Let It Fall Let It Fall Let It Fall!

Last Friday Japan Earthquake was an unexpected event, and this will definitely cause panic selling on the next trading day which is on Monday. Usually for an unexpected event like this our Bursa Malaysia will undergo a period of correction. Ill usually wait for three weeks before Ill go into the market for bargain hunting. Always remember, the stock market will undergo a cycle but on the long run, it will be on an uptrend. So my advice is stay calm, let the market fall for 2-3 weeks, before you go in again. Unless there is another unexpected event happen, things will be different. But for now, that should be my strategy!

Happy investing

Pauline Yong

Diposting oleh Unknown 19.30 0 komentar

Targetting the JPY Crosses Why it is so Hard to Develop Long Term Profitable Systems for These Instruments

If you have been interested in system development and you have been following my achievements for a while you would have certainly noticed that I have never developed a system to target any JPY crosses. The reason why I havent done so is not because I havent tried but because the development of long term profitable systems for them has proved to be extremely hard. On todays post I want to share with you my experience with these instruments and why I have had a very hard time attempting to develop strategies that profit from these very volatile forex trading instruments. I will explain to you why price action based strategies simply do not seem to work for these pairs and what other alternative solutions I have put in practice to develop a long term profitable system that is able to diversify our trading with these JPY beasts.

The JPY crosses are a series of instruments in the forex market that pair the Japanese Yen with a non-USD currency. These instruments are most commonly EUR/JPY, GBP/JPY and CHF/JPY but other more exotic pairs like NZD/JPY and AUD/JPY are also available. These pairs have some very notable characteristics which set them apart from regular forex pairs like the EUR/USD and the GBP/USD. What makes them so special is the extremely large daily volatility and their overall lack of liquidity (when compared to major pairs). Developing a system for these babies is no easy ride and I will just show you why this is the case.

System development is based on the finding of exploitable market inefficiencies. Price behaves in a certain way that allows you to enter a trade with a high probability of success under very diverse market conditions. Lack of liquidity introduces a blur to this image and therefore it becomes very hard to find inefficiencies because price is "all over the place" so to speak. Lack of liquidity makes different price patterns appear on very different market situations signaling many different things taking your mathematical expectancy away from positive territory. So if you try to trade a given candlestick pattern you find that the pattern sometimes leads to where you want to go and sometimes it doesnt - like it always happens - but the lack of liquidity increases the number of times it leads to where you dont want to go significantly, to the point where you lose all the edge you would have gained from it.

For this very reason, the development of price based strategies on the JPY crosses is often not a good idea since you are very vulnerable to the "blur" introduced by the general lack of liquidity of these instruments. Systems that have success on very varied currency pairs - like Teyacanani - simply fail to profit on JPY crosses due to the fact that their signals simply dont lead anywhere. After analyzing 10 years of price data for the EUR/JPY I have found that price action is extremely hard to predict due to the fact that lack of liquidity makes it follow a very random walk in the short and perhaps medium term. This is the exact effect you would expect from lack of liquidity since crowd behavior becomes less representative and more individual human behavior - which is just random - starts to show through the charts.

What is the solution then ? Since price action based strategies seemed to fail to bring positive results on these currency pairs for me, I decided to change into indicator based strategies that allowed me to remove the "noise" from the market more effectively. The idea here is that JPY crosses do follow crowd behavior in the long term so introducing a strategy that averages data and gives me an idea of where things are going would most likely prove more effective. This is in fact the case and indicator based strategies do show positive mathematical expectancy values with less effort. However, the fact that the currency pairs lack liquidity makes the eventual profitability of these strategies much lower than what can be achieved on the regular USD paired instruments.

In the end it becomes obvious that lack of liquidity complicates any mechanical profitability to a large extent since market inefficiencies become far more scarce and difficult to capture. Lack of liquidity makes the effect of smaller parties larger and therefore the movements are just more random overall. Crowd behavior becomes less significant and therefore we lose a significant edge that we are able to use on major currency pairs. Many of you may think that this "randomness" constitutes an inefficiency on its own but the fact is that it does not since you arent able to predict when it will appear with a statistical advantage. If you assume that JPY crosses are random and attempt to profit from their volatility you will fail when they trend and vice versa. The problem is not the character of the instruments but the fact that lack of liquidity does not allow us to have a positive statistical edge on most strategies.

Does this mean that we wont have any mechanical JPY-cross trading strategy ? No, it just means that it will be much harder to develop and probably profit and risk targets wont be as good as for regular systems based on more liquid currency pairs. As a matter of fact I am currently developing some strategies to address these JPY crosses. Hopefully I will be able to tackle this beast and - in the end - we will have some likely long term profitable systems for our JPY trading friends :o)

If you would like to learn more about automated trading and how you too can learn to design and develop your own trading systems with sound trading tactics please consider buying my ebook on automated trading or joining Asirikuy to receive all ebook purchase benefits, weekly updates, check the live accounts I am running with several expert advisors and get in the road towards long term success in the forex market using automated trading systems. I hope you enjoyed the article !

