the new world order. It's called Capitalism.
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And here comes the next hard truth that you will need to accept - Forex is a cruel bitch of a mistress. She will hurt you. She will torment you. She will give you nightmares. She will keep you awake at night. And then she will tease you with a glimmer of hope to lure you into a false sense of security before she then guts you like a fish and shows you what your insides look like. This statement applies to all trading markets - they are cruel, ruthless, and not for the weak minded.
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The sooner you accept these truths, the sooner you will become profitable. Don't accept it? That's fine. Don't bother reading any further. If I've offended you I don't give a fuck. You can run back home and hide under your bed. The world doesn't care and neither do I.
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For what it's worth - I am not normally an major condescending asshole like the above paragraphs would suggest. In fact, if you look through my posts on this subreddit you will see I am actually quite helpful most of the time to many people who come here. But I need you to really understand that Forex is not for most people. It will make you cry. And if the markets themselves don't do it, the people in the markets will.
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LESSON 1 - LEARN THE BASICS
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Save yourself and everybody here a bunch of time - learn the basics of forex. You can learn the basics for free - BabyPips has one of the best free courses online which explains what exactly forex is, how it works, different strategies and methods of how to approach trading, and many other amazing topics.
​
You can access the BabyPips course by clicking this link: https://www.babypips.com/learn/forex
​
Do EVERY course in the School of Pipsology. It's free, it's comprehensive, and it will save you from a lot of trouble. It also has the added benefit of preventing you from looking foolish and uneducated when you come here asking for help if you already know this stuff.
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If you still have questions about how forex works, please see the FREE RESOURCES links on the /Forex FAQ which can be found here: https://www.reddit.com/Forex/wiki/index
​
Quiz Time
Answer these questions truthfully to yourself:
​
-What is the difference between a market order, a stop order, and a limit order?
-How do you draw a support/resistance line? (Demonstrate it to yourself)
-What is the difference between MACD, RSI, and Stochastic indicators?
-What is fundamental analysis and how does it differ from technical analysis and price action trading?
-True or False: It's better to have a broker who gives you 500:1 margin instead of 50:1 margin. Be able to justify your reasoning.
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If you don't know to answer to any of these questions, then you aren't ready to move on. Go back to the School of Pipsology linked above and do it all again.
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If you can answer these questions without having to refer to any kind of reference then congratulations, you are ready to move past being a forex newbie and are ready to dive into the wonderful world of currency trading! Move onto Lesson 2 below.
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LESSON 2 - RANDOM STRANGERS ARE NOT GOING TO HELP YOU GET RICH IN FOREX
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This may come as a bit of a shock to you, but that random stranger on instagram who is posting about how he is killing it on forex is not trying to insprire you to greatness. He's also not trying to help you. He's also not trying to teach you how to attain financial freedom.
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99.99999% of people posting about wanting to help you become rich in forex are LYING TO YOU.
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Why would such nice, polite people do such a thing? Because THEY ARE TRYING TO PROFIT FROM YOUR STUPIDITY.
​
Plain and simple. Here's just a few ways these "experts" and "gurus" profit from you:
​

• Referral Links - If they require you to click a specific link to signup for something, it means they are an affiliate. They get a commission from whatever the third party is that they are sending you to. I don't care if it's a brokerage, training program, hell even an Amazon link to a book - if they insist you have to click their super exclusive, can't-get-this-deal-any-other-way-but-clicking-my-link type bullshit, it's an affiliate link. There is nothing inherently wrong with affiliate programs, but you are literally generating money for some stranger because they convinced you to buy something. Some brokers such as ICMarkets have affiliate programs that payout a percentage of the commission you generate - this is a really clever system - whether you profit or blow your entire account, the person who referred you to the broker makes a profit off you. Clever eh?
• Signal Services, Education & Training Programs, Courses - If somebody is telling you they are making a killing with a signal service and are trying to convince you to join it, I guarantee they are getting a piece of your monthly fee. And better still, these signal services often work...for about a week. Just long enough to suck a bunch of poor fools into it. You see people making money, you want in so you agree to pay the $200+/month subscription fee. You follow the signals and it looks like it's making money for a few days or weeks. Then it turns sideways, you start losing money hand over fist. Pretty soon you have lost most of your trading account because you blindly followed a signal service. And better still - when you go screaming at the person running the signal service they will be very quick to point you to their No Refunds policy. To add insult to injury, the buttfucker that referred you to the signal service in the past will likely listen to you getting mad, and then come back with something like "Sorry it didn't work out, but I just joined this other amazing service and it's working great, you should come join it to earn your money back. Here's my link..." You get the point here right?
• Multi-Level Marketing (MLMs) - These people are scum. They are going to offer you training and education, signals, access to forex experts and gurus, and all kinds of other shit with the promise that you will live the dream and become financially free. They are also loading you into a pyrmaid scheme where you will be hounded to recruit other people and make money off them just like you got roped into it. A really prime example here is iMarkets Live (or IML for short). Don't touch this shit with a 10 foot pole. I don't care what they are claiming, you will lose everything using them.
• Fund Managers - These people make my skin crawl. It's a classic scam and it works like this - somebody will post online about how much money they are making trading forex/commodities/stocks/whatever. Most of the time they won't explicitly post they are offering a trading service, rather they just put the message out there and wait for the ignorant masses (that's you) to contact them. They will charm you. They will lie to you. They will promise you the moon if you simply wire them some money or give them API access to your trading account. Care to guess what happens next? If you send a wire transfer (or Western Union...hell any kind of payment to them) they will vanish. Happens usually after they take a bunch of suckers for the ride. You sent them $2,000 and so do 9 other suckers. They just made $20,000 and are gone. With API access to your account, you will find your account gets blown super fast or worse - possibly leaving you open to persecution by the broker you are using.

