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Trading with Japanese Candlestick Charts

Japanese candlestick charts are arguably the most commonly used charts. It has not always been that way. Candlestick charting techniques were only introduced to western traders in the late 70s by Steve Nison.

A bit of history of Candlestick Charting

Candlestick charting was invented by a rice merchant named Munehisa Homma in Kyoto, Japan in the late 1700s. The merchant made a fortune trading rice and rice warehouse receipts, the first futures contract ever, using only historical daily price information that he visualized using what we now call Candlestick Charts. The Japanese Candlestick Charts have since then only been used by Japanese traders until the American Steve Nison introduced the techniques to the West in the late 70s. He is still the Western authority on Candlestick Charting. You can find out more about him on www.candlecharts.com. I have one of his books:

Japanese Candlestick Charting Techniques
by
Steve Nison

Continue reading “Trading with Japanese Candlestick Charts”

Trading with Support and Resistance

Bulls and Bears
Bulls and Bears

Support and resistance trading is one of the basic building blocks of trading. Not only is it a basic building block of my personal trading, but also of most trading done by professional traders. So even if your trading system does not incorporate support and resistance it is still good to understand it and take notice of the most important price levels. Just because many traders are watching these levels, prices usually will react when it gets there. Support and resistance are all about “Bulls and Bears”, aka “Buyers and Sellers” and how price itself affects their behaviors/decisions. Continue reading “Trading with Support and Resistance”

Where to trade? – Finding a Broker

Singapore, home of many Brokers
Singapore, home of many Brokers

In this article, I will discuss Forex and CFD brokers. I will discuss how they operate and how to find one for successful trading. Many of the ideas that I share about these brokers will also apply to brokers of other securities like Bonds, Stocks, ETFs, and Options.

I am a big proponent of building your own infrastructure. However, as a retail trader, there is only so much you can do. It is not cost-effective to pay for direct access to an exchange and co-locating some trading servers right there at the exchange. That is not what this article is about. This article is about building a trading infrastructure that is flexible and independent enough to be able to execute trades through any broker you see fit.

I believe that you should not get locked into a platform in a way that will allow you to only trade with the broker that provides the platform. That is why I use spreadsheets, open-source programming frameworks/libraries (python) and freely available charting software to do my trading analysis. But first, let’s go into what it is you should look (out) for in a broker. Continue reading “Where to trade? – Finding a Broker”

Which Forex Pairs are Generally Trending and Which Ones Tend to Revert to the Mean

Which Forex Pairs are Generally Trending and Which Ones Tend to Revert to the Mean
Which Forex Pairs are Generally Trending and Which Ones Tend to Revert to the Mean
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In this article, I will systematically investigate the tendency of different Forex pairs to either trend or revert to the mean. I will do so by backtesting a simple trend-following strategy. (Code available on Github. See the end of this article.)

β€œThe trend is your friend.”, is a very well known trading adage. Another thing you read a lot in trading books, blogs, etc. is that the market only trends 20, 30, 40, xx% of the time.

I was wondering how these ideas relate to the Forex markets. Continue reading “Which Forex Pairs are Generally Trending and Which Ones Tend to Revert to the Mean”

Automate your trading without writing code

Automate your trading without writing code
Automate your trading without writing code

In this post, I will investigate and show you the ways I know that you can automate your trading without the need to be a professional software developer. In fact, you don’t even need to be able to code. The main reason why I trade end-of-day strategies is that I do not want to be in front of my computer screen trading the whole day. Another way not to be stuck behind your screen for the whole day is to automate your trading strategy. when most people think about automating a trading strategy they think about writing code and setting up a server and hooking up some trading APIs. Continue reading “Automate your trading without writing code”