Diposting oleh Unknown 21.45 0 komentar

How it All Came to Be The Story of EA Reviewers

It feels like it has been decades when I look back a few years and see the start of what would become a daily-updated blog about automated trading systems and forex trading. Many things have passed during these two and a half years, reviewers have come and gone, experts have been tested and discarded and people have got their accounts funded and wiped. Today I want to write a post to honor all of those who have participated in this story of true expert advisor reviewing, many have found this endeavor to be too exhausting and time consuming while others have found the strength to continue with their tests and their quest for that holy grail people have been looking for since 2007. But how did this all began, how did we take the decision to start reviewer websites ? Why did so many quit and who actually remain ?

This whole journey in forex automated trading started for me in middle 2007 as I was living in the quiet and lovely region of Cumming Georgia with my girlfriend. I had already been trading the forex market for a few years (with some pauses, actually I had used mt3 before but didnt realize it had an auto trading feature) and I was certainly determined to make it work this time. One day, I had the "brilliant" idea of searching for the phrase "forex automated trading" and quickly some results popped up about metatrader, the forex-tsd forum and some very initial commercial EA websites which were more about some programmer making an EA and selling it rather than a mass marketed scam ( although this experts also didnt work).

I remember buying my first couple of experts, testing them on live accounts and feeling utterly disappointed. How could this people be so dishonest ? Why would they sell me something which would lose money so quickly and failed to show any of the results advertised ? This is when I started to look for reviewers and, to my surprise, the only true website I found which tried to review experts in an independent way belonged to a nice fellow from Singapore called Ckow Yong. I quickly contacted him and we engaged in an idea sharing relationship which lasts to this day.

However, as good as CKs approach was to EA reviewing and the great effort he was making; I didnt like several things about his site including his offering of affiliate links and the fact that he traded systems like black boxes without ever wondering if it was key to understand the logic behind them. This is the time when I decided to start this blog in which I first had a CK-like approach (without the affiliate links) and then I started to move beyond what he had done, analyzing and focusing on why all these commercial systems were not working and what could be done to make a system that worked. I consider that my website is the 2nd true unbiased review site and for this I think I am one of the "old guys" in the reviewers scene, not as known or as popular as others, but still, an old dog in this field of EA reviewing and automated trading :o).

Sadly, commercial systems took a toll on CKs patience (since nothing was working) something which prompted him to leave the expert advisor scene in search for some more reliable ways of making profit in trading. I think that CK came to the same conclusions as I did but we both took different approaches to solve the problem. He decided that experts were actually not the way to go, while I decided that making long term profitable experts should be a real possibility since all my reading and analysis had taught me that the market was certainly inefficient to some extent.

Then the "true scam age" of automated trading started with the introduction of FAP turbo and about 10 new different expert advisors every month. I can tell you that this period trialed my patience but at this time I was already a lot more knowledgeable and I was able to see right through the sales pages to give my true insights about the expert advisors I was reviewing. At this time Donna Forex started to come into the picture. She took an opportunity given by the FAP turbo expert advisor in which many people wanted to use it but they didnt know how to work with it (which settings to use, how to evaluate them, etc), since CK wasnt in the scene anymore and I wasnt interested in this system, Donna came in to fill this gap and help people use this commercial system. After this I believe that Donna has filled the space left by CK in the sense that her approach is quite similar, newsletters, affiliate links, an effort to remain unbiased, etc.

Then we had some other reviewers like DuyDuy (duyduyfx.blogspot.com) who did not like to write English prose very much but did want to test expert advisors. His blog, which is still online to date, shows performance charts every now and then of the different systems evaluated by him. His approach is the simplest and utterly the most dangerous and the most transparent, he simply shows trading system results, and you decide what is worth using and what is not. The problem being mainly that this encourages the use experts which show short term profitable results which are bound to wipe accounts in the long term, something which I have talked about in a few previous posts.

In 2009 we saw the appearance of some new guys to the scene, with Casey from bestforexea.com being the most prominent. His approach to automated trading reminds me clearly of my early days with CK and reading the forex-tsd forum. Casey has always been focused on scalpers and Martingale systems and I believe that he is what I consider the questing knight of the EA reviewing community, he is attempting to find something which we have all found from experience and analysis doesnt exist but I believe that he is now starting to realize these things himself and probably we will see some interesting evolution from his part this year. Casey also did some very important contributions to the EA scene by revealing how many expert advisors were simply copy-cats of other trading systems found freely on forums.

