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FOREX Strategies

What are FOREX Strategies?
https://preview.redd.it/ihmphstzguv51.jpg?width=960&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=81f6b73c367d8695605514f8d32aaf3e2aeabc6e
You may have noticed that most of people confuse the terminology and refer to FOREX Strategies in the wrong way. There are methodologies, systems, strategies, and techniques. The most effective methodology is Price Language (Trend Tracking). Combined with a correct reading of mass psychology presented by the charts.
We know that in the Stock Markets there are thousands of strategies. FOREX, like the rest of the markets, presents you with the opportunity to apply similar strategies to win consistently. Taking advantage of repetitive psychological patterns.
First, the Price Language methodology has created great fortunes in FOREX, and the next fortune may be yours. But this methodology must be implemented within a framework of advanced concepts of Markets. Without forgetting the basics. And working hard day by day.
Second, a strategy is a set of parameters and techniques that together give you the advantage to act in any situation. Thus for example in war, generals have attack strategies and counterattack strategies.
FOREX strategies alike are entry strategies and exit strategies. All beginners should know these FOREX strategies for beginners. That way you will get a general idea of the game and understand that trading is a war against the Market and its Specialists. Only applying FOREX strategies revealed by the same Specialists and using their own techniques,
... you can survive in this war.
Do not fall into the trap of the many "systems" and "methods" that are offered on the internet about operating in the FOREX Market. They just don't work in the long run. They are strategies based on indicators for the most part. Using rigid parameters. That if they can work and give profitability during a certain period of time, they will always reach a breaking point when the market changes its dynamics.
Instead, take advantage of your precious time and learn the Language of Price or Price Action.
The Language methodology will allow you to adapt to each new phase of the Market. If you combine this knowledge with the appropriate psychological concepts, you can live comfortably from speculation in FOREX.

Forex Trading Strategies Reddit - Basic FOREX Strategies

You have two basic FOREX strategies, one entry, and one exit. Both follow a general strategy that helps you capitalize on the collective behaviors of the Market. That is, of the total of participating speculators.
This behavior causes the formation of cycles that repeat over and over again. Driven by the basic emotions (uncertainty, greed, and panic) of the speculators involved that can be taken advantage of with the aforementioned FOREX strategies. Specialists identify these emotions in the order flow and capitalize on these events every hour, every day, and every month.
Basic FOREX Strategies - The Price Cycle
These repetitive cycles consist of 4 phases:

Accumulation
Upward trend
Distribution
Downward trend

https://preview.redd.it/6dvk2w0pduv51.png?width=300&format=png&auto=webp&s=a3ab65ca4eab6d20174b3327b862d8b59dcc13b7
The two trends can be easily identified by their notorious breakdown. And the two areas of uncertainty (accumulation and distribution), due to their notorious range trajectories.
This general behavior determines the core of our FOREX strategies.
You buy when the price of a pair has broken and has come out of one of its congestion formations (accumulation or distribution). You implement one of the Forex strategies, in this case, the entry one.
The multi-time technique will help you find the point of least risk when entering your initial buy or sell order. In the same way and using the same strategy but this time to close your position, the multiple timing technique will also show you how to close your operation obtaining the highest possible profit.
The most consistent way to extract profits in the market is by trading the start of trends within a cycle . Once confirmed by their respective breaks from the areas of uncertainty. This is the mother of all FOREX strategies . And in a market that operates 24 hours, we have more frequent cycles and therefore more opportunities.

Forex Trading Strategies Reddit - Advanced Forex Strategies

There are many advanced FOREX strategies that are generally used by professional speculators working for large financial firms.
Among these firms are banks, Investment Fund managers and Hedge Fund managers. The latter is an investment modality similar to Investment Funds, with the difference that Hedge Funds use more complex investment strategies. Its operations are more oriented to aggressive speculations in the short and medium-term.
Among the most common strategies is hedging (hedging), carry trade, automated systems based on quantum mathematics. And a large number of combinations between the different option strategies.

The Carry Trade

The central idea of Carry Trade is to buy a pair in which the base currency has a considerably higher interest rate than the quoted currency. To earn the difference in rates regardless of whether the price of the pair rises or falls.
Suppose we buy a $ 100,000 lot of AUDJPY, which according to the rates on the chart would turn out to be the ideal instrument in this example to use the Forex carry trade strategy.
As our capital is in US dollars we have to assume for our example, the following quotes necessary to perform the place calculations:
AUD / JPY = 80.00 USD / JPY = 85.00
What happens internally in your broker is this.

By placing as collateral $ 1,000 of your $ 50,000 of capital (assumed for this example), deposited in your account, you have access to $ 100,000 virtual (this is what is known as leverage); that is, you put in $ 1,000 and your broker lends you 99,000.
With those $ 100,000 virtual dollars, your broker borrows on your behalf ¥ 8,500,000 Japanese yen (85 × 100,000) at 0.1% annual interest from a Japanese bank.
With those ¥ 8,500,000 Japanese yen, your broker buys A $ 106,250 Australian dollars (8,500,000 / 80) and deposits it in an Australian bank where it receives 4.5% annual interest on your behalf.
One year later (and regardless of the profit or loss generated by the pair's movement), your profit will be the difference between the AUD rate and the JPY rate, that is:

Profit = (AUD rate) - (JPY rate) - (costs of the 2 currency exchanges) Profit = (4.5%) - (0.1%) - (0.1% to 1%)
The great advantage of carry trade FOREX strategies is that this percentage profit is applied to the $ 100,000 of the standard lot; the broker transfers all of the profit to you, even if you only contributed $ 1,000. On the other hand, if you carry out the inverse of this operation, this benefit of the Forex carry trade becomes a cost (swap), and you assume it completely.
Remember that FOREX carry trade strategies are recommended for pairs with considerable interest rate differences, such as the one we have just seen in our example.
These FOREX strategies should also not be used in isolation. The idea is that through technical analysis you identify when would be the ideal time to enter the market using your carry trade Forex strategy and multiply your profits considerably.

What FOREX Strategies Do Hedge Funds Use?

The FOREX strategies used by large fund managers do not constitute an advantage in terms of percentage results for them, nor do they constitute a competitive disadvantage for you.
The vast majority of them fail because of their big egos. In fact, there was a firm made up of great financial geniuses, including 2 winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics, who developed a strategy based on quantum mathematical calculations.
With an initial base capital of about 3 billion dollars, and after 3 successful years obtaining annual returns of over 40%, the firm Long-Term Capital Management, begins its fourth year with losses. To counteract these losses the geniuses decide to multiply the initial capital several times, while the losses continued.
The year closed with the bankruptcy of the fund, and with a total accumulated loss of 1 trillion dollars, due to the great leverage used. And all for not admitting that the FOREX Strategies of Long Term Capital Management were not in line with the dynamics of the Market.
There are an overwhelming number of opportunities in the stock markets to make money interpreting the Language of Price.
You don't need to use complex "advanced" strategies that have been created to handle hundreds or billions of dollars.
The reasons for using these FOREX strategies are very different from what a "retail trader" pursues with his small speculation business.
As you can see, you should not worry about wanting to integrate any of these advanced strategies into your arsenal. They are only beneficial for managing hundreds or billions of dollars, where the return parameters are very different when you handle small amounts of capital.
Do not worry about collecting hundreds of free FOREX strategies that circulate on the internet, that great accumulation of mediocre information will only serve to confuse you and waste your valuable time.
Spend that time learning Price Action,
… And you will always be one step behind the Specialists, identifying each new Market condition, and anticipating the vast majority of reversals of all prices.
Ironically, the most successful fund managers indicate that their most profitable trades are those based on the basic trend-following strategies of the Price Language. The same ones that you will learn in this Free Course.
Dedicate yourself to perfecting them and believe me you won't need anything else. As long as you have good risk management, taking into consideration the following points ...

Styles of Investments in FOREX

The Investment FOREX long term is not recommended for small investors like you and me. If we take into account the term investing literally as large investors do who buy a financial product today to sell it years later.
We both have a better niche in the short and medium-term.
You may have noticed that the big multi-year trends in the Forex Market do exist. But minor swings within a big trend are usually very wide.
These minor movements allow us to easily double and triple the annual return of the big general trend, motivating most traders to speculate in the short and medium-term.
These minor oscillations or trends that occur within the large multi-year trends owe their occurrence mainly to two reasons.
First, the FOREX Market presents 3 sessions a day each in different cities of the world with different time zones (Asia, Europe, and America). This causes more frequent trend changes than in the rest of the stock markets.
Second, the purpose for which it was created also plays a role. The modern Foreign Exchange Market, since its inception in 1972, was conceived by the global financial system as a tool for speculation. To obtain benefits in the short and medium-term (from several days to 1 year).
These two points are basically the reasons why we observe the immense speed with which the FOREX market changes trends.
For example, for those who live in America, in the early morning (Europe) the EURUSD pair may be on the rise, in the morning or afternoon (America) it may be down, and then finally at night (Asia) it may return to the rise.

Define your Own Style for your FOREX Investments

One of the first decisions you will have to make is to choose your style as a trader or investor.
There are 4 types of well-defined styles.
Most professional traders tend to have multiple styles, although they always identify with one primary style for their FOREX investments. Study the characteristics of the 4 main styles to make your investments in FOREX :
1. Long Term: recommended for anyone who is going to enter the market for the first time and who can dedicate a minimum of one hour per month to their investments in Forex. The period of an open position ranges from 1 year to 5 years.
2. Medium Term: recommended for anyone who is going to enter the market for the first time and who can dedicate a minimum of one hour per week to their investments in Forex. The period of an open position ranges from 1 month to 1 year.
3. Short Term: recommended for anyone who is going to enter the market for the first time, or who already has a certain time operating in the long and medium-term, showing constant profits, and who can dedicate a minimum of one hour per day to your investments in FOREX. The period of an open position ranges from 1 day to 1 month.
4. Intraday : recommended only for people with a fairly solid earnings record in the short term, and with a capital greater than $ 50,000. As we have noted, this option constitutes a full-time job.
People who start investing in FOREX , should start executing short-term (weeks) and medium-term (months) transactions only, and not pay attention to intraday oscillations (day trading).
If you are interested in being an intraday speculator, I recommend that you first exhaust at least a year doing operations in the short and medium-term to assimilate the correct strategies and to develop the necessary mentality to carry out this work.
The second option would be to participate in some kind of intensive training.
I remind you that self-educating is almost impossible in speculation. You are likely to accumulate a lot of knowledge by reading books and attending courses. But you will probably never learn to make money with all the incomplete "systems" circulating on the internet.

