(D) Be objective: Do not become emotionally involved in your trade. It does not matter whether you are wrong or right. What matters, as George Soros says, is that “you make more money when you are right than what you lose when you are wrong.” Trading is not about ego, although for most of us it can be disconcerting when we plan a trade, apply our entire logical prowess and then find out that the market does not agree. It is a matter of training yourself to accept that not every trade can be a winning trade, and that you must accept small losses gracefully and move on to the next trade.

(E) Be disciplined: This means that you have to know when to buy and sell. Base your decisions on your pre-planned strategy and stick to it. Sometimes you will cut out of a position only to find that it turns around and would have been profitable had you held on to it. But this is the basis of a very bad habit. Don’t ignore your stop losses - you can always get back into a position. You will find it more reassuring to cut out and accept a small loss than to start wishing that your large loss will be recouped when the market rebounds. This would more resemble trading your ego than trading the market.

Step 2: Identify Your Mission and Set Your Goals
(A) With anything in life, if you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there. In terms of investing, this means you must sit down with your calculator and determine what kind of returns you need to reach your financial goals.

Step 3: Ensure You Have Enough Money
(A) Cash is the fuel needed to start trading and without enough cash, your trading will be hampered by a lack of liquidity. But more important, cash is a cushion against losing trades. Without a cushion, you will not be able to withstand a temporary drawdown or be able to give your position enough breathing space while the market moves back and forth with new trends.

(B) Cash cannot come from sources that you need for other important events in your life, such as your savings plan for your children’s college education. Cash in trading accounts is “risk” money. Also known as risk capital, this money is an amount that you can afford to lose without affecting your lifestyle. Consider trading money as you would vacation savings. You know that when the vacation is over the money will be spent and you are OK with that. Trading carries a high degree of risk. Treating your trading capital as vacation money does not mean that you are not serious about protecting your capital, rather it means freeing yourself psychologically from the fear of losing so that you can actually make the trades that will be necessary to grow your capital. Again, perform a personal SWOT analysis to be sure the necessary trading positions aren’t contrasting with your personality profile.

Step 4: Select a Market That Trades Harmoniously
(A) Pick a currency pair and test it over different time frames. Start with the weekly charts, then proceed to daily, four-hour, two-hour, one-hour, 30-minute, 10-minute and five-minute charts. Try to determine whether the market turns at strategic points most of the time, such as at Fibonacci levels, trendlines or moving averages. This will give you a feeling of how the currency trades in the different time frames.

Repeat this exercise with different currencies until you find the currency pair that you feel is the most predictable for your methodology.

(C) Remember, passion is key to trading. The repeated testing of your set-ups requires that you love what you are doing. With enough passion you will learn to accurately gauge the market.

(D) Once you have a currency pair that you feel comfortable with, start reading the news and the comments regarding the particular pair you have selected. Try to determine if the fundamentals are supporting what you believe the chart is telling you. For example, if gold is going up, that would probably be good for the Australian dollar, since gold is a commodity that is generally positively correlated to the Australian dollar. If you think gold is going to go down, then wait for the appropriate time on the chart to short the Aussie. Look for a line of resistance to be the appropriate line in the sand to get timing confirmation before you make the trade.

(B) Having said the above, it is necessary to pick a methodology and implement it many times in different time frames and markets to measure its success rate. Often a system is a successful predictor of the market direction only 55-60% of the time, but with proper risk management, the trader can still make a lot of money employing such a system.

(C) Personally, I like to use a system that has the highest reward to risk, which means that I tend to look for turning points at support and resistance levels because these are the points where it is easiest to identify and quantify the risk. Support is not always strong enough to stop a falling market, nor is resistance always strong enough to turn back an advance in prices. However, a system can be built around the concept of support and resistance to give a trader the edge required to be profitable.

(D) Once you have designed your system, it is important to measure its expectancy or reliability in various conditions and time frames. If it has a positive expectancy (it produces more profitable trades than losing trades) it can be used as a means to time entry and exit in the markets.

Step 6: Measure Your Risk-to-Reward Ratios and Set Your Limits
(A) The first line in the sand to draw is where you would exit your position if the market goes against you. This is where you will place your stop loss.

(B) Calculate the number of pips your stop is away from your entry point. If the stop is 20 pips away from the entry point and you are trading a standard lot, then each pip is worth approximately $10 (if the U.S. dollar is your quote currency). Use a pip calculator if you are trading in cross currencies to make it easy to get the value of a pip.