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These are just a few examples. The reality is that very few people make it big in forex or any kind of trading. If somebody is trying to sell you the dream, they are essentially a magician - making you look the other way while they snatch your wallet and clean you out.
​
Additionally, on the topic of fund managers - legitimate fund managers will be certified, licensed, and insured. Ask them for proof of those 3 things. What they typically look like are:

• Certified - This varies from country to country, in the US it's FINRA (http://www.finra.org). They need to have their Series 7 certification minimum. You can make the case that other FINRA certifications are acceptable in lieu of Series 7, but the 7 is the gold standard.
• Licensed - They need to have a valid business license issued by the government. It must clearly state they are an investment company, preferrably a hedge fund because they have some super strict requirements to operate (and often require $25,000+ in fees just to get their business license, so you know they at least have some skin in the game).
• Insured - They need to be backed by an insurance company. I'm not talking general insurance for shit like their office burning down. I'm talking about a government-implemented protection insurance program - in the US I believe that is issued by the Securities Investment Protection Corporation (https://www.sipc.org/).

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If you are talking to a fund manager and they are insisting they have all of these, get a copy of their verification documents and lookup their licenses on the directories of the issuers to verify they are valid. If they are, then at least you are talking to somebody who seems to have their shit together and is doing investment management and trading as a professional and you are at least partially protected when the shit hits the fan.
​
​
LESSON 3 - UNDERSTAND YOUR RISK
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Many people jump into Forex, drop $2000 into a broker account and start trading 1 lot orders because they signed up with a broker thinking they will get rich because they were given 500:1 margin and can risk it all on each trade. Worst-case scenario you lose your account, best case scenario you become a millionaire very quickly. Seems like a pretty good gamble right? You are dead wrong.
​
As a new trader, you should never risk more than 1% of your account balance on a trade. If you have some experience and are confident and doing well, then it's perfectly natural to risk 2-3% of your account per trade. Anybody who risks more than 4-5% of their account on a single trade deserves to blow their account. At that point you aren't trading, you are gambling. Don't pretend you are a trader when really you are just putting everything on red and hoping the roulette ball lands in the right spot. It's stupid and reckless and going to screw you very quickly.
​
Let's do some math here:
​
You put $2,000 into your trading account.
Risking 1% means you are willing to lose $20 per trade. That means you are going to be trading micro lots, or 0.01 lots most likely ($0.10/pip). At that level you can have a trade stop loss at -200 pips and only lose $20. It's the best starting point for anybody. Additionally, if you SL 20 trades in a row you are only down $200 (or 10% of your account) which isn't that difficult to recover from.
Risking 3% means you are willing to lose $60 per trade. You could do mini lots at this point, which is 0.1 lots (or $1/pip). Let's say you SL on 20 trades in a row. You've just lost $1,200 or 60% of your account. Even veteran traders will go through periods of repeat SL'ing, you are not a special snowflake and are not immune to periods of major drawdown.
Risking 5% means you are willing to lose $100 per trade. SL 20 trades in a row, your account is blown. As Red Foreman would call it - Good job dumbass.
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Never risk more than 1% of your account on any trade until you can show that you are either consistently breaking even or making a profit. By consistently, I mean 200 trades minimum. You do 200 trades over a period of time and either break-even or make a profit, then you should be alright to increase your risk.
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Unfortunately, this is where many retail traders get greedy and blow it. They will do 10 trades and hit their profit target on 9 of them. They will start seeing huge piles of money in their future and get greedy. They will start taking more risk on their trades than their account can handle.
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200 trades of break-even or profitable performance risking 1% per trade. Don't even think about increasing your risk tolerance until you do it. When you get to this point, increase you risk to 2%. Do 1,000 trades at this level and show break-even or profit. If you blow your account, go back down to 1% until you can figure out what the hell you did differently or wrong, fix your strategy, and try again.
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Once you clear 1,000 trades at 2%, it's really up to you if you want to increase your risk. I don't recommend it. Even 2% is bordering on gambling to be honest.
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LESSON 4 - THE 500 PIP DRAWDOWN RULE
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This is a rule I created for myself and it's a great way to help protect your account from blowing.
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Sometimes the market goes insane. Like really insane. Insane to the point that your broker can't keep up and they can't hold your orders to the SL and TP levels you specified. They will try, but during a flash crash like we had at the start of January 2019 the rules can sometimes go flying out the window on account of the trading servers being unable to keep up with all the shit that's hitting the fan.