Mistakes to Avoid When Looking for Your Style

Many people who are new to FOREX investments make the mistake of combining these styles, which is a key to failure.
I recommend that if you are not getting the results you expected by adopting one of these styles, do not try to change it. The problem sure is not in the style, but in your strategies or in your psychology.
A successful investor is able to make a profit in any longer trading time than he is used to. I explain. If you are already a profitable operator in the short term, it is very likely that you will also be profitable in the medium and long term,
… As long as you can interpret the Language of Price or Price Action.
In the opposite case, the same would not happen. If you were a medium-term trader, you would need time to adjust to the intraday. The reality is that long, medium and short term traders have very similar personalities. The intraday trader is completely different.

The Myth of the Intraday in Investments in FOREX

If you are already successful in the short, medium and long term, you will notice that the sacrifice and the hours necessary in front of the computer to operate intraday is much greater. The intraday style will be useful to increase your account if it is less than USD $ 100,000 in a very short time in exchange for 8 to 12 hours a day of hard work but ...
You must first develop the necessary skills to operate the intraday.
The ideal is to combine all the styles to get more out of the Market and carry out more effective transactions and have a diversification in your investments in FOREX.
There are intraday traders that are very successful, but the reality is that there are very few in the world that make a profit year after year. If you want to become an intraday, you just have to prepare yourself properly through intensive training.
Otherwise, I recommend that you don't even think about educating yourself to adopt the intraday style. It is not necessary to go against a probability of failure greater than 99%. Unless
... your ego is greater than your common sense.
The main reason why this style of investments in FOREX is not recommended for the vast majority of us "retail investors" (the official term "retail traders"), is the high operational cost.
The real commissions in this market range between $ 2.0 and $ 2.50 for each lot of 100,000 virtual units. This means that a complete operation (opening and closing) is approximately $ 5.00, for each standard lot traded ($ 100,000 virtual).
Another fundamental reason is the advent of robotic traders (HFT = High-Frequency Trading), which tend to manipulate the market in the shorter intraday swings. Please do not confuse HFTs with automated systems that we find daily on the internet, and that can be purchased for a few hundred dollars and often for free on FOREX forums / groups.
These HFTs to which I refer, they are effective. They cost millions of dollars and have been developed by the large Wall Street financial firms to manage their investments in FOREX.
The reality of the intraday trader is that you execute orders for large lots at the same time, to profit from the smallest movements in the market. It is an activity based on reflexes. The slightest oversight or distraction can turn into a catastrophe for your FOREX investments.
I recommend that you start investing in FOREX using slow time periods such as H4 or Daily. For some reason, all Goldman Sachs intraday FOREX investments are made with algorithms.

Finally…

To choose your style as a trader and manage your investments in FOREX, first determine what your degree of experience is, analyze the points mentioned below and the rest you will discover when you execute your first operations.
The points that will affect your decision are:

Capital
Time available each day
Level of Experience
Personality

Discovering your style is a search process. For some it will be a long way to find the right time frame that matches their personality. Don't be put off by the falls. After all, those who continue the path despite the falls are the ones who reach the destination.
And I hope you are one of those who get up over and over again. The next lesson will boost your confidence when you discover the main reason that moves currencies ...

Fundamental Analysis in Forex Trading Reddit

The fundamental analysis in Forex is used mostly by long-term investors. Players as we saw in the styles of operators, start a negotiation today, to close it years later.
I always emphasize the importance that the mass media give to this type of analysis to distract the great mass of participants.
It is all part of a great mass psychological manipulation. For centuries the ignorance of the masses has been organized before the great movements begin.
The important news are the macroeconomic reports published by the Central Banks and other government agencies destined for this work. All reports are made up. 99% of them are corrected months later.
These events are tools to justify fundamental analysis and price cleaning movements. Any silly headline does the job. With this, it is possible to absorb most of the existing liquidity, before the new trend phase is projected.

Reaction!

Except in rare situations, the result of an economic report of the fundamental analysis is generally already assimilated in the graph. In most cases, there are financial institutions that already have access to this information and are organizing and carrying out their operations in advance.
The phrase buy the rumor and sell the news is a very old adage on Wall Street. And its meaning contains what we have just explained. For the investor who can interpret the Language of Price, fundamental analysis is of little importance. Well, in general, their disclosure does not indicate that you have to take any action in your open trades , as long as your entry strategy provides you with a good support cushion.
This reality of fundamental analysis causes a lot of confusion for investors who lack in-depth knowledge of the forex market.

Macroeconomic Data

The data published in these events is irrelevant. Both for speculators and for the people in general. They are false. They lack reliability.
The price can go up or down with the same result of the data. The main ones are:
- Interest Rates - GDP (gross domestic product) - CPI (inflation) - ISM (manufacturing index) - NFP (payroll) - Double Deficits (deficit = fiscal + balance of payments)
If you are initiated, I recommend you avoid operating near these events. It is only a matter of having the time pending. Use the economic calendar for Fundamental Analysis of Forex Factory.
There is a probabilistic advantage in operating these fundamental analysis events. But it takes preparation, experience, and practice. They represent a way of diversifying in the general operation of a speculator.

The Uncertainty of Fundamental Analysis

On many occasions after the disclosure of an economic report, the price movement of the currency pair that is going to be affected tends to move in the opposite direction to the logic of the report.
I show you an example of a fundamental analysis report. Imagine that the EUR / USD pair is trading at 1.2500, and the FED (US Federal Reserve) issues a statement announcing that it has just raised inter-bank interest rates from 0.25 points to 0.75 points. Very positive news for the US dollar that logically implies an appreciation of the currency and consequently an instantaneous collapse of the EUR / USD pair (up the dollar and down the euro)
However, minutes after the release of said fundamental analysis report, the pair after effectively collapsing to 1.2400, returns and returns to its levels prior to the report (1.2500). This situation is very common , but it is not so easy to identify it when it is occurring, but after the damage is done.
Traps like these devour the accounts of beginners who approach the market with little experience, with weak strategies, and especially with very little experience.
That is why I reiterate that you forget the fundamental analysis for now. Just keep in mind when operating, that there is no publication scheduled nearby. Just check the economic calendar for the day and forget about the numbers. Let the economists mess around with the data.

FOREX Market Correlation

The Forex market correlation exists between pairs with similar "base" currencies and not always under the same circumstances. The correlation in the Forex market that is most followed and that has the greatest impact on fundamental analysis is that of the US dollar (USD).
The USD is the most traded monetary unit with a volume greater than 80% with respect to the rest of the currencies. This fact determines why their correlation is the most important, the most followed, and perhaps the only one worth following in the fundamental macro analysis.
The 7 major pairs are usually in sync . These 7 pairs all include the USD and present a fundamental analysis correlation almost 75% of the time. Influencing the rest of the currency pairs.

Advantages of the FOREX Market Correlation

In the fundamental analysis the most basic FOREX correlation is the following. When the USD appreciates, the USD / CAD, USD / CHF, and USD / JPY pairs tend to go up in price. This indicates that the Canadian dollar (CAD), the Swiss franc (CHF), and the Japanese yen (JPY) are losing value against the USD.
We must bear in mind that this correlation does not occur 100% of the time. In fact, the JPY generally tends to move in the opposite direction , since in recent decades this currency has been used as a source of financing to invest in other financial instruments.
On the other side is the FOREX market correlation that generates a movement almost in unison in the other 4 major pairs EUR / USD, GBP / USD, AUD / USD, and NZD / USD. These tend to fall in price, homologous the appreciation of the USD. But not always.
In this case the fundamental analysis correlation works most of the time, between 65 and 85% of the time. Small differences are noted in the extent that each of these pairs experiences.
There is also a correlation in the secondary FOREX market, where the pairs of all currencies that do not include the USD participate, but I recommend you not to waste time on them for now. There are more important things about the Language of Price to know first.

FOREX Commodity Correlation

In this part I will explain to you in a basic way the Correlation Commodities - FOREX of the fundamental analysis.
There are three currencies that have a direct correlation with commodities. They are usually called: "COMDOLLS" which is short for "Commodities Dollars" (Commodities Dollars), since all three obey the dollar denomination. These are:
- The New Zealand Dollar (NZD) - The Australian Dollar (AUD) - The Canadian Dollar (CAD)
These three currencies make up the group of the 8 largest together with the euro, the pound, the yen, the franc and the US dollar. Together, they merge to produce the major pairs traded in the FOREX Foreign Exchange Market.
The FOREX Commodity Correlation has an affinity in most cases greater than 75%. And each of them has its different raw material of correlation. You will notice that the NZD and the AUD are two currencies that act practically in unison. Both present minimal discrepancies in their fluctuations in the short, medium and long term.
This is mainly because their economies are very similar and their economic and fiscal policies are too. Their main production items also show great similarities, despite the fact that the Australian economy is much larger than the New Zealand economy.
The raw materials that follow the movement of the AUD are mainly gold and copper. If you put the history of these three quotes during the last decade of the year 2,000 together on the same chart, you will notice a very similar upward movement between the three quotes. Pure correlation of fundamental analysis.
This strong correlation with commodities in the metals area for the AUD has provided Australia with an economic advantage enviable over the other major powers that have seen their currencies devalue sharply against the AUD. At the same time, they experience a constant decrease in the purchasing power of their citizens.
The NZD maintains a correlation with raw materials related to agriculture and livestock, mainly including milk and its derivatives. It is one of the countries that dominates the world export of these economic items, and also has important exports of metals , although in smaller quantities than Australia.
Finally, you have a correlation with raw materials in the energy area. For historical reasons the CAD, which is not the largest oil producer in the world, but an important supplier to the largest consumer that is the US, has seen its currency oscillate in line with oil prices.
To make long-term investments in the Foreign Exchange Market, it is necessary to take into consideration at least one Commodity Correlation - FOREX in your fundamental analysis.

Forex Technical Analysis Reddit

The technical analysis is the methodology that interprets the movements of the price. Specialists look for liquidity to fund their business. The repetition of the strategies used by the specialists in their work generate repetitive patterns.
If you were an analyst, you would develop the visual ability to identify such patterns on a graph. If you were a programmer you would quantify them mathematically using complex formulas.
And if you could learn to interpret the Language of Price, you would have the ability to anticipate 90% of all movements that occur on a chart. And in this business, anticipating is what will make you money.
Market prices are reflected and framed on a horizontal time axis and a vertical price axis. Prices go up or down according to the aggressiveness of the participating operators. In an efficient or balanced market these oscillations should be imperceptible.
But in reality this is not the case, since the Market works thanks to the digital printing of hundreds of billions of units of paper money systematically distributed by the Central Banks through the banking system. These resources serve as a tool to manipulate 100% of the movements that occur in the FOREX Market.
Are you looking for Technical Indicators? All technical indicators were created from the 70's. How do you think that for more than 200 years the speculators of the past accumulated great wealth?
With the Language of Price. The best timing is given by the price itself. Indicator-generated entry signals usually occur at the wrong time.
The basis of technical analysis is human psychology. Unfortunately, human beings are not perfect and are loaded with emotions that dominate their behavior in similar situations, creating repetitive and highly predictable behavior when it occurs in masses.
The study of technical analysis through indicators and subjective training, originates and shapes the collective thinking on which all the traps that specialists execute every day to maintain their business are designed. If the majority won, the Market would cease to exist.
Although you already know that the patterns are not generated by the masses , but the repetitive behavior of the Specialists in the face of the action response of the masses. It is very easy for speculaists, because they can see everyone's orders in their books.
And they also exert a great influence on the decisions of the masses through the mass media. It is what I call the war between the Egg and the Stone , if you hit me you win and if I hit you also you win.

