Mergers and Acquisitions: Their Impacts to Forex Market

Most forex traders focus on fundamental news such as the consumer index or central bank announcements. Although fundamental news and changes are greatly influential, keeping up with changes can be quite hard. There are other information and possible changes you can use to help foresee possible movements and make profitable trades based on them.

My personal favorites are mergers and acquisitions, especially involving two companies from different countries. When a company purchases another company, you can expect a serious transfer of money from one account to another to close the deal. When the two companies are from different countries, currency exchange and transfer in substantially large amount are needed for sure. See the opportunities now?

While still keeping your focus on fundamental analysis, make sure you spot information regarding mergers and acquisitions of large companies as well. The key is measuring the impact of mergers and acquisitions to forex market. If the merger or acquisition involves stock options and less cash or capital transfer, then the impact would be relatively low. What you are looking for is merger or acquisition with large capital transfers across the border, which means a lot of foreign exchanges and financial activities will take place.

Focus on the target currency. If a company from Europe is buying another company in America, with $1 billion cash transactions, you will see a possible positive impact on the USD. Under this condition, you can expect EURUSD to go bearish quite substantially, while USDJPY and USDGBP might enjoy nice bullish movements.

Getting Started with Forex Trading

Forex trading is a very appealing investment opportunity, and of course can be a very rewarding one. With more than $3 trillion being traded and circulated in one day, a lot of traders are enjoying handsome profits. A trading day starts in Sydney and continues to shift from time zone to time zone across the globe until it reaches New York as the last marketplace to open each day. You know that you can make money 24/5 — the opportunities are there for smart traders.

To get started with forex trading, you need to prepare several things. Other expert might tell you to open a trading account or get a reliable signal service, but those are not what you really need. To start your journey into the forex trading world, you need to learn.

Study the basics of forex trading. Learn how to read charts as well as how to execute trades. Most forex brokers have demo account you can use to familiarize yourself with the system and learn how to make good trades. While you study the basics, you can observe how the theories are applied in real trades.

Continue by learning indicators, influencing news and other factors, and of course yourself. Indicators can help you in a lot of practical ways, while news and fundamental analysis can make spotting trends and possible money-making opportunities a lot easier. By studying yourself, you can learn your trading style, control emotion while you trade, and formula a strategy that suits your personalities.

What to Do If You Are Stuck With Shady Broker

The number of online forex brokers is sharply increasing. You can find brokers operating in different countries as well as offering different added services to their customers. As the number of broker increases, resource centers reviewing these brokers also gain more popularity. The best way to go is make sure you are dealing with trustworthy broker that you can rely on. Check clients’ testimonials, the broker’s track records, and financial background of the company.

The problem is when you are stuck with a shady broker already. It may be hard to get your money back, but it is not impossible at all. The first thing you should do is review the terms and conditions as well as trade agreement you signed when you join the service. Make sure you pay close attention to every details; double check if you need to and make sure you understand these documents cover to cover.

If the broker is denying you your money, or making the withdrawal process a lot more difficult than it should be, then you need to be bold. State exactly what you are going to do if they give you further troubles. Don’t be rude though, since they can easily block you out; being rude can simply cost you your money. Plus, make sure you understand the terms and conditions before you make threats.

Last but not least, you can try forum and online forex watch such as Forex Peace Army to help you. Explain your case calmly and let other traders supply you with solutions.

Spotting Trends with MACD

When you trade forex, sometimes keeping the analysis simple is so much better. Complicated technical indicators may be able to help you trade, but you can make similarly good trades using simple indicators and simple analysis. In this article, we are going to talk about how you can spot trends using nothing but the MACD oscillator and one additional exponential moving average for confirmation.

The first thing you need to do is set up your MACD indicator. If you are trading on longer timeframe, the best combination would be 12- and 26-day moving averages, while day traders may want to opt for 7- and 18-day moving average instead. With the indicator properly set up, you can now analyze trends using several simple theories. A 9-day exponential moving average is added as a momentum line so that you can confirm trends easily.

If you see the MACD line crosses the momentum line upwards, you are looking at an upward trend or a bullish; a possible reversal of the current bearish is also possible. To confirm the trend, check the signal line’s current direction and the position of the two lines — if they are under the 0 signal line, than the trend can be quite strong. You can also spot trend reversals by seeking for divergences in strength as measured by the MACD channel, or in other words the distance between two lines.

Combine this simple analysis with your own trading formula, and you can enjoy profitable trades. Just keep it simple and catch trend changes properly.

Trading Multiple Timeframes

Forex is indeed a very volatile market, and you need to go the extra mile to determine market direction and make profitable trades. That is why I always remind new traders to have the right point of view; forex is not a get-rich-quick scheme and efforts are needed to be profitable. One of the things you can do to be more profitable in forex is to trade multiple timeframes.

Common forex trading software usually has different timeframe settings. You can set the chart to display movements in different intervals, from 1-minute to 1-months. A good rule of thumb is to have at least three charts if you want to trade multiple timeframes. Start with the lowest chart timeframe you usually use, and add two more charts to help you analyze market movements.

The lowest timeframe is called short-term, followed by intermediate-term and long-term. If you use 15-minute for the short-term chart, you can use 1-hour chart for intermediate-term — that is four times the lower chart timeframe — and 4-hour chart for the long-term analysis. If you generally use 4-hour chart, add 1-day and 1-week charts to help you.

You can confirm trends and analyze movements better with multiple timeframes. No matter what trading style you use, using multiple timeframes properly can help you be more profitable and catch more trends. Formulate your own strategy of how you can use the multiple timeframes to support your current trading style, and you will be much more profitable in no time at all.

Learning from Bad Trades

I just finished hearing complains of a new forex trader. Among his biggest issues is the fact that the market turn against him as soon as he opened a position; I wouldn’t be surprised if some of you feel or experience similar things several times. The natural reasoning he used was that his forex broker scammed him; for the record, he is using the same broker as I’ve been using, and my trades are generally profitable.

When you experience similar situation, don’t jump to the conclusion of you being scammed by your forex broker just yet. Instead, try to analyze the situation objectively and see if the decision you made to enter a trade was properly calculated. First, start with determining whether you have a strategy in mind — entering a position without proper strategy, or in other words based on ‘intuition’ and emotions is definitely suicidal.

If you do have a strategy mapped, continue by assessing whether you enter the trade correctly based on that particular strategy you are using. If the answer is still (objectively) YES, then you can simply analyze the strategy that you use and see if this is a solitary issue or if the strategy needs further evaluating.

Last but not least, assess properly if you are entering the trade because you are emotional at the moment or because you have cleverly calculated the movement. By following these steps, you can generally discover if the trade was properly timed and that you made the right decision.