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Because of this I live by a rule I call the 500 Pip Drawdown Rule and it's really quite simple - Have enough funds in your account to cover a 500 pip drawdown on your largest open trade. I don't care if you set a SL of -50 pips. During a flash crash that shit sometimes just breaks.
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So let's use an example - you open a 0.1 lot short order on USDCAD and set the SL to 50 pips (so you'd only lose $50 if you hit stoploss). An hour later Trump makes some absurd announcement which causes a massive fundamental event on the market. A flash crash happens and over the course of the next few minutes USDCAD spikes up 500 pips, your broker is struggling to keep shit under control and your order slips through the cracks. By the time your broker is able to clear the backlog of orders and activity, your order closes out at 500 pips in the red. You just lost $500 when you intended initially to only risk $50.
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It gets kinda scary if you are dealing with whole lot orders. A single order with a 500 pip drawdown is $5,000 gone in an instant. That will decimate many trader accounts.
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Remember my statements above about Forex being a cruel bitch of a mistress? I wasn't kidding.
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Granted - the above scenario is very rare to actually happen. But glitches to happen from time to time. Broker servers go offline. Weird shit happens which sets off a fundamental shift. Lots of stuff can break your account very quickly if you aren't using proper risk management.
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LESSON 5 - UNDERSTAND DIFFERENT TRADING METHODOLOGIES
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Generally speaking, there are 3 trading methodologies that traders employ. It's important to figure out what method you intend to use before asking for help. Each has their pros and cons, and you can combine them in a somewhat hybrid methodology but that introduces challenges as well.
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In a nutshell:

• Price Action Trading (Sometimes called Naked Trading) is very effective at identifying when trends will start and finish. This gives you the advantage of staying ahead of the market and predicting when a change in trend direction will occur. It has the disadvantage of being really easy to screw it up if you don't plot your support and resistance lines properly and interpret the chart wrong. Because you can identify a change in trend direction, you'll generally make more profit on a new trend than a technical strategy will.
• Technical Analytics (or TA) uses math and statistics to try and identify where the market is headed or confirm/reject whether a trend is happening. It has the advantage of being very math and stat driven which is hard to refute the numbers, but it has the disadvantage of being late to the party when it comes to identifying trends (hence why people call TA a lagging strategy). When people fail using TA, it's not because of the math - it's because you misinterpreted what the math is telling you.
• Fundamental Analysis (or FA) uses news and macro scale events to predict what is going on. A really good example right now is Brexit, what a clusterfuck that is. Every time some major brexit news breaks it causes all sorts of choas in almost every currency pair. Fundamental trading has the highest potential profitability per trade but it also has the highest potential drawdown per trade.

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Now you may be thinking that you want to be a a price action trader - you should still learn the principles and concepts behind TA and FA. Same if you are planning to be a technical trader - you should learn about price action and fundamental analysis. More knowledge is better, always.
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With regards to technical analysis, you need to really understand what the different indicators are tell you. It's very easy to misinterpret what an indicator is telling you, which causes you to make a bad trade and lose money. It's also important to understand that every indicator can be tuned to your personal preferences.
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You might find, for example, that using Bollinger Bands with the normal 20 period SMA close, 2 standard deviation is not effective for how you look at the chart, but changing that to say a 20 period EMA average price, 1 standard deviation bollinger band indicator could give you significantly more insight.
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LESSON 6 - TIMEFRAMES MATTER
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Understanding the differences in which timeframes you trade on will make or break your chosen strategy. Some strategies work really well on Daily timeframes (i.e. Ichimoku) but they fall flat on their face if you use them on 1H timeframes, for example.
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There is no right or wrong answer on what timeframe is best to trade on. Generally speaking however, there are 2 things to consider:
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• Speed - If you are scalping (trading on the really fast candles like 1M, 5M, 15M, etc) odds are your trades are very short lived. Maybe 10 minutes to an hour tops. For the most part, scalping strategies will produce little profit per trade but make up for it in the sheer volume of trades. Whereas swing trading may only make a few trades but each one could be worth a significant amount of money.
• Spread (the fee you pay to the broker when you trade) - If you are a scalper, the spread is your worst enemy because you have to overcome it very fast to make a profit on your order. Whereas swing trading the spread hardly impacts you at all.

