Dear diary, I am feeling something akin to disappointment but it’s nothing so deep that I can’t get over. As I was saying yesterday I found this forex trading program called etoro. I tried it out and found it interesting by comparison to 2 other forex trading platforms I demoed. I’ve been trading the USD against the CAD (United States dollar against the Canadian dollar) and the USD against the JPY (the United States dollar against the Japanese Yen). I’ve been having fun with it. The interface is right up my alley. I don’t do too well reading charts and graphs. The etoro interface makes it easy for an average capacity brain like mine to understand what is going on by making it plain as day. But as it turns out, etoro might be a scam. Such a shame.
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Dear diary, I am feeling energized and powerful right now, like I can I do anything. Maybe I am bi polar. I don’t think so, but I do know that by comparison to how I was feeling yesterday it’s incredible how different I feel today. And what’s interesting is that this happens to me every month and has been happening to me every month for years. People can dismiss it all they want but there’s a definite connection between my menstrual cycle and my state of mind; and I’m not talking PMS either. PMS trivializes the whole issue. I’m not talking about bad moods vs good moods. I’m talking about something far more profound. But I won’t get into it right now. Maybe another time. Right now I’m mock trading forex using the etoro platform. I’ve issued an order to buy the Canadian dollar against the US dollar. I’ve put up $1000 mock dollars.
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I’ve noticed that exchange rates fluctuate constantly throughout the day. You probably knew that already because you’re not financially illiterate like me. I’m just now beginning to learn about currency trading so I’ll make discoveries that are obvious to other people in the know but that weren’t so obvious to me before. Until a few days ago the term “exchange rate” wasn’t part of my daily vocabulary, and if you’d asked me to define it I wouldn’t have been able even though, as it turns out, I’ve known what an exchange rate is since the first time my parents sent money to me from America when I was a little girl and living in the country where I was born. I would go to the store with my US dollar and be able to buy twice as many things as I could with a dollar from my own country. That was because a US dollar in my country was the same as about $2.50 of my country’s dollars. So whenever I had a US dollar I knew I had about $2.50 in my local currency.

So I’ve downloaded this forex trading platform from etoro.com. It’s the 3rd application I’ve downloaded since deciding I want to learn about forex trading, and it’s the first application I’ve actually been able to figure out how to make a trade on. With the other 2 I simply didn’t know where to begin. With etoro’s platform I was able to get started without effort. I’ve been running it for a few hours now just studying what goes on, how the exchange rates fluctuate and how you gain profit and incur loss based on the fluctuation direction and value.

I ‘ve just learned what I suspect is an important lesson. I closed a trade I’d opened a while ago. I had issued an order to buy the US dollar against the Canadian dollar. The exchange rate kept rising and falling between 1.0093 and 1.0098 Maybe that’s the spread and not the exchange rate?). Honestly I’m not sure what those values reflect yet. I know each rise or fall is called a pip and for each pip my gain/loss percentage rises or falls depending on the direction the pip takes and the position I took when I opened the order. I’ve waited patiently for it to get to a figure above the opening value of 1.0098, and when it reached 1.0100, I closed the trade; but as it turns out I delayed too long in clicking “OK” to seal the close, and by the time the close was completed, I was back at my opening position of 1.0098 which meant I ended up with no profit. So the important lesson I’ve learned is to act swiftly once you’ve decided to close a position.

Now I will wait for the rate to fall back to about 1.0093, which of course there is no guarantee it will do any time soon. If it does before I’m ready to call it a day I will initiate another order to buy the USD against the CAD.

Applying concepts learned:

I think I took a long position on the US dollar and a simultaneous short position on the Canadian dollar. In time I’ll know better. For now I’m doing a lot of guessing but it’s an interesting way to pass the time and if nothing else I will come away knowing a bit more about forex trading than I knew about the subject 7 days ago, which was absolutely nothing.

Imagine being able to afford your own private island? David Copperfiled owns his own island called Musha Cay located in the Exuma Chain in the southern Bahamas. It was on this private island that a 21-year old girl claimed last year that David Copperfield raped her.

Information about Musha Cay

Photos of Musha Cay

Musha Cay website

I have to admit that I’m wondering if my intelligence quotient might be too low to allow me to grasp the concept of forex trading or any other kind of trading, investing and economics subjects well enough to take part in a related conversation. I wonder if maybe I’m totally out of my league here. Bad marriages I can talk about easily, 500 calorie diets, feeling fat, wanting to lose weight, depression, but forex trading? And I wonder if maybe that doesn’t explain in some small part why there are so few women out there talking about market liquidity, derivatives, exchange rates, bid/ask spreads and the like. We limit ourselves and trivialize our lives, at least some of us, by preoccupying ourselves with silly concerns. And we tell ourselves that certain subjects are just above our heads for one reason or another.

There’s still a prevalent attitude in society where women and money are thought to be a mix that is a headache for a man in the sense that the only thing women know about money is how to spend it on clothes and shoes and accessories. Of course the woman first has to find the man whose head she will make hurt by spending the money he goes out and earns.

I did come across some articles that claim there are more and more women trading forex from their home computers maintaining work from home business; but as for prominent females with big names in forex trading, I could find very few out there taking part in trading discussions by maintaning forex trading blogs or building their own forex trading resource websites. One name that appears to be well recognized and well respected in forex trading in that of Kathy Lien, author and currency expert.

Kathy has written trading books such as:

1) “Day Trading the Currency Market: Technical and Fundamental Strategies to Profit form Market Swings (2005, Wiley).”

