Archive for September, 2010

What is Sterilized Intervention?

Intervention by central banks is one of the most important short-term and long-term fundamental drivers in the currency market. For short-term traders, intervention can lead to sharp intraday movements on the scale of 150 to 250 pips in a matter of minutes. For longer-term traders, intervention can signal a significant change in trend because it [...]

The Japanese Have Done it! Kan’s Politically Savvy Move

The Japanese have finally done it! Yesterday, I wrote that “even if Kan was not actively considering physical intervention to weaken the Yen before the elections, he will have warmed to idea when he wakes up in the morning and finds USD/JPY trading below 83.”
Warming to the idea was apparently an [...]

JPY Breaks 83: Time for Intervention?

Prime Minister Kan won the elections last night and Yen traders have interpreted his victory to mean a more relaxed approach towards intervention. This may be true when compared to the pro-intervention stance of Ozawa (his challenger) but the rapid appreciation in the Yen against the U.S. dollar AND the Chinese Yuan has also [...]

Forex Survey from CitiFX

My good friend Francesc from FXStreet alerted me to CitiFX’s new survey of Forex Traders. I am always a big fan of initiatives that create greater transparency in the forex market. I’ve taken the survey, and you may want to do so as well so that they have a reliable sample set of [...]

Outlook for JPY, GBP, EUR, USD

I was on the Business News Network this morning talking about today’s developments including the Japanese elections, the prospect of intervention, the UK CPI numbers, the reason why euro is weak and U.S. retail sales. Click on the image to access the Video

Scalping University Lesson 7 - Rules to Scalp By

Forex Trading Strategies: Surviving is Winning

Surviving is Winning
When studying money managers, academics always note the presence of survivorship bias. Survivorship bias amongst many other things is the idea that if you flip a coin often enough any monkey can succeed at this job. Basically in any given pool of applicants a very small percentage can flip ten heads in a [...]

Currency Pair Checklist - Here it is!

I have received a number of requests for my Currency Checklist excel spreadsheet which I fill out every morning before I trade (admittedly some of them are linked to real time feeds and are automatically filled out) but here it is!
This is the same Currency Pair Checklist shown in Chapter 8 of Day [...]

European Stress Tests: Could the Publicity Stunt Backfire?

The European sovereign debt crisis has come back to haunt the euro. In the beginning of the year, European debt problems drove the EUR/USD from 1.45 down to 1.1877. When the fears receded, the euro climbed back above 1.33. However now that the fears that have gripped the currency for most of the year [...]

Forex Trading Strategy: Setting Goals

Setting Goals

This holiday weekend I thought I would share with you this video from the TED conference on the latest research into goal setting. My only comment on the subject is that when it comes to trading make your own goals modest. It is much harder than you think to make 50bps per week, [...]