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If you are a total newbie to forex, I suggest you don't trade on anything shorter than the 1H timeframe when you are first learning. Trading on higher timeframes tends to be much more forgiving and profitable per trade. Scalping is a delicate art and requires finesse and can be very challenging when you are first starting out.
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LESSON 7 - AUTOBOTS...ROLL OUT!
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Yeah...I'm a geek and grew up with the Transformers franchise decades before Michael Bay came along. Deal with it.
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Forex bots are called EA's (Expert Advisors). They can be wonderous and devastating at the same time. /Forex is not really the best place to get help with them. That is what /algotrading is useful for. However some of us that lurk on /Forex code EA's and will try to assist when we can.
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Anybody can learn to code an EA. But just like how 95% of retail traders fail, I would estimate the same is true for forex bots. Either the strategy doesn't work, the code is buggy, or many other reasons can cause EA's to fail. Because EA's can often times run up hundreds of orders in a very quick period of time, it's critical that you test them repeatedly before letting them lose on a live trading account so they don't blow your account to pieces. You have been warned.
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If you want to learn how to code an EA, I suggest you start with MQL. It's a programming language which can be directly interpretted by Meta Trader. The Meta Trader terminal client even gives you a built in IDE for coding EA's in MQL. The downside is it can be buggy and glitchy and caused many frustrating hours of work to figure out what is wrong.
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If you don't want to learn MQL, you can code an EA up in just about any programming language. Python is really popular for forex bots for some reason. But that doesn't mean you couldn't do it in something like C++ or Java or hell even something more unusual like JQuery if you really wanted.
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I'm not going to get into the finer details of how to code EA's, there are some amazing guides out there. Just be careful with them. They can be your best friend and at the same time also your worst enemy when it comes to forex.
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One final note on EA's - don't buy them. Ever. Let me put this into perspective - I create an EA which is literally producing money for me automatically 24/5. If it really is a good EA which is profitable, there is no way in hell I'm selling it. I'm keeping it to myself to make a fortune off of. EA's that are for sale will not work, will blow your account, and the developer who coded it will tell you that's too darn bad but no refunds. Don't ever buy an EA from anybody.
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LESSON 8 - BRING ON THE HATERS
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You are going to find that this subreddit is frequented by trolls. Some of them will get really nasty. Some of them will threaten you. Some of them will just make you miserable. It's the price you pay for admission to the /Forex club.
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If you can't handle it, then I suggest you don't post here. Find a more newbie-friendly site. It sucks, but it's reality.
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We often refer to trolls on this subreddit as shitcunts. That's your word of the day. Learn it, love it. Shitcunts.
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YOU MADE IT, WELCOME TO FOREX!
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If you've made it through all of the above and aren't cringing or getting scared, then welcome aboard the forex train! You will fit in nicely here. Ask your questions and the non-shitcunts of our little corner of reddit will try to help you.
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Assuming this post doesn't get nuked and I don't get banned for it, I'll add more lessons to this post over time. Lessons I intend to add in the future:

• Demo Trading
• Why you will blow your first account and what to do when it happens
• Trading Psychology (this will be a beefy one and will take a while to put together)
• Exotics vs Majors and which you should focus on as a newbie (aka how to blow your account in a single trade with exotics)
• Which Broker Should You Use? (This is covered in pretty good detail on the FAQ already - https://www.reddit.com/Forex/wiki/index - so I may not bother)
• Hedging (there isn't really a good guide written on this anywhere)
• Doubling Your Risk to Save Your Ass or Lose a Shit Ton (aka Martingale & Anti-Martingale)
• Risk On/Off
• Forex Calendars
• Currency Strength / Heat Maps
• Swap
• Margin Calls (What are they and why are you getting them?)

If there is something else you feel should be included please drop a comment and I'll add it to the above list of pending topics.
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Cheers,
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Bob
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