It’s never long when you’re starting out in forex before you come across a site offering an automatic forex trading tool. Their’s, of course, is the best ever…

It’s the ideal solution in the market that never sleeps (except at weekends).
All you need is a hundred bucks to make your first trade – then you’ll have the mega money to invest and make a serious pip profit…
You don’t need to know anything about boring things like the markets, technical analysis, your new forex friend will help you through.
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When you take a loss on a forex trade, the plain fact is you’re making an admission that you were plain wrong. And that’s uncomfortable – and that’s when all the avoidance mechanisms kick in. We all, on occasion, are good at hanging in there too long just avoid have to admit the screw-up.

So why is it going to get better?
Hanging a bad position round your neck will suffocate you slowly. Better to cut it free and then you really can begin the process of learning then forgetting. Yes, learn from mistakes, it takes a bit of steel to go back and have a close look at what went wrong – it’s painful, no doubt about it – then keep the lesson and forget the feeling.
If you don’t, you’ll carry it for a day or two, and then – usually – your broker will do the job for you, like it or not. And those 2 days won’t have made you enjoy forex trading any more…
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The forex market? Predictable? – well, just at the moment, while we are hardly in normal trading conditions, that doesn’t necessary mean predictability is reduced…

For light reading, I have been checking James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds. The critical factor in this treatment of the subject is the consideration of a collection of individuals, all making independent decisions (given the same apparent input data) – yes, a bunch of forex traders, each of whom know it’s them against the rest – rather than the standard psychology of crowds.
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Well, I’ve never totally understood why people use credit cards on the internet anyway…
Give over just one number and they can debit your account at any time they feel like?

Credit card security
Most forex brokers will accept deposits by credit card, wire transfer and, in some cases, checks by good old snail mail. However many forex traders share the view about the use of their credit card online and the possibility of endangering their saving account.
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Fairly obvious really, but the thing about obsessions is they creep up on you.

A friend of mine does affiliate marketing – 14 hours a day at a screen, fixing up links, building a hundred or so rubbish web sites each designed to earn a dollar a day – so it mounts up, but it is a seriously brute force approach – and then there’s a heck of a lot of stress when a hundred sites go down at once. There are times, frankly, when he’s not a fun person to be near. He’s going to sacrifice a few luxuries like a social life, decent blood pressure readings, make his money and retire at 40. Maybe….
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Recessions and refuges
The US dollar and the yen gained against the euro as worldwide and general recession arrived – so sparking an investor’s run for refuge in these old favorites (also in recession themselves, but that’s not quite how it works) – while exotics such as the forint, which had been doing business on the back of derivatives etc., fell back sharply.

Central bank interest rates, without exception, began a journey towards 0% – the US dollar lost value against the yen, which has had a low interest rate (0.5%) for the preceding decade – and therefore not so far to fall…
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Keep it simple (stupid) - if you do keep your trading simple, the point of it all is that you know where you stand, know what decision to make when faced with a set of circumstances and why you made it – all key factors in making the transition from rookie to professional.

And the obvious way to keep keep it as simple as possible at the beginning is to only trade one currency pair. Fewer variables, fewer moving parts, and a lot more chance for you to analyse charts, trends and trades with some accuracy. If you do try to handle 4 or 5 pairs at once, with all the major currencies involved, the individual characteristics of a pair, or even a currency, get lost in the blur of action. Learning the unique behavior of a pair is critical.
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What of the rumors? Rumors that, faced with a currency dropping like a stone, a lot of previous policy statements are going to be junked and the United Kingdom might make a relatively rapid emergency dive into the Eurozone. ft.com doesn’t seem to carry the story/suggestion anywhere that I can see, presumably not dignifying it with any unmerited publicity.
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The Average True Range (ATR), like Bollinger Bands, is a measure of volatility.

It’s another J Welles Wilder production, starting with an index he called the True Range, defined as the greatest of the following 3 values:

Current High – the current Low
Absolute value of (current High – previous Close)
Absolute value of (current Low – previous Close)

The Average True Range is commonly calculated using 14 periods. See the chart below, showing a period of level trading, relatively low volatilitiy, followed by a down trend and higher volatility. Standard Bollinger bands are also plotted.

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Fairly obvious – at the moment, investors, rather than traders, need something that isn’t going to go down the pan – if the future is uncertain, and more importantly, with news events coming in thick and fast, making it impossible to make any sensible long-term decisions, what do you do? Give up and head for the nearest safe haven.

Any major traded currency, for example USD or CHF, is going have a natural inbuilt advantage.
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