Currency Trading Is The World’s Largest Financial Market

At the core, all you need to remember is that betting on a currency’s direction is speculation, not investment. When you buy Pounds or Swiss Francs or Euros or Yens, you don’t buy an ownership right into a firm that can grow its top and bottom line, and thus its equity and the wealth of its shareholders over time. You just hope that the relative value of the currency you purchased will increase. It’s a trade, nothing more, nothing less. Twenty years from now, it’s quite possible that the Euro and the dollar will still be close to parity. What long-term return can you then hope for from taking such a position? Meanwhile, companies like Facebook or LinkedIn may have made their owners rich – very rich. Primarily because they grow profit and you owner own some of it. Lucky you!

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I should have studied finance. I don’t even know what a devaluation is. Instead, I am the proud alumnus of a two-hour webinar that taught me I could become rich trading foreign currencies. Rich! Do you understand? Rich!!! But a foreign-exchange investor is like an... oxymoron. And if you remove the oxygen, he or she becomes a moron. My first wife should be doing this. After all, it’s for ex… Definitely not for me!

Yes, you learn a skill and hope to make a killing. But the murdered one in the end may be… you. Most retail currency investors lose money most of the time. FXCM Inc. and Gain Capital Holdings Inc., two leading publicly traded over-the-counter forex companies, have reported that, on average, nearly 70 percent of investors had a net loss from trading in recent quarters. The average OTC forex investor drops out of the market after just four months, according to the National Futures Association (NFA).
Currency trading is the world’s largest financial market; $5.3 trillion changes hands every day, according to the Bank for International Settlements. There are zillion of market participants. Pension funds and multinational corporations operate in the space of course. But also all sorts of speculators, brokers, weirdoes and people with broken dreams…

And then there is… me. Both my shrink and a friend of a friend of my dentist who said he knows someone recommended I get a piece of the action.

Damned, why did I listen and choose to enroll?

Can you believe I can supercharge my bets with 50:1 leverage? Stock investors are amateurs. The U.S. Federal Reserve limits individual stock investors’ leverage (margin requirements) to 2:1. I say, 50:1 or nothing! If I have $1,000 I want to bet $50,000’s worth minimum. The dream! This kind of juice can lead to monstrous wins -- even in a market that moves little. But of course investors – really, speculators – can have their entire position vanish in days. How about that for magic! Don’t overleverage, they recommend. But I’m saying 10:1 is for sissies… Or am I deranged?

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Sure, leverage can blow me out. But if you don’t mind losing $10 instead of a mere $1, gambling the house, unsleeping at night, discovering the true meaning of conflicts of interest (Brokers often buy what I sell and sell what I buy so I guess they trust my judgment big time, don’t they?), enticing pitches by people who truly don’t care, piling up credit card debt for the wrong reasons (as though there ever were a good reason!), just help yourself! Do forex by any means.

Yes I’m going to max out my credit card. Oh yeah baby! That’s what FXCM suggested I do when I started with them. Fastest way to open an account, they teased. Why not? I have tons of credit cards I must be rich. The combination of leverage and plastic is a dream come true. I can end up paying an upfront fee, a transactional interchange reimbursement fee, a terminal fee (yeah, I’m about to die), a payment gateway fee, as well as debt with as high an interest rate as 25 percent. And the Fed is looking to boost rates; can you believe the dream? It’s like paradise! Who dared say I can lose it all?

Hold on! It’s already tomorrow and I forgot to make money. Thank God today is the day! Let’s go back to those Polish złoty and Mongolian tugrik…

In the “I trade. Do you mind?” Series Forex Routines, Beware Mirages!

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We have a very unique daily routine as forex traders, so beware.

• 3:00am EST Wake Up and Stress

• 1 hour reading on Stress and how to deal with it

• 30 minute workout to chill and try to forget about stress

• 4:30 Shower – We find using freezing water helps forget stress if only for a few minutes

• 4:31 Start the long, painful process of unfreezing

• 5:00am Breakfast including Tarte Tatin and double whopper Cheese because it’s going to take a lot to survive the day

• 5:30 Logon computer to check out all critical news feeds and hyper-sensitive emails that make us feel self-conscious or nervous or worse and disregard any that exacerbate stress levels or do not fit with expectations of what the data should look like today – it’s only fair.

• 6:00 Respond to any emails that’s worth responding to specially those that are quick to process – avoid anything challenging. Now is not the time.

• 6:30 Think of tax implications of the above. Call accountant and lawyer for a pleasant, well-deserved relaxing chat. Oops, too early we’re going into voice mail. Can you believe some people are still sleeping? What a bunch of deadbeats! Leave messages.

• 6:45 Skype call to Trading Partners - if I do feel I have any today: run our daily scan and proceed through market analysis. Select best vehicles for profit generation or at least loss prevention. Well, mostly loss prevention. Sorry, loss reduction. Damned! Remember stress is not the enemy. Panic when you are stressed; paradoxically, panic can help you forget you are stressed because you’re so stressed it’s like paroxysmal and numbing.

• 7:30 Second Breakfast to include hot dog and lots of eggs. Don’t forget the pickle. Pizza welcome as long as toppings include pineapples.

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• 8:00 Second Skype call to Trading Partners: Tertiary analysis review of the basket of relevant currencies and associated exit strategies. Bond with futures now before they’re past if you have to. Avoid exotic currencies like the British pound, especially if they feel dear.

• 8:01 Stress Coping Tactics. Avoid any inappropriate online content if, and only if, you must.