2) High Probability Trading Setups for the Currency Market E-Book (2006, Investopedia)

3) Millionaire Traders: How Everyday People Are Beating Wall Street at Its Own Game (2007, Wiley)

She is an experienced FX analyst and trader co-runs an FX signal service and used to work in JPMorgan Chase’s Cross Markets and Foreign Exchange Trading groups.

Apparently a chance to have lunch with billionaire investor Warren Buffet is being auctioned off over at Ebay. The starting bid was $25,000 and the current high bid is $77,100 (this is as of 9:17 EST June 23rd,2008). The auction is to benefit the Glide foundation, an organization providing social services to San Francisco’s poor and homeless. Seems this auction is a yearly event currently in it’s sixth year. Also seems last year’s winning bid was $650,100. Good money for the Glide Foundation no doubt; but one would imagine someone with $650,000 to spend for the chance to lunch with Warren Buffet already knows quite a bit about how to make big money? What can have been the benefit of this lunch to them? It’s hard to imagine they would have been able to do much picking of Warren Buffet’s brain; but hopefully it was money well spent for them.

Source of information: Auction of lunch with Warren Buffett starts Sunday

Buffet Auction

Hmm, I decided to try to look up information about women who have made their fortunes in forex trading and I was sidetracked by an article about forex trading as a viable option for women looking for a way to stay at home and still contribute to the family income. Obviously I am new to the world of forex trading and not qualified to encourage or discourage any woman from getting into forex trading as a means for making an  income working from home; but it would seem to me that with the high risk of losing money that comes with forex trading this would not be a wise choice for a woman looking for a way to make money. The experts warn against trading forex or taking any other kind of financial investment risk unless you have capital to risk, and presumably a woman looking for a work at home job so she can contribute to the family income doesn’t have capital to risk.

By all means learning Forex trading could provide a woman with the option to trade forex if she felt confident in her ability to make money once she’s mastered the art of trading, but to risk money if you don’t know anything about forex trading would not be wise in my opinion.

There are people like you making thousands in forex trading everyday. The volume of money being traded daily in the forex market amounts to trillions, but as I understand it, the greater percentage of those trillions is being traded at what is called the inter-bank market level where large investment banking firms like Deutsche Bank out of Frankfurt Germany, UBS (the global financial services company headquartered in Basel & Zürich, Switzerland), Citi (Citigroup Inc) and others such as JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, HSBC, the Royal Bank of Scotland, engage in trading large volumes of currency daily.

But of course we’re not concerned about what’s going on at the inter-bank market level in the foreign exchange market. Unless of course what goes on at that level impacts on what goes on in our daily lives somehow; but we don’t understand currency trading on that level quite yet so, we’ll wait for some scandal to erupt that exposes truths about interbank market level corruption in the world of forex trading. From what I’m reading though corruption is apparently not posible; but again, we’re not concerned with that. We want to know how we, the little guy or “retail” trader can make money in forex trading.

So far Forex trading seems to me like it’s more of a game that comes with financial risk, like gambling. I’ve read in several places that 95% of forex traders lose money. That says to me that forex trading is highly risky and that you have a better chance of failing at it than succeeding. In fact I’ve noticed on most of the websites I’ve visited that provide forex trading services they include a warning message about the high risk of loss. I imagine this is a legal requirement because no one would warn you of the risks involved if they didn’t have to; so the fact that it had to be made illegal not to warn people of the risks involved would seem to mean that so many people were losing money the government had to get involved to try to police the lower levels of the industry.

So why would I be interested in forex trading if only 5% of forex traders succeed? Well, as I explained in Learning Forex trading, I became intrigued while working on a website for a client. It isn’t necessarily that I want to get into forex trading. Right now I just want to learn about it so that if at any point I decided I wanted to try my hand at trading I would know how to do it and would understand how it all works.

It’s not really a manic monday per se. I woke up at 4Am today and did some writing until 7AM. Then I did some work until 9:30AM. At 9:30 I went and made myself some tea and had half of a slice of wheat bread; then I did a little inventory taking so-to-speak. Then I decided to take a break to go watch a little tennis (Wimbledon 2008 is in progress), but I fell asleep and woke up again less than an hour ago. I suppose you could say I’ve just begun my day. I barely remember the hours from 4AM to 11AM but that’s an entire 7 hours of work I completed before falling asleep for 2.5 hours and it feels like I’ve just awaken. I had my shower and have dressed for going to the mall with my son. If we make it I plan to pick up a few books about forex trading because I want to learn about the foreign exchange and currency trading. I explain why in Learning Forex trading. My reason is not profound. I’ve just been doing some work for a new client and have developed an interest in the subject as a result.
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Recently I took on a new client who needed me to develop a website and populate the site with content  about forex trading. I know nothing about forex trading so I’ve had to do some research in order to get some articles written. While doing the research I’ve developed a bit of interest in learning more about the foreign exchange market; so I’ve decided to put back the money and finance category I used to have and use it as a scrap book of sorts for my lessons in forex trading. If you’re looking for qualified information about forex trading you’re not going to find it here, but if you’re an absolute novice and would like to follow along as I, also an absolute novice, try to grasp the concept of trading currency you’re welcome to check back daily as I update this section of the site with new information I’ve learned.  I am even considering getting a qualified tutor and will share my lessons should I go that route.

What’s interesting is I’m not necessarily trying to learn about forex trading so that I can start trading. I would just like to understand how forex trading works and fully grasp the concept of currency trading as I find it all a bit fascinating.