The Deception of Modern Technical Analysis

Through the centuries thousands of people have been able to extract great benefits from the financial markets by applying the basic strategies of technical analysis and the psychology of the Price Language.
More than 200 years ago when the markets began to operate officially, fundamental analysis predominated, which was only used by large financial institutions. As this analysis tool began to become popular, these institutions began to apply the strategies of technical analysis.
In recent decades and with the massification of internet technology, technical analysis has begun to be handled by anyone who has a computer with internet access. The same financial institutions, which have been present for more than a century and as a result of this overcrowding , establish a strategy to confuse and misinform about the true strategies of technical analysis.
This has been accomplished in the following manner. Currently there are hundreds, if not thousands of technical indicators that have been developed by so-called "gurus" of technical analysis and that sell their magic indicators packed in a "system" or "method" that usually cost thousands of dollars, or simply with the publication of a book with which they generate large profits. Double benefit.
The aim is to confuse the initiates in speculation and create the collective mentality that will originate the same behaviors over and over again. About 95% of these new entrants completely lose all the capital they invest in their early stages as investors.
Leaving them with a negative experience and creating the idea and the image that financial markets are an exclusive area for geniuses with high academic levels and that only they can produce returns in the markets year after year.
The initiate, having lost all his original capital, turns to these “gurus” for help and teachings. You spend more capital on the products they offer you and the cycle repeats itself . Obviously, the vast majority do not relapse and completely forget to re-engage in the stock markets.
I hope you have not been a victim of this drama.
Now I will show you the simplicity of a FOREX technical analysis , without the need to resort to any indicator as a tool to determine an effective entry or exit strategy when planning your operations.

The Price Cycle

Previously you studied in the FOREX strategies lesson, that the typical price cycle when it is reflected in a graph, presents four very specific phases and very easy to identify if you perform a technical analysis with common sense . These are:

Accumulation
Bullish trend
Distribution
Bearish trend

Remember also that the most effective way to constantly extract profits in the markets is by taking advantage of phases 2 and 4 (the trends). Combined with a correct reading of the collective behavior of the masses of speculators interpreting the Language of Price.
You will be surprised by the simplicity with which thousands of people around the world and over the centuries have accumulated large sums of money by drawing a few simple lines and applying responsible risk management with their capital.

How to Identify Trends?

Being able to determine the trend phases within the price cycle is the essence of technical analysis since it is these two phases that provide you with the probabilistic advantage you need to operate in the markets and obtain constant returns.
In the most plain and simple language, in the world of technical analysis, there are only two types of formations: trends and ranges.
The trends, in turn, can be bullish if they go up, or bearish if they go down. The ranges, on the other hand, can be accumulation if they are at the beginning of the cycle, or distribution if they are in the high part of the cycle. As I had indicated in the topic of FOREX strategies when describing the price cycle.
This sounds more like a play on words, but I will show you the practical definition to simplify your life and then you will apply these definitions on the graph so that everything makes more sense to you.

Bullish trend: a succession of major highs and major lows
Bearish trend: a succession of minor highs and minor lows
Floor Range: equal highs and varied lows
Ceiling Range: equal minimums and varied maximums

https://preview.redd.it/vvmsshf0guv51.png?width=600&format=png&auto=webp&s=c321679a7dcc03f7184778be86379ef442fddf91
Some key points from the graph:

The start of this big uptrend was detected when the last high (thick green line) of the previous downtrend was broken to the upside, ending the succession of lower highs, while exiting the lateral floor formation.
The succession of major lows in the uptrend (thin blue lines)
The succession of major highs in the uptrend (thin green lines)
The end of the uptrend was detected when the last low (thick blue line) of the uptrend was broken to the downside, ending the succession of higher lows, while exiting the lateral ceiling formation.

A tool that will help you sharpen your technical eye and identify trends on the chart is the Currency Scanner. This application is very effective and will provide you with a much-needed boost in your operations to identify reliable trends. At first, we are not sure how reliable a trend is. You will receive great help to find opportunities with the Currency Scanner .

The Common Sense, The Less Common of Senses

The central idea of technical analysis consists in determining the price situation of a market, that is, in which phase of the pattern of its cycle it is currently conjugated with the collective thinking of the masses and the possible traps that the market would have prepared to remove. the capital at stake by the public.
To carry out a precise technical analysis, you will use the support and resistance lines, which can be static (horizontal) or dynamic (projecting an angle with respect to the horizontal axis).
Your common sense prevails here.
If you show a 10-year-old a chart, they will be able to tell you if the price is going up or down. You will most likely have no idea how to draw the lines, but you will be able to establish the general trend. Simply using your common sense.
By introducing indicators and other gadgets , the simplicity and effectiveness of the technical analysis created by your common sense evaporates.
The following graph conceptually shows you all the possible situations in which you could draw these lines to carry out your technical analysis of the place. You can clearly observe a downtrend delimited by its dynamic trend line and an uptrend on the right side with its respective dynamic delimitation.
https://preview.redd.it/5iehg0r6guv51.png?width=500&format=png&auto=webp&s=84c265a5d35da7ea970792c4bf40fe20b33bd8bd

Forex Charts Analysis

I want to remind you that the formations or patterns that develop on the charts (triangles, wedges, pennants, boxes, etc.) only work to execute trades that have initially been confirmed by the static support and resistance lines and to read the collective thinking of the masses.
Chart formations work, but you must know the Language of Price to determine when the Specialists will exploit a chartist figure, or when they will allow it to run. In fact, you will learn with the Language that you can operate a chart figure in any direction.
Much of the "mentalization" that the masses receive is to believe that the figures are made to be respected. Which is an inefficient way of working. Simply because you could wait days or months for a perfect chart figure to occur in order to perform a reliable trade. When in fact there are dozens every day.

Japanese Candles

Of all the tools you have to carry out technical analysis, perhaps the best known and most popular is the Japanese technique of candles (candlesticks).
Candles are mainly used to identify reversal points on the chart without resorting to confirmation of horizontal trend lines and only using a previous bar or candle breaks.
Its correct use is subject to a multi-time analysis (multiple temporalities) and a general evaluation of the context proposed by the market in general at the time of each scenario.
Later I will show you all the important details to take into account so that you use Japanese candles in a simple and very effective way.
Do not forget ... Trading in your beginnings based on formations (chartism) and candlestick patterns conjugated with hundreds of tools and technical indicators, constitutes the perfect path to your failure. Before using any strategy or technique I recommend you focus on learning the Price Language, which includes 3 basic things:

The Price: structure and dynamics
Market sentiment: relative strength, external shocks, etc.
Psychology: flexible mindset and risk acceptance

After you acquire this solid foundation, I guarantee that you will be able to trade any trading system that exists, any strategy, technique or chart figure in a profitable and consistent manner.
Specialists make money every day at the expense of the collective behavior caused by the use of these strategies and techniques. With which you will only manage to lose your capital and your time by putting the cart in front of the horse.
People who do the opposite, at best become,
... Philosophers of Speculation, or indocile Robot Assistants or Expert Advisors.
To make money in any market condition, range or trend, you must use the technical analysis based on the Price Language and combine it with a correct psychological reading of the price. This knowledge can only be acquired through proper education and lots of supervised practice. Like any other career in life.
I hope you've found this guide helpful!

This is an updated copy of the version on BadHistory. I plan to update it in accordance with the feedback I got.
I'd like to thank two people who will remain anonymous for helping me greatly with this post (you know who you are)
Three years ago a festschrift for Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri was published by Shubhra Chakrabarti, a history teacher at the University of Delhi and Utsa Patnaik, a Marxist economist who taught at JNU until 2010.
One of the essays in the festschirt by Utsa Patnaik was an attempt to quantify the "drain" undergone by India during British Rule. Her conclusion? Britain robbed India of $45 trillion (or £9.2 trillion) during their 200 or so years of rule. This figure was immensely popular, and got republished in several major news outlets (here, here, here, here (they get the number wrong) and more recently here), got a mention from the Minister of External Affairs & returns 29,100 results on Google. There's also plenty of references to it here on Reddit.
Patnaik is not the first to calculate such a figure. Angus Maddison thought it was £100 million, Simon Digby said £1 billion, Javier Estaban said £40 million see Roy (2019). The huge range of figures should set off some alarm bells.
So how did Patnaik calculate this (shockingly large) figure? Well, even though I don't have access to the festschrift, she conveniently has written an article detailing her methodology here. Let's have a look.

How exactly did the British manage to diddle us and drain our wealth’ ? was the question that Basudev Chatterjee (later editor of a volume in the Towards Freedom project) had posed to me 50 years ago when we were fellow-students abroad.

This is begging the question.

After decades of research I find that using India’s commodity export surplus as the measure and applying an interest rate of 5%, the total drain from 1765 to 1938, compounded up to 2016, comes to £9.2 trillion; since $4.86 exchanged for £1 those days, this sum equals about $45 trillion.

This is completely meaningless. To understand why it's meaningless consider India's annual coconut exports. These are almost certainly a surplus but the surplus in trade is countered by the other country buying the product (indeed, by definition, trade surpluses contribute to the GDP of a nation which hardly plays into intuitive conceptualisations of drain).
Furthermore, Dewey (2019) critiques the 5% interest rate.

She [Patnaik] consistently adopts statistical assumptions (such as compound interest at a rate of 5% per annum over centuries) that exaggerate the magnitude of the drain

Moving on:

The exact mechanism of drain, or transfers from India to Britain was quite simple.

Convenient.

Drain theory possessed the political merit of being easily grasped by a nation of peasants. [...] No other idea could arouse people than the thought that they were being taxed so that others in far off lands might live in comfort. [...] It was, therefore, inevitable that the drain theory became the main staple of nationalist political agitation during the Gandhian era.

