Nice Ideas

Just letting out a few things I thought I wanted to tell ...

Sunday, January 29, 2006

Forex Trading

Forex stands for Foreign Exchange. Unlike, Shares and bonds, Forex is not traded in a centralized platform like in a Stock exchange. Instead, Forex trading is done OTC(Over the Counter), which means that this is traded all through the day and in direct mode over telephones or the internet.

How does the Forex work? Every day, over $1 trillion of money is traded between different countries. Most of this is through genuine trade of export and import. And based on the trade between, say USA and the EU, the exchange rate between USD and the Euro fluctuates. So, effectively, if you have $100 when the exchange rate is One Dollar for Two Euros, and now you exchange it with Euros and thus get 200 Euros. Now if the exchange rate changes the next day to become $2 for every two Euros, now you can exchange it back to USD to make $200.

Ofcourse, the exchange rate seldom has such rapid fluctuations that you can double your $100, but that example would help you understand how the Forex trading is done.

Now, what is it that you need to do? Similar to virtual trading before investing in stocks, you also need to do your homework before starting to invest. Also, there are lot of sites on the internet, some of which you may find here in our own site which offers you virtual FOREX games. Playing virtually will get you to the intrinsics of Forex trading. You can start to invest in the actual trade while you know the basic fundamentals.

Now, I would also like you to invest some time in reading various tutorials. You need not necessarily pay for them. There are hundreds of free sites that offer you tutorials on how to analyze the exchange rates. Keep studying even if you are confident of putting your best foot forward. You never know when you learn something new or a new strategy that you never thought of.

So, all done where to register. Look into your local country Forex traders from Google or also from your local media and Financial advisors. It is important to choose the best trader because, they need to trade currencies that you think are your money getters. For example, you may feel that US Dollar trades best against Australian Dollar, but if your trader does not have that currency pair, you lose your strategy. So, make sure about the trading pairs that they offer, the commissions that they might demand, etc. Note that there exist institutions that do not demand any commission, but may offer poor services. So, you need to choose the best one for you. There cannot exist one best place which we can suggest.

Now, when you have started to trade, you need to remember one thing that you need to be really shrewd to understand how the Forex market moves. Keep tracking of the rise-fall trends and make your moves accordingly. Take the help of an expert, if needed. Keep learning and Happy Forex trading!

Learn to trade in Stock Markets

If you always heard about people making money by trading shares,bonds,etc and now you yourself want to take the first step, then you have made the right move by visiting this site. Now since, this page has to cater to the requirements of a variety of visitor profiles, it is not practical if I straight away start off with what you should do. So, as a basic minimum, this page requires that you go through the numerous terminlogies that are given in our terminologies section, browse other parts of the site to have a general knowledge of what a share is, what bonds, forex, mutual funds are. If you already have a basic knowledge about these, then this is more than sufficient.

Now, before you start putting your money, you need to make sure about what your economic resilence power is going to be. Let me tell you that no matter how well the stocks are moving, if you are a beginner, then it is surely not going to be a very rosy path straighaway. You will be making a lot of mistakes initially. This is quite true since, though I may want you to stay away from other trading advices and listen only to mine, you still might not feel comfortable and with a variety of advices come a variety of options and until you find a balance between the advices you take and the moves you make, there is certainly going to be a hitch on the way.

So, does that mean that you are really going to lose money? Not necessarily, unless you do your homework. This means that when you set out to trade your first share, you should infact not be doing it for the first time. To help you in this, there are several Virtual Stock Market games available on the net. Some of them are even free. The essence of the entire exercise is to see how you trade the virtual money to buy and sell shares. You will know if you make a profit or loss. Do not do this just for a day and after making a profit, set out to trade. You need to go through all the phases of the market. There can be some days when except for a very few shares, all others would have made losses. And somedays, except for the ones you have bought the others would have made profit. You need to go through losses, analyze those impulses that make you go for the shares of a particular company, understand if your impulses were right or wrong, and if wrong if you can make your decision right the next time,etc. You need to do this for atleast a couple of weeks so that you get used to the environment of losing and winning.

Understand that the stock market is not a center of gambling. The highs and lows that the stocks make are out of tiny pieces of information that flow about the company. Suppose, take the case of Google. Google is one day asked by the US govt to submit all search information for security purposes. Now an event like this might force Google to disclose confidential data which can be used by its competitors. In a situation like this, most investors might end up selling the stock as this is a negative sided news. On the other hand, when Google takes over 5 percent stake in AOL, this indicates a growth trend for the company when the stock price is likely to rise. Thus, you need to look at these pieces of information and not simply speculate. Let me also make it clear that a negative sided news need not always result in stock prices falling and vice versa. But this is the general trend and you need to take quick smart decisions and that is why trading stocks is such a beautiful thing to do.

Now after trading virtually for a couple of weeks, you need to register with a broker. These brokers run online interfaces thorugh which you can buy or sell stocks. You can get other information regarding opening and maintaing your account from other sections on our homepage.

Now from now on, all you need to do is keep looking for pieces of information, stick to those stock alert news that helped you to make profits during your virtual tradings. Happy Trading!

Invest in Mutual Funds

For a beginner, it is always a dilemma to know which of the stocks should he be investing in. Also added to this is the little capital most of you might invest for fear of risking. And thirdly, you do not have an all-time active trading consultant. To alleviate you of all this, the mutual fund works as a boon. So, what is a Mutual fund.

Just as the term means, it is a mutually cooperated investment where both of you look to benefit. In this case, as a mutual fund investor, you invest the capital and the investment fund invests its knowledge and time to manage the money in various shares. Thus,this gets the maximum returns on investment in the shares.

An important rule of investments that you would come over again and again is to diversify your stocks so that the risks are minimized. However, to achieve this you require a lot of investment since diversifying your small $5000 capital wouldnt do much help. So, instead when you invest this amount in a mutual fund, this money is pooled with the collective capital from all other mutual fund investors and this huge capital is intelligently invested in diversified stocks. The mutual funds work on the news alerts much faster than you as an independent investor would do, and thus the returns on the capitals are usually very high.

However, one point you must note is that mutual funds are not supposed to be taken as a short term investment where you invest today and wthdraw tomorrow as these things cost money and hence may not be intelligent moves. It is advisable to take a long-term view while investing in mutual funds.

Another aspect is that you have the option of receiving your dividends that accumulate over the period or reinvesting them back in your mutual find. These amounts get compounded annually and hence you have the option of increasing your investments periodically which mean higher returns.

So, as a final say, Mutual funds are perfect for beginners or those with not enough time to plan their investments and who are willing to take a long-term investment strategy and want to minimize their risks.