(D) Now draw a line on your chart where you would want to take profit. Be sure this is at least 40 pips away from your entry point. This will give you a 2:1 profit-to-loss ratio. Since you cannot know for sure if the market will reach this point, be sure to slide your stop to breakeven as soon as the market moves beyond your entry point. At worst, you will scratch your trade and your full capital will be intact.

(E) If you get knocked out on your first attempt, don’t despair. Often it is your second entry that will be correct. It is true that “the second mouse gets the cheese.” Often the market will bounce off your support if you are buying, or retreat from your resistance if you are selling, and you will enter the trade to test that level to see if the market will trade back to your support or resistance. You can then catch profits the second time around.

(D) Be objective: Do not become emotionally involved in your trade. It does not matter whether you are wrong or right. What matters, as George Soros says, is that “you make more money when you are right than what you lose when you are wrong.” Trading is not about ego, although for most of us it can be disconcerting when we plan a trade, apply our entire logical prowess and then find out that the market does not agree. It is a matter of training yourself to accept that not every trade can be a winning trade, and that you must accept small losses gracefully and move on to the next trade.

(E) Be disciplined: This means that you have to know when to buy and sell. Base your decisions on your pre-planned strategy and stick to it. Sometimes you will cut out of a position only to find that it turns around and would have been profitable had you held on to it. But this is the basis of a very bad habit. Don’t ignore your stop losses - you can always get back into a position. You will find it more reassuring to cut out and accept a small loss than to start wishing that your large loss will be recouped when the market rebounds. This would more resemble trading your ego than trading the market.

Step 2: Identify Your Mission and Set Your Goals
(A) With anything in life, if you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there. In terms of investing, this means you must sit down with your calculator and determine what kind of returns you need to reach your financial goals.

Step 3: Ensure You Have Enough Money
(A) Cash is the fuel needed to start trading and without enough cash, your trading will be hampered by a lack of liquidity. But more important, cash is a cushion against losing trades. Without a cushion, you will not be able to withstand a temporary drawdown or be able to give your position enough breathing space while the market moves back and forth with new trends.

(B) Cash cannot come from sources that you need for other important events in your life, such as your savings plan for your children’s college education. Cash in trading accounts is “risk” money. Also known as risk capital, this money is an amount that you can afford to lose without affecting your lifestyle. Consider trading money as you would vacation savings. You know that when the vacation is over the money will be spent and you are OK with that. Trading carries a high degree of risk. Treating your trading capital as vacation money does not mean that you are not serious about protecting your capital, rather it means freeing yourself psychologically from the fear of losing so that you can actually make the trades that will be necessary to grow your capital. Again, perform a personal SWOT analysis to be sure the necessary trading positions aren’t contrasting with your personality profile.

Step 4: Select a Market That Trades Harmoniously
(A) Pick a currency pair and test it over different time frames. Start with the weekly charts, then proceed to daily, four-hour, two-hour, one-hour, 30-minute, 10-minute and five-minute charts. Try to determine whether the market turns at strategic points most of the time, such as at Fibonacci levels, trendlines or moving averages. This will give you a feeling of how the currency trades in the different time frames.

Repeat this exercise with different currencies until you find the currency pair that you feel is the most predictable for your methodology.

(C) Remember, passion is key to trading. The repeated testing of your set-ups requires that you love what you are doing. With enough passion you will learn to accurately gauge the market.

(D) Once you have a currency pair that you feel comfortable with, start reading the news and the comments regarding the particular pair you have selected. Try to determine if the fundamentals are supporting what you believe the chart is telling you. For example, if gold is going up, that would probably be good for the Australian dollar, since gold is a commodity that is generally positively correlated to the Australian dollar. If you think gold is going to go down, then wait for the appropriate time on the chart to short the Aussie. Look for a line of resistance to be the appropriate line in the sand to get timing confirmation before you make the trade.

(B) Having said the above, it is necessary to pick a methodology and implement it many times in different time frames and markets to measure its success rate. Often a system is a successful predictor of the market direction only 55-60% of the time, but with proper risk management, the trader can still make a lot of money employing such a system.

(C) Personally, I like to use a system that has the highest reward to risk, which means that I tend to look for turning points at support and resistance levels because these are the points where it is easiest to identify and quantify the risk. Support is not always strong enough to stop a falling market, nor is resistance always strong enough to turn back an advance in prices. However, a system can be built around the concept of support and resistance to give a trader the edge required to be profitable.

(D) Once you have designed your system, it is important to measure its expectancy or reliability in various conditions and time frames. If it has a positive expectancy (it produces more profitable trades than losing trades) it can be used as a means to time entry and exit in the markets.

Step 6: Measure Your Risk-to-Reward Ratios and Set Your Limits
(A) The first line in the sand to draw is where you would exit your position if the market goes against you. This is where you will place your stop loss.

