6 Skills Every Trader Should Have Going Into Trading

Whether day trading, scalping, or investing, there are fundamental skills that each trader should master. Skill-building activities will help you sharpen your ability to make money and cash in on critical market movements.

1. Don't Be a Perfectionist

Consistent profits are achieved from winning more than you lose - not winning every single trade. There are plenty of professional traders who generate profits by winning just 10% of their trades by maximizing gains and minimizing their losses.

2. Stick to a Trading Plan

Developing a trading plan is extremely important. Day trading around your own set plan for each position will produce consistent profits. A trading plan planner should be your best friend when developing your own trading style. The key is sticking to what you've written down on paper.

3. Know the Odds

You should know the payoff odds for each trade that you take. Scalping produces large gains from small movements with higher risk than swing trading. Your trading plan should include a way to regulate how much capital you're willing to risk on each position - but you should never risk more than 2% of your total account value.

4. Complete Trading Plan

The skill to plan is the most important. A complete trading plan should be more than just "trade everyday from 9-3." A plan should include how to act in upswings and downswings and how to protect your capital. In many cases, a thin plan is worse than no plan at all. Stick to your guidelines to get the most out of each trade.

5. Ability to Keep Emotions Under Control

It's hard not to be emotional with hundreds or thousands of dollars on the line each moment of the day. Think like you would in a survival scenario; you've got to be calm and keep your head above the water. Many traders slip from their plan and take positions to cover losses only to lose more money. Over time, a complete trading plan will produce consistent profits, but only if you believe in it.

6. Know How the Market Responds

After getting some experience, you should be able to know how the market responds to certain events before they happen. If there was a negative Non-farm payroll statistic last month, and the Dow lost 60 points, it would be smart to consider that the same would happen again. History does repeat itself in the financial markets.

About the Author:
Leroy Rushing is an active, professional day trader; trading coach; and author. He is the Founder and CEO of Trading EveryDay, a provider of educational trading products and services that are available worldwide. Trading EveryDay has complimentary/FREE products, a Tools of the Trade eBook and a Trading Room Report, that are downloadable for your convenience.

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Emini Trading Systems - Albert Einstein and Emini Trading Systems

Albert Einstein was born in 1879 in a small German town of Ulm. He died in 1955 in Princeton, a small town in New Jersey, USA. He was a theoretical physicist, first and foremost, although it is not so unusual these days to see questions "what would Einstein do?" related to things that have little to nothing to do not only with theoretical physics but with science in general.

Could thus Einstein offer any insight into trading emini futures markets? Such as the futures for the S&P 500 index?

The full size contract for this financial market was established in 1982, its emini version, and the first emini market at all, appeared on the financial scene in 1997, in both cases a few decades after the death of the fellow in question. It seems therefore rather obvious to assume that Einstein would have absolutely nothing to say about trading emini markets, or emini systems, for that matter.

But this would not be entirely true. In fact, we believe, that this would be pretty wrong. For while Einstein was a physicist first and foremost throughout most of his active professional life, he was also a wise man and his profound statements about scientific matters can be applied to things outside science as well. Or, at the very least, some clear parallels to Einstein's pronouncements on science can be found in the world of emini trading systems.

Let us use two rather famous Einstein quotes to prove our assertion.

The first of these quotes is: "I want to know God's thoughts... the rest are details." When designing emini trading systems, or systems for other markets, you want to know what makes these markets tick, what drives their dynamics, what determines their behavior. In other words, you want to know Mr. Market's thoughts for it is he that rules them. Knowing his thoughts is like knowing God's thoughts in the matters of science. He is the utmost authority of the markets. He, Mr. Market, a mythical figure that even the least religious of traders believe in. You want to know his thoughts to design systems that the market forces respect, and vice versa, that respect these forces, that properly reflect these markets' nature and their intraday or longer term behavior, depending on the system primary time frame. You want to know what's essential as opposed to what's spurious and accidental. If you approach designing your emini systems this way, you stand a very good chance to come up with robust and profitable ideas.

Another famous Einstein quote, that perfectly applies to designing emini trading systems, is: "Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler." There are many simple systems out there. Such as, say, the one based on trading the breakout of the first hour range, that for reasons inexplicable to this author, retails in the vicinity of $1000. Good luck making money with it, though. It may turn out to be a painful experience. The reason this system is not particularly good is because it is too simple. Systems like that are fine for educational purposes, but using them for trading in their crudest form is not very advisable. A good, sound, robust emini system needs to employ filters that would limit circumstances that are less likely to lead to a profitable outcome. Not all breakouts of the first our range, to use our example again, are created equal. Systems that are too simple usually do not employ any filters. In fact, some of them may even not be amenable to imposing filters that could improve them.

As you can see from these two examples, Einstein would certainly have quite a bit to say about how to design a profitable, robust emini trading system or other trading systems, for that matter.

If you would like to experience trading an emini futures system designed using ideas Einstein would approve of, please visit this page: http://www.eminimethods.com/system_g4.html

Waldemar Puszkarz, Ph.D., is a web veteran with 15 years of web surfing under his belt. By training, he is a theoretical physicist, but his interests are much broader than science and include trading financial markets, sports betting, poker, and researching online business opportunities. He is also an avid book reader and sports afficionado. Currently he is making his living mostly as a day trader. He has been in the trading trenches for almost a decade during which he has traded a variety of financial instruments. He is the owner and webmaster of Eminimethods.com (http://www.eminimethods.com) which provides free common sense trading education and simple trading systems for e-mini and stock markets as well as reviews of honest online business opportunities in Meet HOBO section of his site.