- Chandra et al. (1989)

The key factor was Britain’s control over our taxation revenues combined with control over India’s financial gold and forex earnings from its booming commodity export surplus with the world. Simply put, Britain used locally raised rupee tax revenues to pay for its net import of goods, a highly abnormal use of budgetary funds not seen in any sovereign country.

The issue with figures like these is they all make certain methodological assumptions that are impossible to prove. From Roy in Frankema et al. (2019):

the "drain theory" of Indian poverty cannot be tested with evidence, for several reasons. First, it rests on the counterfactual that any money saved on account of factor payments abroad would translate into domestic investment, which can never be proved. Second, it rests on "the primitive notion that all payments to foreigners are "drain"", that is, on the assumption that these payments did not contribute to domestic national income to the equivalent extent (Kumar 1985, 384; see also Chaudhuri 1968). Again, this cannot be tested. [...] Fourth, while British officers serving India did receive salaries that were many times that of the average income in India, a paper using cross-country data shows that colonies with better paid officers were governed better (Jones 2013).

Indeed, drain theory rests on some very weak foundations. This, in of itself, should be enough to dismiss any of the other figures that get thrown out. Nonetheless, I felt it would be a useful exercise to continue exploring Patnaik's take on drain theory.

The East India Company from 1765 onwards allocated every year up to one-third of Indian budgetary revenues net of collection costs, to buy a large volume of goods for direct import into Britain, far in excess of that country’s own needs.

So what's going on here? Well Roy (2019) explains it better:

Colonial India ran an export surplus, which, together with foreign investment, was used to pay for services purchased from Britain. These payments included interest on public debt, salaries, and pensions paid to government offcers who had come from Britain, salaries of managers and engineers, guaranteed profts paid to railway companies, and repatriated business profts. How do we know that any of these payments involved paying too much? The answer is we do not.

So what was really happening is the government was paying its workers for services (as well as guaranteeing profits - to promote investment - something the GoI does today Dalal (2019), and promoting business in India), and those workers were remitting some of that money to Britain. This is hardly a drain (unless, of course, Indian diaspora around the world today are "draining" it). In some cases, the remittances would take the form of goods (as described) see Chaudhuri (1983):

It is obvious that these debit items were financed through the export surplus on merchandise account, and later, when railway construction started on a large scale in India, through capital import. Until 1833 the East India Company followed a cumbersome method in remitting the annual home charges. This was to purchase export commodities in India out of revenue, which were then shipped to London and the proceeds from their sale handed over to the home treasury.

While Roy's earlier point argues better paid officers governed better, it is honestly impossible to say what part of the repatriated export surplus was a drain, and what was not. However calling all of it a drain is definitely misguided.
It's worth noting that Patnaik seems to make no attempt to quantify the benefits of the Raj either, Dewey (2019)'s 2nd criticism:

she [Patnaik] consistently ignores research that would tend to cut the economic impact of the drain down to size, such as the work on the sources of investment during the industrial revolution (which shows that industrialisation was financed by the ploughed-back profits of industrialists) or the costs of empire school (which stresses the high price of imperial defence)

Since tropical goods were highly prized in other cold temperate countries which could never produce them, in effect these free goods represented international purchasing power for Britain which kept a part for its own use and re-exported the balance to other countries in Europe and North America against import of food grains, iron and other goods in which it was deficient.

Re-exports necessarily adds value to goods when the goods are processed and when the goods are transported. The country with the largest navy at the time would presumably be in very good stead to do the latter.

The British historians Phyllis Deane and WA Cole presented an incorrect estimate of Britain’s 18th-19th century trade volume, by leaving out re-exports completely. I found that by 1800 Britain’s total trade was 62% higher than their estimate, on applying the correct definition of trade including re-exports, that is used by the United Nations and by all other international organisations.

While interesting, and certainly expected for such an old book, re-exporting necessarily adds value to goods.

When the Crown took over from the Company, from 1861 a clever system was developed under which all of India’s financial gold and forex earnings from its fast-rising commodity export surplus with the world, was intercepted and appropriated by Britain. As before up to a third of India’s rising budgetary revenues was not spent domestically but was set aside as ‘expenditure abroad’.

So, what does this mean? Britain appropriated all of India's earnings, and then spent a third of it aboard? Not exactly. She is describing home charges see Roy (2019) again:

Some of the expenditures on defense and administration were made in sterling and went out of the country. This payment by the government was known as the Home Charges. For example, interest payment on loans raised to finance construction of railways and irrigation works, pensions paid to retired officers, and purchase of stores, were payments in sterling. [...] almost all money that the government paid abroad corresponded to the purchase of a service from abroad. [...] The balance of payments system that emerged after 1800 was based on standard business principles. India bought something and paid for it. State revenues were used to pay for wages of people hired abroad, pay for interest on loans raised abroad, and repatriation of profits on foreign investments coming into India. These were legitimate market transactions.

Indeed, if paying for what you buy is drain, then several billions of us are drained every day.

The Secretary of State for India in Council, based in London, invited foreign importers to deposit with him the payment (in gold, sterling and their own currencies) for their net imports from India, and these gold and forex payments disappeared into the yawning maw of the SoS’s account in the Bank of England.

It should be noted that India having two heads was beneficial, and encouraged investment per Roy (2019):

The fact that the India Office in London managed a part of the monetary system made India creditworthy, stabilized its currency, and encouraged foreign savers to put money into railways and private enterprise in India. Current research on the history of public debt shows that stable and large colonies found it easier to borrow abroad than independent economies because the investors trusted the guarantee of the colonist powers.

Against India’s net foreign earnings he issued bills, termed Council bills (CBs), to an equivalent rupee value. The rate (between gold-linked sterling and silver rupee) at which the bills were issued, was carefully adjusted to the last farthing, so that foreigners would never find it more profitable to ship financial gold as payment directly to Indians, compared to using the CB route. Foreign importers then sent the CBs by post or by telegraph to the export houses in India, that via the exchange banks were paid out of the budgeted provision of sums under ‘expenditure abroad’, and the exporters in turn paid the producers (peasants and artisans) from whom they sourced the goods.

Sunderland (2013) argues CBs had two main roles (and neither were part of a grand plot to keep gold out of India):

Council bills had two roles. They firstly promoted trade by handing the IO some control of the rate of exchange and allowing the exchange banks to remit funds to India and to hedge currency transaction risks. They also enabled the Indian government to transfer cash to England for the payment of its UK commitments.

The United Nations (1962) historical data for 1900 to 1960, show that for three decades up to 1928 (and very likely earlier too) India posted the second highest merchandise export surplus in the world, with USA in the first position. Not only were Indians deprived of every bit of the enormous international purchasing power they had earned over 175 years, even its rupee equivalent was not issued to them since not even the colonial government was credited with any part of India’s net gold and forex earnings against which it could issue rupees. The sleight-of-hand employed, namely ‘paying’ producers out of their own taxes, made India’s export surplus unrequited and constituted a tax-financed drain to the metropolis, as had been correctly pointed out by those highly insightful classical writers, Dadabhai Naoroji and RCDutt.

It doesn't appear that others appreciate their insight Roy (2019):

K. N. Chaudhuri rightly calls such practice ‘confused’ economics ‘coloured by political feelings’.

Surplus budgets to effect such heavy tax-financed transfers had a severe employment–reducing and income-deflating effect: mass consumption was squeezed in order to release export goods. Per capita annual foodgrains absorption in British India declined from 210 kg. during the period 1904-09, to 157 kg. during 1937-41, and to only 137 kg by 1946.

Dewey (1978) points out reliability issues with Indian agriculutural statistics, however this calorie decline persists to this day. Some of it is attributed to less food being consumed at home Smith (2015), a lower infectious disease burden Duh & Spears (2016) and diversified diets Vankatesh et al. (2016).

If even a part of its enormous foreign earnings had been credited to it and not entirely siphoned off, India could have imported modern technology to build up an industrial structure as Japan was doing.

This is, unfortunately, impossible to prove. Had the British not arrived in India, there is no clear indication that India would've united (this is arguably more plausible than the given counterfactual¹). Had the British not arrived in India, there is no clear indication India would not have been nuked in WW2, much like Japan. Had the British not arrived in India, there is no clear indication India would not have been invaded by lizard people, ~~much like Japan.~~ The list continues eternally.
Nevertheless, I will charitably examine the given counterfactual anyway. Did pre-colonial India have industrial potential? The answer is a resounding no.
From Gupta (1980):

This article starts from the premise that while economic categories - the extent of commodity production, wage labour, monetarisation of the economy, etc - should be the basis for any analysis of the production relations of pre-British India, it is the nature of class struggles arising out of particular class alignments that finally gives the decisive twist to social change. Arguing on this premise, and analysing the available evidence, this article concludes that there was little potential for industrial revolution before the British arrived in India because, whatever might have been the character of economic categories of that period, the class relations had not sufficiently matured to develop productive forces and the required class struggle for a 'revolution' to take place.

A view echoed in Raychaudhuri (1983):

Yet all of this did not amount to an economic situation comparable to that of western Europe on the eve of the industrial revolution. Her technology - in agriculture as well as manufacturers - had by and large been stagnant for centuries. [...] The weakness of the Indian economy in the mid-eighteenth century, as compared to pre-industrial Europe was not simply a matter of technology and commercial and industrial organization. No scientific or geographical revolution formed part of the eighteenth-century Indian's historical experience. [...] Spontaneous movement towards industrialisation is unlikely in such a situation.

So now we've established India did not have industrial potential, was India similar to Japan just before the Meiji era? The answer, yet again, unsurprisingly, is no. Japan's economic situation was not comparable to India's, which allowed for Japan to finance its revolution. From Yasuba (1986):

All in all, the Japanese standard of living may not have been much below the English standard of living before industrialization, and both of them may have been considerably higher than the Indian standard of living. We can no longer say that Japan started from a pathetically low economic level and achieved a rapid or even "miraculous" economic growth. Japan's per capita income was almost as high as in Western Europe before industrialization, and it was possible for Japan to produce surplus in the Meiji Period to finance private and public capital formation.