Almost three years have passed now and I feel that we have all done our part to enrich the automated trading community with whatever approach we think is best. Donna continues to test commercial expert advisors as Duyduy and Casey while I have decided to go into a different direction in which knowledge and understanding are primordial for success. I think that they will all realize in time that commercial trading systems are not the answer (mainly because one thing is to develop an EA to sell and another to develop an EA to trade) and they will take whatever path they think is best to sort this out. It is exciting to think about the future and about where we will all be in a few years. Definitely I hope that we will all still be active and working in our own ways to bring people a true solution to long term profitability in forex automated trading.

There are also some new guys, like Chris (fx-mon.blogspot.com) . I encourage them to go on and build their own knowledge regarding automated trading systems and how to use them to be profitable. Definitely it is a long and hard journey but also a rewarding one altogether. To all reviewers and traders working on automated trading, I wish you the best luck, hopefully we will all still be working on our websites and content in ten years :o)

If you would like to learn more about what I have learned in automated trading and how you too can build and design profitable automated trading systems based on sound trading tactics please consider buying my ebook on automated trading or joining Asirikuy to receive all ebook purchase benefits, weekly updates, check the live accounts I am running with several expert advisors and get in the road towards long term success in the forex market using automated trading systems. I hope you enjoyed the article !

Diposting oleh Unknown 17.30 0 komentar

Too Good to Be True Why it is Never True

Yesterday while I was searching some forums and reading the comments of the posters I came across a conversation about the very traditional saying "if it is too good to be true, it probably is". As I read more I saw some very interesting aspects about the way in which the conversation was being carried out, specially the opinion of one of the debaters who was against the hypothesis claiming that is was nothing but mediocre and destructive to a person with an "achieving" personality. Today I want to write a post about my opinion about this "too good to be true" issue and how I feel it is a very valuable piece of common knowledge based on hundreds - or even thousands - of years of human experience. In particular I will discuss its relationship with automated trading and why it is extremely importance in this field
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First of all, we need to understand the nature of this timeless phrase. Why does it exactly mean and what is the power behind it ? What do people mean by "too good to be true" ? Generally this sentence speaks about the overall human experience in the sense that it reflects the expectations of the general public. When someone tells you that a certain endevour sounds "too good to be true" it means that you may be drastically underestimating the efforts or the actual real possibilities of doing what you are intending to do.

As a clear example, imagine that you lived in the 19th century and you told someone "I will be building a machine to fly in one week". They would tell you that it sounds too good to be true and the actual truth is that you would have found the endevour much more time consuming and difficult than what you originally thought. It is worth noting that the saying does not necessarily limit the possibilities of what can be done but generally the manner in which things can be carried out meaning that if something that was "too good to be true" could be done in that way, you wouldnt be the first person doing it and it wouldnt be too good to be true after all, because it would be true.

So how does this all apply to automated trading ? It applies in a very simple way. If it was possible and so simple to turn 500 USD into 1 million in 5 years, then it would have already been done and it wouldnt be considered too good to be true. However, since achieving this extremely high capital returns isnt something which is being done by the worlds top traders or trading organizations (or anybody else for that matter... if you have an example in automated trading I would absolutely love to hear it) then it simply falls within this category with very good reason.
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Is living from automated trading too good to be true ? The fact is that if you are thinking about placing a robot on a trading platform and letting it to work like an ATM for you then it certainly is too good to be true. Othewise dont you think that the thousands of people who have learned about automated trading would be living from it right now? The reality is that most of these people are actually not making any income from automate trading but they are losing money trying to achieve the situation which is just "too good". However - as I implied before - this does not mean that living from automated trading is impossible, it merely signals that the way most people are following is just wrong. Living from automated trading is possible but the truth is that it will require a LOT of study, a LOT of work and MUCH more capital that what you have been told and - not surprisingly - it is not something everybody can do; it is a long journey filled with frustration and hard work which - alike most non-luck based roads towards wealth- is simply not travelled by the vast majority of people.

In my mind, I dont think that the "too good to be true" saying is intended to be discouraging, mediocre or destructive - on the contrary - I think that it is meant to be protective as it certainly points out that the roads towards wealth exist but they are not short and they are not easily travelled. In the end there is nothing special about you or about me and if the easy ways to achieve massive riches in automated trading were really a reality, we would have both achieved that goal without any effort a long time ago (and therefore it wouldnt be too good to be true either !). In reality the best thing you can do for yourself is to find out what can be realistically achieved and put all your hard work into. Forex automated trading - as I have said several times - is not a gold mine for you to avoid work and sit on a beach to drink Margaritas all day. The journey is far harsher and demanding than your average 9 to 5 job, but so is the end much more rewarding.

If you would like to learn more about my perspective in automated trading and how you too can build systems with realistic profit and risk targets which use sound trading tactics to profit from the market please consider buying my ebook on automated trading or joining Asirikuy to receive all ebook purchase benefits, weekly updates, check the live accounts I am running with several expert advisors and get in the road towards long term success in the forex market using automated trading systems. I hope you enjoyed the article !

Diposting oleh Unknown 03.46 0 komentar