AP - World stock markets railled again Friday as confidence remained buoyed by positive U.S. economic data, hopes of further stimulus measures from Japan and China and an upbeat comments from Bank of America's CEO.

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Spot Currency Trading - A Brief Guide to Forex

In today's world, Foreign Exchange Trading which is also known as Forex has evolved into a major online industry. When done correctly, trading can be very profitable for not just the big companies but the individual working from home.

This is one of the good things about the internet as it has levelled the playing field between big companies and small traders.

As the biggest financial market, the FX (Forex) is the best market to make trades. Everyday, trades to the value of over 2 trillion dollars take place. If you compare that to another big market known as the New York Stock Exchange, the value of trades on that market is 25 billion dollars every day. This is all big bucks stuff which attract many large multi national companies, banks and governments.

Money is traded on the Forex and usually involves a simultaneous flow of buying and selling of different currencies. These currencies are handled by brokers.

If you are active in purchasing currency, what happens is that you actually invest in the economy of a certain country. For instance, if you by UK pounds, this will mean that you are really buying a piece of the UK economy. The current state of that countries economy is what sets the value for the currency and any fluctuations.

In the beginning, the idea of being able to trade in the Forex was meant to be for the large banks and companies. It was not intended for the likes of the little people like me. You needed many millions to get involved and that was beyond the scope of many normal people.

But times have now changed and in today's world, just about anyone with a little money can trade through a broker. All the trading can be done through the internet. All that is required is that you sign up with a reputable trading firm and moniter the market online.

Trade continues 24 hours a day through the three main trading centers in the United Kingdom, Japan and USA.

There are a number of benefits when it comes to trading online and for most cases, it is usually a very good way to trade. As long as you have a computer with good internet access, you can trade with the best of them.

With a little research and due diligence, there is no reason why you can not take part in the Forex and trade online.

There is a lot of trading software, trading courses and trading systems, all claiming to be the best. On our website, we have independent reports of the better ones. See if we can help you over at Stock Market Software.

Reuters - Freddie Mac, one of the two main U.S. mortgage companies that the U.S. government is depending on to help stabilize the housing market, said on Wednesday it needs $30.8 billion from the Treasury to survive after a massive fourth-quarter loss.

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Day Trading Charts, Are They Any Good?

The mechanics of the market are constantly changing and this has resulted in people relying much more heavily on various algorithms to execute trades. The investor can still use intraday stock charts to great advantage but you will also need some foresight when it comes to your trading and there are several ways to acquire the foresight you need.

It is important to try to use a rather longer time frame on your chart if you are to understand the big picture, let me explain:

It is important to try to use a longer term time frame on your day trading chart if you intend to understand the big picture. Therefore if you trade using the ten minute charts then it pays to look at the hourly and even daily charts so you can get more of an idea on what the market is doing. For those of you who are scalpers, that is people who take trades with the idea of only making 1% or less profit the larger time frame charts will enable you to remove those of no interest.

The day trading chart can be used to show the market internals such as the TIKI, TRIN, TICK, fair value and many other market internals are often very useful to your trading. Personally I try to add at least two market internals to my parameters list when I am back testing one of my intraday strategies.

Most good day trading software or day trading charts will allow the insertion of technical indicators (such as RSI and morning averages) on the market internals charts you are using. You may wish to test out this feature of your day trading software to determine if this function will be of use to you or
not depending on your day trading styles.

Above all make sure you do your homework at the end of every day so you can determine which symbols are likely to go up the next day and which are likely to go down, of course there are no guarantees in this market just like any other but the use of a good day trading chart will enable you to determine which direction the market is most likely to go in the next day so you can focus on that for your next trading session.

Hopefully this knowledge will help you become a better day trader and help you avoid the many pitfalls out there.

Get your Momentum Stock Trading System and sign up for my free weekly online trading system newsletter here at: http://www.stressfreetrading.com

Reuters - Where, oh where, did AIG's bailout billions go? That question may reverberate even louder through the halls of government in the week ahead now that a partial list of beneficiaries has been published.

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Currency Trading Made Easy And Effective

I'm going to share with you currency trading made easy and effective. This is a great business to get into. With a few trillion dollars in trades a day, that makes it the largest market in the world. There has been an opportunity for the small traders to now compete along side the large traders and make a profit.

You're going to need a daily plan to get this right. The worst thing you can do is get up in the morning, head to the computer and figure out what you're going to do to make a buck. That's just a waste of time. You need to have a step by step plan. You need to follow that step by step plan. After you try it for a little bit, you can evaluate its effectiveness. When you force yourself to think of a new plan and strategy each day, you're just wasting your energy on that. You miss the fact that you need energy to do the work required of you. Be a good and effective trader; have a plan.

Everyday on the news there is economic and political news. It's an important task for you to look at this before you start trading to make sure there isn't something being released that could be detrimental to the price of currency. Economic news like GDP or unemployment rates will have an affect on currency prices. The more alarming the news, the more volatile the currency market will be. Also watch out for political policies that have changes to economic policy; like taxes, regulations, etc.

Lastly, you'll want to get yourself a good software package for trading forex. I recommend Forex Killer. It has a great automated feature that can allow the software to handle the trades. It also can find and identify trends that you could make a profit on.

The automated software of Forex Killer will give you an immediate edge in the market. Make trades that work for your profit line. For more information on the Forex Killer software, check out Forex Charting Software.

AP - A Republican lawmaker is accusing the former chief executive of mortgage finance company Fannie Mae of being dishonest in testimony before Congress about discounts he received on his home loan.

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