The circumstances that led to Meiji Japan were extremely unique. See Tomlinson (1985):

Most modern comparisons between India and Japan, written by either Indianists or Japanese specialists, stress instead that industrial growth in Meiji Japan was the product of unique features that were not reproducible elsewhere. [...] it is undoubtably true that Japan's progress to industrialization has been unique and unrepeatable

So there you have it. Unsubstantiated statistical assumptions, calling any number you can a drain & assuming a counterfactual for no good reason gets you this $45 trillion number. Hopefully that's enough to bury it in the ground.
^{1. Several authors have affirmed that Indian identity is a colonial artefact. For example see} ^{Rajan 1969}^:

^{Perhaps the single greatest and most enduring impact of British rule over India is that it created an Indian nation, in the modern political sense. After centuries of rule by different dynasties overparts of the Indian sub-continent, and after about 100 years of British rule, Indians ceased to be merely Bengalis, Maharashtrians,or Tamils, linguistically and culturally.}

^{or see} ^{Bryant 2000}^:

^{But then, it would be anachronistic to condemn eighteenth-century Indians, who served the British, as collaborators, when the notion of 'democratic' nationalism or of an Indian 'nation' did not then exist.} ^[...] ^{Indians who fought for them, differed from the Europeans in having a primary attachment to a non-belligerent religion, family and local chief, which was stronger than any identity they might have with a more remote prince or 'nation'.}

Bibliography

Chakrabarti, Shubra & Patnaik, Utsa (2018). Agrarian and other histories: Essays for Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri. Colombia University Press
Hickel, Jason (2018). How the British stole $45 trillion from India. The Guardian
Bhuyan, Aroonim & Sharma, Krishan (2019). The Great Loot: How the British stole $45 trillion from India. Indiapost
Monbiot, George (2020). English Landowners have stolen our rights. It is time to reclaim them. The Guardian
Tsjeng, Zing (2020). How Britain Stole $45 trillion from India with trains | Empires of Dirt. Vice
Chaudhury, Dipanjan (2019). British looted $45 trillion from India in today’s value: Jaishankar. The Economic Times
Roy, Tirthankar (2019). How British rule changed India's economy: The Paradox of the Raj. Palgrave Macmillan
Patnaik, Utsa (2018). How the British impoverished India. Hindustan Times
Tuovila, Alicia (2019). Expenditure method. Investopedia
Dewey, Clive (2019). Changing the guard: The dissolution of the nationalist–Marxist orthodoxy in the agrarian and agricultural history of India. The Indian Economic & Social History Review
Chandra, Bipan et al. (1989). India's Struggle for Independence, 1857-1947. Penguin Books
Frankema, Ewout & Booth, Anne (2019). Fiscal Capacity and the Colonial State in Asia and Africa, c. 1850-1960. Cambridge University Press
Dalal, Sucheta (2019). IL&FS Controversy: Centre is Paying Up on Sovereign Guarantees to ADB, KfW for Group's Loan. TheWire
Chaudhuri, K.N. (1983). X - Foreign Trade and Balance of Payments (1757–1947). Cambridge University Press
Sunderland, David (2013). Financing the Raj: The City of London and Colonial India, 1858-1940. Boydell Press
Dewey, Clive (1978). Patwari and Chaukidar: Subordinate officials and the reliability of India’s agricultural statistics. Athlone Press
Smith, Lisa (2015). The great Indian calorie debate: Explaining rising undernourishment during India’s rapid economic growth. Food Policy
Duh, Josephine & Spears, Dean (2016). Health and Hunger: Disease, Energy Needs, and the Indian Calorie Consumption Puzzle. The Economic Journal
Vankatesh, P. et al. (2016). Relationship between Food Production and Consumption Diversity in India – Empirical Evidences from Cross Section Analysis. Agricultural Economics Research Review
Gupta, Shaibal (1980). Potential of Industrial Revolution in Pre-British India. Economic and Political Weekly
Raychaudhuri, Tapan (1983). I - The mid-eighteenth-century background. Cambridge University Press
Yasuba, Yasukichi (1986). Standard of Living in Japan Before Industrialization: From what Level did Japan Begin? A Comment. The Journal of Economic History
Tomblinson, B.R. (1985). Writing History Sideways: Lessons for Indian Economic Historians from Meiji Japan. Cambridge University Press
Rajan, M.S. (1969). The Impact of British Rule in India. Journal of Contemporary History
Bryant, G.J. (2000). Indigenous Mercenaries in the Service of European Imperialists: The Case of the Sepoys in the Early British Indian Army, 1750-1800. War in History

I am subscribed to various analysis of the Forex market and today I got an email saying that "Following the explosion in Lebanon, the price of Gold surged to another record high". Can somebody explain how and why such news influence the price of gold?
Wikipedia says that Lebanon exports jewelry, base metals, chemicals, consumer goods, fruit and vegetables, tobacco, construction minerals, electric power machinery and switchgear, textile fibers, paper. Imports: petroleum products, cars, medicinal products, clothing, meat and live animals, consumer goods, paper, textile fabrics, tobacco, electrical machinery and equipment, chemicals
And Lebanon has no data on gold production https://www.gold.org/goldhub/data/historical-mine-production
So.. what is the correlation?

From the $BLK DD guy that rolled into $XLF last month. I am currently long $SLV, $GLD, $GDX, and $GDXJ with call spreads, shares, and just pruned $AMZN and $AAPL gains but keeping $ARKF, $ARKQ, and $ARKK (ETFs with $TSLA as the largest holding.)
Today, Friday's CNBC "Options Action" has just dangled calls on the $TLT, the ETF that tracks the 20+ year *BOND PRICES move inverse to yields and the Fed would not mind rates to hit 0% to spark inflation.* I concur with CNBC who suggested buying August dated call spreads on $TLT.
My $XLE long dated puts have been melting up. I am short every sector ETF but $IBB and $XLV. Be careful as these options are not as liquid as the $QQQ or $SPY but I cannot help that sectors are moving down when oil is down.
The VIX is holding steady, steady high. I am not hedging with the $VIX when stay home stonks work- the $VIX is broken imao so use $GLD, $SLV, and $TLT because bond rates are going to 0% (meaning the price goes up.)
I also concur with CNBC that options are the best way to play a market by reducing risk like selling a put. There are risky options, and very safe options if you can own 100 shares (the company could be $DTEGY Deutsche Telekom AKA T-Mobile/Sprint and the bringer of 5G eventually, pick your poison.)
I suggest selling a put for some good companies with solid balance sheets, 5G capabilities, and anything auto in the green space to get 100 shares of companies (see the next paragraph.)
My suggestions for getting 100 shares at a cheaper price would be Ericsson (trading under $10,) Dell or VMWare (you pick the one that matches your risk,) NIO (trading below $10), $NOK at $4 is interesting, and for big rollers Amazon (if you have the $ to own 100 shares at $2,500 or $250,000 or less, I would but that is for wsb) That is, if Amazon retests $2,500. I suggest 100 shares of $SHLL for YOLO if this bores you as this is the best $SPAC (but there is probably other ones because management is all you have with blank check companies.)
AFTER you own 100 shares of $AAL or $TSM or Dell or whatever, you can dump the 100 shares anytime. I suggest you keep them and sell options and join the theta gang. Why not get paid for owning your 100 shares of $TSM [Taiwan Semiconductor, the company onshoring manufacturing to America] you got at $45? $TSM August 21 $45p is $.35. If you had 100 shares of $TSM today, selling a $60c gives you $140 just for holding the shares until August 21st.
Bullish on onshoring green jobs because Trump leaving office is the biggest buy after the news ever. (Buy on the rumor sell on the news but in reverse because solar employs more than fossil fools in TX pre COVIDcession.)
For examples of selling a put: $AAL Nov 20th $2 puts are $0.14 (You are agreeing to buy 100 shares of $AAL at $2/share before or on November 20th, if you are not asked to buy $AAL you keep your $0.14 collateral and the full $14 credit.)
A shorter dated long put $AAL Aug 21st put is $0.09 ($9.) Or you could buy the death puts on $AAL but JPow exists, hence zombie companies, like Hertz, so that is just blowing money. $AAL has the highest %age interest on their debt and the CLOs (their bond insurance) were the highest, I have to check again ($AAL is the worst, but not as bad as $HTZ, a worthless zombie stock.)
*BOND prices move inverse to yields so going from 0.5% to 0% makes the price go up* Zombie companies with balance sheet nightmares is what keeps bond prices upper bound at 0.8 but lower bound is 0%.
Worthless zombie stocks include banks, fossil fools, and then by default industrials, and I hate to say that I am only long $XLK and thinking of $IBB. Every day that oil is not above $35 or in the green or both is a day stonks tank. Every stonk will fall after earnings. Short individual stonks going into earnings, wait- all stonks have cancelled earnings. See why I think maximum protection by not going long the VIX but long gold, silver, even transition phase metals, copper, and BONDS.
$NEM, $GLDI, $SLVP, $HL, $SAND, $SA, $GLTR, $PALL, $SPPP, $SSRM, $BTG , $PPLT, $PLTM, $NUGT, $BAR, $FNV all up today [I also have $GLNCY, $SBSW, and $PLG.] Why own these when you can just long $GDX and $GDXJ?
I do think rates will remain positive, until they are not positive anymore, AKA Japan and Europe :). What BOND fund would you long or short and why, besides $TLT? If a 100 year bond comes out, the interest rate will be 0% anyways in the long run, but we are dead in the long run, so long live bonds until we decarbonize the economy, tax the rich, and pigs fly (not happening fast enough.) Ray Dalio and many others have been harping about this, and a broken clock is right twice a day, or a bear is right when we are in a bear market with a broken VIX.
The bond market is king compared to the stonk market in sheer $. And ForEx trades trillions a day and is important (on days the $DXY, the basket of the dollar versus the globe) goes up $GLD should ease and is a time to buy the dip, and on days the $DXY goes down $GLD will gap up during this "bear oil/hospitality/planes" market.) When the $DXY goes down, it takes more dollars to buy the gold/silvecoppematerials, and $GLD rises and is very liquid for options. Thinking August to add to my Dec 31st $160c. That is, unless we are going to allow millions to go into poverty, so then just buy guns and physical gold and we can trade scraps of silver.
Fossil fools, the slow pace of massive renewable energy projects, and both candidates tripping overthemselves to be more anti-China during global warming and upcoming food inflation spell the need risk reduction (if you plan on holding equities please buy puts to hedge.)
TL;DR $TLT August call spreads, $TLT is the 20 year bond ETF. Pick companies you want to own 100 shares of by selling a put while long $GLD and long $SLV print money so holding the 100 shares prints money joining theta gang.