• 9:00 Pre market analysis sequel to make sure our overall (and ante-post-pre) analysis is correct. No way it is. Limit resulting damage. Only trade currency pairs we are super familiar with. My favorite one lately has been the Polish złoty versus the Mongolian tugrik. The tugrik today is worth around 0.00052 US dollars so I can get tons of tugriks for a dollar. Makes me feel good. I didn’t know, but in tugriks I’m a millionaire. Maybe you are too; think about that! The złoty is worth .27 US dollar. So you can still get lots of Mongolian moola per złoty.

There are other pairs I like. But I’ve found the U.S. dollar versus the euro tough to read, unpredictable as it has become lately. Thank the Greeks and the Germans for that!!! All this chat of Grexit and Grexhaustion makes me feel queasy. Not to mention the U.S. dollar versus the Swiss franc, an old favorite of mine. Remember a few months back when the Swiss currency jumped by nearly 30% against the euro right after the Swiss National Bank decided to stop curtailing the value of its currency? No warning, not even an apology. Nothing. Just wiped me out. FXCM Inc., one of the largest retail currency brokers in the world, had to beg for an emergency $300 million lifeline from investment firm Leucadia National Corp. Leucadia did not rescue me, though! Shares of FXCM were suspended on the New York Stock Exchange after the company said client (yeah, that’s me folks!) losses on Swiss franc trades threatened to put it in violation of regulatory capital rules. No kidding! I also owned shares of FXCM… Yeah, exactly, that’s me! A double whammy for the God of trades!!! Do you believe the comfort zone? What a day! The bast@rds! The yen is more predictable but you never know in which direction. Let me clarify: it’s not clear.

• 9:01 Check the markets. The first thing any pro trader does before breathing each day (that is, after all of the above, so there’s a good chance I’m already dead by now) is to check any outstanding order or open trades from the previous day. Depending on what happened overnight I may have to adjust stop losses on open positions, or just cry and wish I were a rock star. If the pre-determined plan was to trail stops on an open position, I will take the time to find the most logical next step (again, whatever that means), assuming the position has evolved in a certain way that’s not the opposite of what I had predicted and if it has not then I have to reevaluate. If any trades have closed out overnight, hitting either the set target (target, what target?) or stop loss level, I will update my trading journal to reflect these changes. Yes, because I write a journal. Thank God nobody reads it. Not even me! Are you kidding?

• 9:30 Market opens. Oops, hold on. It was already open. The foreign exchange currency market is not traded on a regulated exchange like stocks. It consists of a whole bunch of financial institutions and brokers, which follow their own modus operandi. Since most participants trade between 8:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. in their local time zone, this is widely assumed to be the market open and close times. I trade during the working hours of the three largest Market Centers: London, New York, and Tokyo. Sydney is for tourists and Frankfurt for Frankfurter Wuerstchen (THE sausage) amateurs. Given the multiplicity of operations in different time zones, the forex market is available for trading 24 hours a day, five and one-half days per week. You can be sleeping and have a nightmare and it is still open. Always on. I can engage after dinner or before breakfast or whenever I breathe. See, I can lose money anytime; I just have to click! I am waiting for triggers, fingers crossed. What? Who? Where? How? These are the key questions.

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• 9:30am – 4:00pm -- Live market analysis and news feeds and real-time transaction nightmares. I shall be placing a few trades. You know, the saying that genius is the ability to recognize patterns... Well, guess what, I don’t have it. I usually use technical analysis but today I again feel non-inspired. There are tons of zigzagging lines in the currency-price charts on the screen but I see no W formation. Maybe a V. Definitely a q. Oh yeah, going down alright… No, I don’t see any currency rising the way I want. I look online at my broker’s listing of bid and offer prices for THE currency pair. Where is the Polish złoty versus the Mongolian tugrik? OK, I’m going to short the Brazilian Real against the U.S. Dollar (get real… not!). Am I a genius or what? Eat while monitoring trades for further analysis. Can you believe the mess? Chew. The hardship? Chewing is good. The food deserves my hatred. Masticate. Make every effort not to scream or cry, however inhuman or unfair or unnatural the market’s hysteria seems. Daydream and use adult content – nobody said you are a child. Damned! Try to take time off the market. You don’t have to be in it all the time. What am I? A newbie? Have a life! Relax… Don’t stare at the charts like this. You look mad.

• 4:00 – 11:00pm Market roundup of today’s trades. P/L report. Prep messages to family, partners and banks to remind them – and most of all you – that money isn’t everything. Losing a few grand is not the end of the world. Too bad it’s more than a few!

• 11:00pm – 2:59am TV relaxation including any Show on Wall Street Meltdowns or Cramer vs. Cramer or Banging the Bank if you have to. Can you believe some traders are even worse off?

• 2:59am – 3:00am Time to wonder if currency trading is a worthy activity given nexus of failed tactics and losing trades, and looming yet inevitable impoverishment. Meditate. Would God be a currency trader or a long-term stock investor? Revisit all assumptions. How come Warren Buffett does not trade forex? George Soros has been known to, but not everybody has a gorgeous foreign accent and a predisposition for foreign exchanges. Can you believe Carl Icahn doesn’t buy and sell the same currency twenty times a day – and incur fees, taxes, bloodbaths, violations of good faith (oops, no that must be for stocks) and all sorts of supposedly impossible, granted sometimes-unpredictable yet very real downfalls?

Learn More-  FUNanc!al Two Cents: Why You May not Wish to Trade Forex