(B) Calculate the number of pips your stop is away from your entry point. If the stop is 20 pips away from the entry point and you are trading a standard lot, then each pip is worth approximately $10 (if the U.S. dollar is your quote currency). Use a pip calculator if you are trading in cross currencies to make it easy to get the value of a pip.

(D) Now draw a line on your chart where you would want to take profit. Be sure this is at least 40 pips away from your entry point. This will give you a 2:1 profit-to-loss ratio. Since you cannot know for sure if the market will reach this point, be sure to slide your stop to breakeven as soon as the market moves beyond your entry point. At worst, you will scratch your trade and your full capital will be intact.

(E) If you get knocked out on your first attempt, don’t despair. Often it is your second entry that will be correct. It is true that “the second mouse gets the cheese.” Often the market will bounce off your support if you are buying, or retreat from your resistance if you are selling, and you will enter the trade to test that level to see if the market will trade back to your support or resistance. You can then catch profits the second time around.

Singapore & San Juan Capistrano, CA, USA – Singapore-based Finenz Pte Ltd, a financial systems’ software company specializing in developing, hosting and maintaining automatic trading systems for financial institutions, has joined forces with US-based ForexSignal, a leading provider of forex trading signals with clients in over 40 countries.

“It is an important step in Finenz’s planned progression from being a signal provider to a trade execution company,” said Charles Villeneuve, founder of Finenz Pte Ltd. The synergistic merger will enable both companies to leverage complementary capabilities, penetrate new markets geographically, and service a larger client base.

The two companies will combine their portfolio of forex trading signal tools and leverage respective market presence to expand their geographic presence and service a significantly larger audience base. Following the merger, the companies plan to create an even more sophisticated system that will include a selection of short term, medium term and long term position trade signals in a multitude of languages that can be broadcast worldwide with the option of being traded 100% by computers directly in the client’s account with selected brokers.

“We are very excited to be partnering with ForexSignal,” said Villeneuve. “Their expertise in pushing out forex trading signals to a large user base of retail traders, particularly in North America, is a great addition to our capabilities. At the same time, we believe our strong presence in Asia and our proven systematic trading platform used by many of the large banking and financial institutions in the region adds tremendous value to the combined entity.”

Commenting on the merger, Bernard Lewis, President of ForexSignal said: “This merger is a natural fit that joins two of the leading forex signal service providers, resulting in increased intraday trading opportunities for our respective clientele. It will also bring together our exceptional development teams, aggregating the best of financial engineering and software engineering. This will help us develop and fine-tune algorithms to generate and facilitate trading decisions and market indicators. In our industry, money cannot buy know-how and experts are rare because it is relatively new and the exceptional combination of our respective teams is just what we needed to become a world leader in this space.”

Expect further acquisition announcements: “Acquiring a stake in ForexSignal is one of the many strategic partnerships we are lining up to scale our operations and expand into new markets,” said Villeneuve.

About Finenz (http://www.finenz.com)

Finenz Pte Ltd , a software company specializing in financial systems, is a pioneer in systematic trading platforms that take the ‘emotion out of trading’. Finenz develops and maintains forex trading systems for banks, brokers and financial institutions. The company’s Finenz Gateway is a complete trading system solution comprising FxMove, the company’s flagship movement analytics application; Cash & Go, a cash management application; Risk Management, a risk management application; and FxTradex, a forex trade executor application. Finenz offers a complete and flexible trading solution, simple to integrate with any existing brokerage or banking environment.

Besides Finenz (Pte) Ltd in Singapore, the Finenz Group of companies includes Finenz SMBA, Denmark, Finenz SA, Labuan and PT. Finenz Indonesia. For more details on Finenz and its core financial software applications, visit www.finenz.com and www.fxmove.com.

About ForexSignal.com (http://www.forexsignal.com)

Founded in 1998, ForexSignal.com is a powerful web-based forex signal platform providing real-time forex trade signals through the website or on mobile phones. Used by clients in over 40 countries, ForexSignal.com works with any web browser on a PC or a mobile phone and is fully compatible with over 700 mobile networks in 200 countries. The system alerts subscribers to trading opportunities in real-time via text messages to mobile phones or e-mails with notifications on entry, stop and take/profit prices.
For more details, visit www.forexsignal.com

Media Contact:
Charles Villeneuve – Founder
E-mail: Charles@finenz.com
Tel No: +65 8511 4605

Rachel Phua – PR
E-mail: Rachel@finenz.com
Tel No: +65 8511 4605

Philip Patterson
Tel No: 949-542-3500
Email: phil@forexsignal.com