The following story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this post are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.
However, the LINKS to real-life events and inspiring sources are placed here and there throughout the story.
--------
Truth is the Only Light
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INTRO
☞ [As of 2019] there are plenty of reasons to think the Chinese system will implode spectacularly without Japanese feeling the need to do a thing. — Peter Zaihan, Disunited Nations (Mar 03, 2020)
It's apparent that two nations have been engaged in a high-stakes military & economy arms race. The current US admin has been hitting China with waves of tariffs, but that was merely a small part of what's actually going on. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]
On Oct 11, 2019, when they reached a tentative agreement for the first phase of a trade deal, the fact that China made the concession actually made my jaw drop. From where I sit, it was a worrisome scene. Aren't people saying, when challenging situations are bottled up, they will just grow and mutate into another terrible complications?
Admittedly I was not certain how they are going to adhere to the agreement: It left most of the US tariffs (on China's exports) in place, and at the same time, came with an additional USD $200 Billion burden for China over the next two years. This agreement might seem a bit insignificant, but now China would need to purchase almost twice the size of the US products & services they did before the trade war began.
With their current economic climate? I murmured, "No way."
While watching Trump brag and boast around with said agreement, I expected China would soon come out and fling some improvised excuses in order to delay the document-signing process. It wouldn't be their first time. More importantly, even if China does so, there wouldn't be many (real) counterattack options left for the Trump admin during this year, the US presidential election year.
Then, on Jan 16, 2020, the world’s two largest economies actually signed a partial trade agreement aimed at putting the brakes on an 18-month trade war. China would almost surely not sit down but come back to bite, I thought.
Enter the worldwide chaos following so called the COVID-19 outbreak.
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BACKGROUND
☞ Globalists have been heavily investing in China's economy and its components overseas.
• Here are a couple of well known names: the Great Old One; George Soros; Koos Bekker; and Bill Gates.
• For the sake of convenience, from here on, let's call these globalists, who are foreign investors in China's top tier state-owned/sponsored/controlled enterprises, Team-Z.
• Team-Z has adopted big time lackeys like Henry Kissinger or small time ones like Larry Summers, Stephen Hadley, or Bill Browder as matchmakers to court Team-Z for China's top tier enterprises. When Israel's highest echelons chimed in, it has been through Israeli IT companies and the BRI projects.
• Naturally, multinational investment banks have also been employed; such as Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), UBS Group AG (formerly Union Bank of Switzerland), Blackstone Group, Canaccord Genuity, BlackRock, Hermitage, or Mirae Asset.
☞ Note: The Great Old One didn't use any matchmakers, something peasants would need. Because the Great Old One's power level is over 9000.
• China's Shanghai clique used to keep the nation's state-sponsored enterprises under their firm grip: Enterprises such as Alibaba Group, Tencent, Baidu, Wanda Group, HNA Group, Anbang Group, Evergrande Group, CEFC Energy and Huawei, all of which Team-Z has massively invested in.
• Here is how Shanghai clique and Team-Z, esp. Bill Gates, started to get together: [LINK]
• However, in the name of anti-corruption campaign, Xi Jinping & his Princelings have been taking those businesses away from Shanghai clique's hand, and transforming those state-sponsored private enterprises into the state-owned enterprises, declaring the 國進民退 movement.
• Slaying Shanghai clique's control = [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
• 國進民退 + Slaying Shanghai clique's control = [A] [B] [C]
• Xi's reign didn't arrive today without challenges though: the BRI projects' poor outcome has frustrated Israel's great expectations. And since the US-China trade war has started, the problems of China's economic systems started to surface, not to mention China's economy has long been decaying.
• Coupled with the US-China trade war, the current US admin has been trying to block Huawei from accessing the international financial systems that the US can influence, as well as the US banking systems. This is a good time to remind you again that Bill Gates has had a very close-knit relationship with Huawei.
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TRADE WAR & INTERNET-BASED COMPANIES
☞ It's the trade war, but why were internet-based companies such as Tencent and Baidu suffering losses?
Answer: The state-sponsored companies like Tencent, Baidu, or Huawei have heavily invested in international trade and commodity markets, which are easily influenced by aspects that IMF interest rates, the US sanctions, or trade war can create.
Example: Let's say, Tencent invests in a Tehran-based ride-hailing company. Then, through said ride-hailing company, Tencent invests in Iran's petroleum industry. Now, China's most valuable IT company is in international petrochemical trade. The business is going to make great strides until the US imposes trade embargoes oand economic sanctions against Iran.
--------
TL;DR
China's economy going down = Team-Z losing an astronomical amount of money.
★ Wednesday, Sep 26, 2018 ★
"Gentlemen, you guys might want to do something before it's too bloody late, no? His speech last night was .... (sniggers) Mr. Gates, now is as good a time as any. Mr. Soros, hm, don't look at me like that."
".... But,"
"Yes, Mr. Soros, your HNA is going down, too. .... Ah, Schwarzman xiansheng, we're very sorry to learn about Blackstone's Iran & SinopecChina situation. So, we're guessing, you'd be happy to join Mr. Gates's operation, yes? Of course, We already contacted Kissinger xiansheng. .... Okay then, Gentlemen?"
• Now you can take a guess why George Soros has recently been sending out confusing messages regarding Xi Jinping.
• Wait, how about Wuhan Institute of Virology? Doesn't this story concern the COVID-19 outbreak? Is the Wuhan Institute also associated with Shanghai clique? Yes, indeed. Here's How Wuhan Institute of Virology and Shanghai Clique are related: [LINK]
--------
EIGHT OBJECTIVES
☞ Calling for the tide to be turned, Team-Z and Shanghai clique started to devise the plan. The objectives are:
① By shutting down international trade, crashing world economy, and exploiting its aftermath, the plan should produce an outcome letting Team-Z earn back their loss from the trade war & the US sanctions, and collect additional profits from China's BRI projects & stock markets worldwide, including the US stock markets.
• Don't forget this: This point number ① also concerns the developing nations on the BRI with the large deposits of natural resources that Team-Z has invested in through China. If everything comes together nicely, Team-Z will pick up trillions of dollars from those nations alone as if they are light as a feather. Ironically this will reinforce the BRI project governance and mitigate fraud & corruption risks inherent to the international development projects.
② By utilizing the aftermath in the US, a new US administration consisted of pro-Beijing personnels should be fostered at the 2020 election. In a worst-case scenario, the aftermath should be abused enough to make Robert Lighthizer to leave the admin. Mr. Mnuchin could stay.
③ Sometime next year, the phase one trade deal must be reassessed with the new US admin. The reassessment should help China take the upper-hand at the second phase trade talk.
④ The pandemic crisis should yield a situation which allows China to delay the payments for its state-firm offshore debts. With the point number ①, this will give China a breathing room to manage its steadily-fallen forex reserves.
⑤ Since their current turf (in China) is education industry & medical science industry, Shanghai clique will have no issue with earning hefty profits by managing China's export of medical equipments & health care products which can be supplied worldwide mainly by China. People in the west will bent the knees for the clique's support.
☞ Regarding Jiang Zemin's son and medical science industry in China [LINK]
⑥ The outcome should weaken Xi & his Princelings' political power considerably in favour of Shanghai clique & Team-Z. This will let Jiang's Shanghai clique (A) reclaim some of political status & business interest controls they have lost to Xi & his Princelings.
• And once this point number ⑥, with the point number ② , is realized, it would be much easier for the clique to (B) recover their huge assets hidden overseas that the current US admin or Xi & his Princelings have frozen.
⑦ Combining good old bribery with sex, the outcome should support China to re-secure control over the US governors. Once the plan is executed successfully, those governors would desperately need solutions to local economic problems and unemployment.
⑧ Lastly, implementing an e-ID system in the US similar to Beijing's Alipay and WeChat could be the cherry on top of the operation's entire outcomes. Who's supporting such a system worldwide? None other than Microsoft and Rockefeller Foundation. ಠ_ಠ
--------
OLD COMRADE BECOMES A NEW RECRUIT
☞ They were afraid more talents were needed. The main target was the world’s largest economy with the most powerful military capability, after all.
They ended up asking Mr. Fridman to see Lord Putin about that. The old Vova was going through a lot nowadays, people said. It could be because his nation's energy business to Europe seems to be hitting wall after wall. He is said to have enough on his plate with no end in sight, so maybe he'll join.
★ Monday, Jan 15, 2018 ★
"(pours a drink for himself) I know, but. ... What would happen if Bashar falls? How long you think you can keep it up? .... Erdogan is many things (sniggers) but he's never gentle. (sips his drink slowly) When Benji's EastMed Pipeline starts to actively compete, then what? They got the China money now. .... Vagit and his buddies will be very unhappy. You know that. Not great, Vova."
"...."
"Ah, you mean what are we going to do? Hm? Hm. I'll tell you what we're going to do. This time, we're going to bankrupt the US shale gas sector. Then, of course, we can maybe convince Benji to take their time with the pipeline. Perhaps for good. (sips his drink slowly) Don't worry, Vova, It'll work. You worry too much. We'll come out the other side stronger."
"So, how long until they set it off?
"Hahaa, yes. They'll soon put all things in place. While marching in place, they'll play the tune a couple of months before the next sochelnik."
"Nearly 20 months to brace things here, then?"
"(nod slowly in happiness) Hm. Оторви́сь там, оттопы́рься, Vova"
--------
USEFUL IDIOTS
☞ When the directive came, these idiots answered claiming they would be gladly "on it." All in the name of rejuvenating China's economy without grasping the real objective prevailing throughout the entire operation. Thing is, they would never realize what they are to Team-Z & their Asian overlord until it’s too late.
Who are they? It's A and B, not A or B: (A) the American corporations that are too big to fail and have suffered a considerable loss because of the US-China trade war. Among those corporations, (B) the ones that have been structured with massive interest-profit relationships in/with China.
"We need China in order for the US as a nation to continue being prosper," they've been shouting. No surprise there, because they've enjoyed the strides of extraordinary profits over the years while the US middle class has continued to shrink.
But, in 2019 when China's stock markets nosedived for the first time since 2015 and China's authorities in financial stability & resiliency fumbled their response; it wiped that smile off their face. Still, they'll keep behaving not to offend their Asian overlord, nonetheless.
--------
PERFECT PLAN
☞ Many crucial components had to come into play all at once in order to cause World War I. If one of the components were missing or different, it is unlikely that the World War I as we know of could be produced.
① The US in 2019: Overbought bubbles + Over borrowed corporations
② The US in 2020: It's an Election Year.
③ Russia has been dumping US Treasuries for the past few years.
④ Russia has been hoarding golds as if they were recreating Inca Empire.
⑤ China in 2019: Immense & long term financial troubles has started to surface.
⑥ China in 2020: The phase-one deal has been signed; leaving most of tariffs on China intact and adding another $200 Billion burden for China.
⑦ Team-Z sets up a situation in the US where some event(s) would freeze the US supply chains & demand for the next three to ten months.
• Just like the 9/11, the event will be initiated at the clique's own region. However, unlike in China, the US will report multiple epicentres simultaneously.
• And the CDC and the US medical task force will carry on with a number of sabotage acts, to secure enough time for the infected yet untested in those US epicentres to spread plenty. [1] [2] [3]
• Here's a feasible timeline of the operation.
⑧ Then, the BOOM: Team-Z (a) manipulates the markets to make sure MM will have liquidity concerns (b) when they need it most. The (c) bottomed out oil price will be an enforcement, which will also wreck the US energy sector as a kicker. The (d) WHO will also join as a disinformation campaign office.
• Then a couple of big name investment managers will lead a movement that (will try to) bring back foreign money back to China. [1] [2]
• Meanwhile, in US, the disinformation campaign will continue to be pushed until the second wave of attack arrives.
--------
MEASURABLE SHORT-TERM OUTCOME
☞ We're now going through World War III. The global structure laid down by World War II had been shaken by globalization and the rise of China. This pandemic event will shock the structure further. Human history will be divided into Before 2021 and After 2021.
① Outcome pt. 1: Immediate Aftermath [pt.1] [pt.2]
② Outcome pt. 2: The US economy goes deep dive along with world economy, and the only thing Team-Z has to do is to exploit the aftermath which has been thoroughly calculated and eagerly anticipated. — Favoured assessment: There won't be a V curve ever, unless drastic measures taken within the timeframe of four months. Unprecedented market crash, the rapid unemployment acceleration because of the supply-chain shut down, and the near-death security which in turn forces consumer confidence to plummet. We're looking at a super long L shape curve unless the US prepares fast for the second wave of their asymmetric warfare.
③ Outcome pt. 3: Arguably the most important outcome. — Because of the unprecedented shutdown of international trade, the nations heavily rely on exporting natural resources will face the extreme financial threats. What if some of those are emerging markets AND massively in debt to China? What do you think China would do to said nations while the aftermath is hitting the globe hard? [PDF] Something comparable to Latin American Debt Crisis will happen.
④ Outcome pt. 4: Not that significant compared to the others but still notable outcome. — The world will need Shanghai clique's help to get medical products and equipments.
--------
WHAT'S NEXT?
☞ Several analysts have discussed off the record that next it'd be a proxy warfare not using armed conflicts but with spreading a galaxy of counterfeit-currency across every possible channels.
Coincidently, on Dec 13, 2017, Business Insider reported in an article "A $100 counterfeit 'supernote' found in South Korea could have been made in North Korea" that:

"It was the first of a new kind of supernote ever found in the world," Lee Ho-Joong, head of KEB Hana Bank's anti-counterfeit centre told Agence France-Presse.

Reporting the same news, The Telegraph published an article on Dec 11, 2017:

"It seems that whoever printed these supernotes has the facilities and high level of technology matching that of a government", said Lee Ho-jung, a bank spokesman from KEB Hana Bank in South Korea. "They are made with special ink that changes colour depending on the angle, patterned paper and Intaglio printing that gives texture to the surface of a note".

ಠ_ಠ
--------
• Tale of How Shanghai clique and Globalists Got Together
• Wuhan Institute of Virology, Wuhan City, & Shanghai Clique
• Feasible Timeline of the COVID-19 Operation
• Immediate Aftermath — pt.1.b
• Immediate Aftermath — pt.2.a
• Remdesivir, Gilead Sciences, Its Shareholders, & Silly Concern
• Cases Displaying the Recent Climate of Chinese Economy
• Compliance Report by the US State Department on China regarding Biological Weapons Convention — Click "2019 August Unclassified Compliance Report" and see p45.
• Jiang Zemin's son & Medical Science Industry in China
• What is Guanxi (關係)?
• Israeli IT Companies & China
• Opinion article "Cancel All Debt to China"
• Fun Trivia about Bush Family and China
--------

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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.

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.

LET'S GET SOME UNPLEASANTNESS OUT OF THE WAY

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

LESSON 1 - LEARN THE BASICS

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.

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.

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.

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.

LESSON 2 - RANDOM STRANGERS ARE NOT GOING TO HELP YOU GET RICH IN FOREX

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.

99.99999% of people posting about wanting to help you become rich in forex are LYING TO YOU.

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.

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/).

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

LESSON 4 - THE 500 PIP DRAWDOWN RULE

This is a rule I created for myself and it's a great way to help protect your account from blowing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Remember my statements above about Forex being a cruel bitch of a mistress? I wasn't kidding.

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.

LESSON 5 - UNDERSTAND DIFFERENT TRADING METHODOLOGIES

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

LESSON 6 - TIMEFRAMES MATTER

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.

There is no right or wrong answer on what timeframe is best to trade on. Generally speaking however, there are 2 things to consider:

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.

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.

LESSON 7 - AUTOBOTS...ROLL OUT!

Yeah...I'm a geek and grew up with the Transformers franchise decades before Michael Bay came along. Deal with it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

LESSON 8 - BRING ON THE HATERS

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.

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.

We often refer to trolls on this subreddit as shitcunts. That's your word of the day. Learn it, love it. Shitcunts.

YOU MADE IT, WELCOME TO FOREX!

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.

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.

Cheers,

Bob

I was going through old emails today and came across this one I sent out to family on January 4, 2018. It was a reflection on the 2017 crypto bull market and where I saw it heading, as well as some general advice on crypto, investment, and being safe about how you handle yourself in cryptoland.
I feel that we are on the cusp of a new bull market right now, so I thought that I would put this out for at least a few people to see *before* the next bull run, not after. While the details have changed, I don't see a thing in this email that I fundamentally wouldn't say again, although I'd also probably insist that people get a Yubikey and use that for all 2FA where it is supported.
Happy reading, and sorry for some of the formatting weirdness -- I cleaned it up pretty well from the original email formatting, but I love lists and indents and Reddit has limitations... :-/
Also, don't laught at my token picks from January 2018! It was a long time ago and (luckliy) I took my own advice about moving a bunch into USD shortly after I sent this. I didn't hit the top, and I came back in too early in the summer of 2018, but I got lucky in many respects.
----------------------------------------------------------------------- Jan-4, 2018
Hey all!
I woke up this morning to ETH at a solid $1000 and decided to put some thoughts together on what I think crypto has done and what I think it will do. *******, if you could share this to your kids I’d appreciate it -- I don’t have e-mail addresses, and it’s a bit unwieldy for FB Messenger… Hopefully they’ll at least find it thought-provoking. If not, they can use it as further evidence that I’m a nutjob. 😉
Some history before I head into the future.
I first mined some BTC in 2011 or 2012 (Can’t remember exactly, but it was around the Christmas holidays when I started because I had time off from work to get it set up and running.) I kept it up through the start of summer in 2012, but stopped because it made my PC run hot and as it was no longer winter, ********** didn’t appreciate the sound of the fans blowing that hot air into the room any more. I’ve always said that the first BTC I mined was at $1, but looking back at it now, that’s not true – It was around $2. Here’s a link to BTC price history.
In the summer of 2013 I got a new PC and moved my programs and files over before scrapping the old one. I hadn’t touched my BTC mining folder for a year then, and I didn’t even think about salvaging those wallet files. They are now gone forever, including the 9-10BTC that were in them. While I can intellectually justify the loss, it was sloppy and underlines a key thing about cryptocurrency that I believe will limit its widespread adoption by the general public until it is addressed and solved: In cryptoland, you are your own bank, and if you lose your password or account number, there is no person or organization that can help you reset it so that you can get access back. Your money is gone forever.
On April 12, 2014 I bought my first BTC through Coinbase. BTC had spiked to $1000 and been in the news, at least in Japan. This made me remember my old wallet and freak out for a couple of months trying to find it and reclaim the coins. I then FOMO’d (Fear Of Missing Out”) and bought $100 worth of BTC. I was actually very lucky in my timing and bought at around $430. Even so, except for a brief 50% swing up almost immediately afterwards that made me check prices 5 times a day, BTC fell below my purchase price by the end of September and I didn’t get back to even until the end of 2015.
In May 2015 I bought my first ETH at around $1. I sent some guy on bitcointalk ~$100 worth of BTC and he sent me 100 ETH – all on trust because the amounts were small and this was a small group of people. BTC was down in the $250 range at that point, so I had lost 30-40% of my initial investment. This was of the $100 invested, so not that much in real terms, but huge in percentages. It also meant that I had to buy another $100 of BTC on Coinbase to send to this guy. A few months after I purchased my ETH, BTC had doubled and ETH had gone down to $0.50, halving the value of my ETH holdings. I was even on the first BTC purchase finally, but was now down 50% on the ETH I had bought.
The good news was that this made me start to look at things more seriously. Where I had skimmed white papers and gotten a superficial understanding of the technology before FOMO’ing, I started to act as an investor, not a speculator. Let me define how I see those two different types of activity:

Investors buy because the price is less than the value they see in the investment. Speculators buy because they think that someone will pay more in the future than they are paying now.
Investors trade on information (The white paper was really well-written, had a clear technical advantage over other alternatives, and addresses a need that I can understand and value.) Speculators trade on sentiment. (Buy the rumor! Sell the news!)
Investors usually look at the investment and themselves and can describe why they purchase in those terms (ABC-Coin provides (service) that isn’t addressed yet and matches (requirements) for an investment.) Speculators usually describe why they bought something in terms of how other people think (I think that other people think that the price will rise, so I want to get ahead of that.)
Investors don’t necessarily check the price every day. The can, and very often I do, but it isn’t required because fundamentals don’t often change on a dime. Speculators need to be glued to a price feed, because sentiment very often changes on a dime.
Investors like ideas, people, business plans, and market opportunities. Good ones are like Spock. Speculators like trends. They are tribal.
Investors have a longer time horizon than speculators. In cryptoland, the notion of a “longer” time horizon is still laughably small (months) compared to traditional markets, but it certainly isn’t weeks or days or hours, which is whre speculators often live.

So what has been my experience as an investor? After sitting out the rest of 2015 because I needed to understand the market better, I bought into ETH quite heavily, with my initial big purchases being in March-April of 2016. Those purchases were in the $11-$14 range. ETH, of course, dropped immediately to under $10, then came back and bounced around my purchase range for a while until December of 2016, when I purchased a lot more at around $8.
I also purchased my first ICO in August of 2016, HEAT. I bought 25ETH worth. Those tokens are now worth about half of their ICO price, so about 12.5ETH or $12500 instead of the $25000 they would be worth if I had just kept ETH. There are some other things with HEAT that mean I’ve done quite a bit better than those numbers would suggest, but the fact is that the single best thing I could have done is to hold ETH and not spend the effort/time/cost of working with HEAT. That holds true for about every top-25 token on the market when compared to ETH. It certainly holds true for the many, many tokens I tried to trade in Q1-Q2 of 2017. In almost every single case I would have done better and slept better had I just held ETH instead of trying to be smarter than Mr. Market.
But, I made money on all of them except one because the crypto market went up more in USD terms than any individual coin went down in ETH or BTC terms. This underlines something that I read somewhere and that I take to heart: A rising market makes everyone seem like a genius. A monkey throwing darts at a list of the top 100 cryptocurrencies last year would have doubled his money. Here’s a chart from September that shows 2017 year-to-date returns for the top 10 cryptocurrencies, and all of them went up a *lot* more between then and December. A monkey throwing darts at this list there would have quintupled his money.
When evaluating performance, then, you have to beat the monkey, and preferably you should try to beat a Wall Street monkey. I couldn’t, so I stopped trying around July 2017. My benchmark was the BLX, a DAA (Digital Asset Array – think fund like a Fidelity fund) created by ICONOMI. I wasn’t even close to beating the BLX returns, so I did several things.

I went from holding about 25 different tokens to holding 10 now. More on that in a bit.
I used those funds to buy ETH and BLX. ETH has done crazy-good since then and BLX has beaten BTC handily, although it hasn’t done as well as ETH.
I used some of those funds to set up an arbitrage operation.

The arbitrage operation is why I kept the 11 tokens that I have now. All but a couple are used in an ETH/token pair for arbitrage, and each one of them except for one special case is part of BLX. Why did I do that? I did that because ICONOMI did a better job of picking long-term holds than I did, and in arbitrage the only speculative thing you must do is pick the pairs to trade. My pairs are (No particular order):

ETH/XMR
ETH/ICN
ETH/DNT
ETH/QTUM
ETH/ZRX
ETH/CFI
ETH/OMG

I also hold PLU, PLBT, and ART. These two are multi-year holds for me. I have not purchased BTC once since my initial $200, except for a few cases where BTC was the only way to go to/from an altcoin that didn’t trade against ETH yet. Right now I hold about the same 0.3BTC that I held after my first $100 purchase, so I don’t really count it.
Looking forward to this year, I am positioning myself as follows:

ETH will still be my core holding. It is the “deepest in the stack” crypto investment that I have. “Deep in the stack” is a programming term that gets at the idea that most software is built on other software. If you just think about your notebook, you have your OS, and programs run on that. But even inside the OS there is a stack. The bottom of your stack is the kernel, and on top of that are the drivers, protocols, and other layers that allow the programs to talk to the OS, the hard drive, the screen, the mouse, your printer, etc. You can change your mouse or printer easily. Changing things deeper in the stack becomes harder and harder. ETH is deep in the crypto stack, so is very hard to dislodge – Around 60 of the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market cap run on top of Ethereum, so getting rid of Ethereum is something that would take a long time to do.
- DNT, QTUM, ZRX, and OMG are all, to varying degrees, “deep in the stack” tokens that, once established, will be very hard to dislodge.
That said, I am peeling away some of my holdings into USD right now, because big changes are afoot and they are going to cause market disruptions. I’m going to come right out and admit that this is speculative, but I’m also going to back it up with some non-speculative facts.
- The SEC has been sending out hundreds of subpoenas to cryptocurrency organizations over the past 3-4 months. These subpoenas are simply asking for information and nobody has been charged with any crimes or misdoings, but it is clear that the SEC is getting together information so that they can begin to regulate cryptoland. When that happens, other countries will follow, and that means:
  - Some tokens will be deemed outright scams and people will be prosecuted.
  - Some tokens will be deemed securities and will be regulated.
  - Some tokens will not be deemed scams or securities and will continue as they have.
  - Looking at this, it is clear to me that the tokens that escape prosecution and regulation should do better, but the short-term impact will be brutal and ugly. It would not surprise me at all to see a 50% drop in overall market cap within Q1-Q2, with Q1 being more likely.
- Cryptoland has always been a bit nuts, but it is more nuts now than I have ever seen it. Back in 2011-2014 it was a freaks-n-geeks show where people were all about the technology and I would sit around for a 3-day weekend installing a *nix VM on my Windows machine so that I could compile the most recent source and run a CUDA SHA-256 routine rather than thrash my CPU. If that doesn’t make sense to you, you wouldn’t have even thought about being involved.
  - Now, people see Bitcoin advertisements in their Facebook feed and think “I gotta get on the BTC train!” before going to Coinbase and buying some with a credit card. They don’t know anything about crypto, and they are getting eaten alive – It is no coincidence that BTC peaked after the Thanksgiving holidays when people sat around the table and Janice got Uncle Mike and Cousin Bob all excited as she talked about going to Cancun for Christmas because of her crypto winnings. Huge amounts of fiat got transferred from newbies to BTC whales during this period, and once the whales were done, BTC had dropped from $20,000 to $12,000. It’s now back at $15,000, but for people who bought at a higher level, this sucks. As a result many have moved from BTC to ETH, with the single biggest money flow in crypto in December being the BTC à ETH flow. As a result, it’s no coincidence that ETH is at all-time highs now. The thing is, though, that even most people that moved from BTC to ETH really have no idea what they are doing. They are acting on buzzwords and emotion. They are speculators and are going to get crushed.
The stock market is quite high right now, but people are starting to worry that it is too high and that we are going to enter into a period of inflation again. This has caused gold to go up a lot the last quarter and is likely also responsible a bit for the rise in cryptos. If this view is correct, then cryptos stay stronger than if that pressure wasn’t there. If wrong, then cryptos will swing down as money exits cryptoland for more traditional markets.
I am spending most of my time and money on the arbitrage effort. The nice thing about arbitrage is that it works as the markets go up, and it works as the markets go down. When markets are too volatile, however, arbitrage can get very messy and dangerous, with each trade generating a loss instead of a profit, so I am working right now to tune the algorithms to take into account rate-of-change and add in some circuit breaker triggers. Once this is done I will expand those operations.
I am getting much more serious about systems security.
- I have a Nano Ledger and recommend that anyone with >$1000 of crypto have one. The Trezor is also supposed to be good, but I haven’t used it.
- I will set up a dedicated *nix notebook that is used for nothing except my crypto work. All it takes is one keylogger to get on your PC/Mac and your crypto is gone. What is on your Nano Ledger will be OK, but they will sweep out your exchange account or Coinbase account faster than you can type. A standard Linux installation with Chrome and nothing else is as about as secure as you can get in the civilian world.
- If you don’t use LastPass or a similar password manager yet, you need to do that. Your password to LastPass should be at least 16 characters long and should not have a recognizable English word in it. If you think that “Iluvu4evah” is a secure password, you’re wrong.
  - Hackers know that “4”=”for” and “u”=”you”. Writing a script to substitute those in is trivial if they want to write the script, but it’s much easier for them to download one of the many, many programs out there that already do this.
  - If your password contains any string of numbers from anything that can be associated with you at any time in your life, it is insecure. Take those numbers out of the character count because they are an insignificant barrier to cracking your account.
  - The good news is that you probably won’t be targeted, but if you ever mention online that you are doing anything significant in crypto, that chance increased enormously.
  - *Never* talk with *anyone* about how much you have in crypto. You’ll notice that I haven’t here. There is no reason to tell even a family member how much you have unless you are sharing a tax form. Sure, you may trust them, but all it takes if for someone to overhead someone else mention at a party that a relative got into crypto a long time ago and made a bunch of money. That person can also then be subjected to the $10 hack and force you to send all your crypto to them.
  - Your password to LastPass (Or equivalent.) should look something like this -> 6k0jQMoziX&D#4W8
  - Yes, it’s a headache. Imagine your headache, though, were you to open your account one day and find all of your money gone.

Looking at my notes, I have two other things that I wanted to work into this email that I didn’t get to, so here they are:

Just like with free apps and other software, if you are getting something of value and you didn’t pay anything for it, you need to ask why this is. With apps, the phrase is “If you didn’t pay for the product, you are the product”, and this works for things such as pump groups, tips, and even technical analysis. Here’s how I see it.
1. People don’t give tips on stocks or crypto that they don’t already own that stock or token. Why would they, since if they convince anyone to buy it, the price only goes up as a result, making it more expensive for them to buy in? Sure, you will have friends and family that may do this, but people in a crypto club, your local cryptocurrency meetup, or online are generally not your friends. They are there to make money, and if they can get you to help them make money, they will do it. Pump groups are the worst of these, and no matter how enticing it may look, stay as far away as possible from these scams. I even go so far as to report them when I see them advertise on FB or Twitter, because they are violating the terms of use.
2. Technical analysis (TA) is something that has been argued about for longer than I’ve been alive, but I think that it falls into the same boat. In short, TA argues that there are patterns in trading that can be read and acted upon to signal when one must buy or sell. It has been used forever in the stock and foreign exchange markets, and people use it in crypto as well. Let’s break down these assumptions a bit.

i. First, if crypto were like the stock or forex markets we’d all be happy with 5-7% gains per year rather than easily seeing that in a day. For TA to work the same way in crypto as it does in stocks and foreign exchange, the signals would have to be *much* stronger and faster-reacting than they work in the traditional market, but people use them in exactly the same way.
ii. Another area where crypto is very different than the stock and forex markets centers around market efficiency theory. This theory says that markets are efficient and that the price reflects all the available information at any given time. This is why gold in New York is similar in price to gold in London or Shanghai, and why arbitrage margins are easily <0.1% in those markets compared to cryptoland where I can easily get 10x that. Crypto simply has too much speculation and not enough professional traders in it yet to operate as an efficient market. That fundamentally changes the way that the market behaves and should make any TA patterns from traditional markets irrelevant in crypto.
iii. There are services, both free and paid that claim to put out signals based on TA for when one should buy and sell. If you think for even a second that they are not front-running (Placing orders ahead of yours to profit.) you and the other people using the service, you’re naïve.
iv. Likewise, if you don’t think that there are people that have but together computerized systems to get ahead of people doing manual TA, you’re naïve. The guys that I have programming my arbitrage bots have offered to build me a TA bot and set up a service to sell signals once our position is taken. I said no, but I am sure that they will do it themselves or sell that to someone else. Basically they look at TA as a tip machine where when a certain pattern is seen, people act on that “tip”. They use software to see that “tip” faster and take a position on it so that when slower participants come in they either have to sell lower or buy higher than the TA bot did. Remember, if you are getting a tip for free, you’re the product. In TA I see a system when people are all acting on free preset “tips” and getting played by the more sophisticated market participants. Again, you have to beat that Wall Street monkey.

If you still don’t agree that TA is bogus, think about it this way: If TA was real, Wall Street would have figured it out decades ago and we would have TA funds that would be beating the market. We don’t.
If you still don’t agree that TA is bogus and that its real and well, proven, then you must think that all smart traders use them. Now follow that logic forward and think about what would happen if every smart trader pushing big money followed TA. The signals would only last for a split second and would then be overwhelmed by people acting on them, making them impossible to leverage. This is essentially what the efficient market theory postulates for all information, including TA.

OK, the one last item. Read this weekly newsletter – You can sign up at the bottom. It is free, so they’re selling something, right? 😉 From what I can tell, though, Evan is a straight-up guy who posts links and almost zero editorial comments.
Happy 2018.

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