The Secrets to Forex & Why You Were Bullied at Trader HighSchool
This is the second half of the deliverable on fundamentals. It covers content you don't normally learn about in the retail trading loserverse, stuff that is often paywalled behind shill "courses" or dismissed as unnecessary by wealth gurus. I'm here to short those paywalls with my appropriately priced FREE knowledge. Take everything in stride, this business wasn't meant to be mastered or understood overnight. You don't think they give the Fisher accounts of the world out to any tryhard with a computer and a chart?
Conversely. Don't worry, too much knowledge is the best problem you can have.
Part 1: Modern Chartfare
When you started trading, you were probably 360 no-scoping your trades. You probably had a few win-streaks, and then a demoralizing losing streak. You felt your win/loss ratio falling and you sought out new strategies, new weapons. So you turned to the internet for ideas, like you would for anything. The omnipresence of advertising and social media caught your attention first. You turned to a metric shitload of wealth gurus. Instagram, telegram, pictogram, etc. Sure, the bros pitching this stuff look like older versions of the kids that bullied you in school, but now they're here to make you money, right?
Nice try nitwit. Now you're making a new kind of losing investment. This is an important piece of "risk management," and I wasn't sure where to fit it in. But those educators, ARE your competitors. Your investment isn't a potential return, its accounts recievable to Guru LLC. When you make enough money trading, you don't need to shill services for income. Remember, forex is a meta marketplace itself, AKA a place to trade services. Most of which are scams or overpriced.
Wealth and warfare go hand in hand. In capitalism, the true battlefield is your bank account, the true center of gravity is your mindspace. The weapons are languages, visuals, platforms, technologies.. And I can tell, trust me, that most of you are easily exploited noncombatants, unarmed and unable to defend yourself or stake a claim to survival in this eternal warzone. Step one to making wealth is protecting whatever amount (no matter how pathetic) of wealth you currently have. Step two is to stop chasing paywalled wealth gurus who draw no income from trading, or any profit that do is embarrassingly mediocre. Greed makes it too easy for the fishermen these days. But wealth that lasts is quiet and deals in many faces. You have to go looking for it, it doesn't try to find you. That's why I'm not selling you on overnight wealth, I'm buying you a lifetime of better risk taking behavior. You need to stop being a wierdo who idolizes mediocre profits.
Part 2: Lunch is NOT for WIMPs
Most of the information in this article is available to find online for free with enough effort, it's just not prioritized by the get-rich shills on major social media platforms. That's the problem. You're still getting bullied out of your lunch money.
I have a counter-offer, I'll buy you lunch instead. At the conclusion of this series in a few months, I will launch a free, private signal service (based on one of my own profitable strategy systems), to build a new type of community, and to help demonstrate the effectiveness of my risk ethos promulgated across this series. I'll get into earning details in a later article, but those master accounts are traded by my hand and produce a minimum positive number of pips per month. Bottom line, it's enough for lunch at Dorsia. But it's not enough to replace a job. Answers to all questions will be provided when the time comes, and performance will be fully transparent. There will be rules for the community and the private signal, rules that may not make sense at first or seem unfamiliar, but everything will be free, always. I don't need your money, the federal reserve has given me plenty. Instead, I will 'trick' you into prioritizing the right things, to protect and develop your networth and lifeworth. From this new kind of community, I will eventually select a few unique individuals to inherit and run my forex trading systems, so I can focus on business creation.
In the meantime, you should be utilizing free websites like FxBlue or Psyquation to manage and study your account risk overtime. You'll be able to see clear differences in the before and after comparison corresponding to your trading experience before finishing this series vs afterwards.
Part 3: Factoring Events
Alright, this will be a bit disjointed but let's start the race to the bottom.
Some investors will pitch their fund or their style as event-driven trading. I simply call event-driven trading by another phrase, 'risk management.' That's all it is.
EVENTS ARE THE ONLY FORM OF VOLATILITY THAT MATTERS.
The priority for your risk management across long-term timeframes is not entirely explained in simple volatility equations. I have briefly mentioned this in prior articles. But the investing boomerisms about volatility are right and wrong. Volatility is the key to risk management, right, but only if you understand the threat origination of volatility itself, which most don't. Which is why they lose. Volatility is the rapid transition of fear into security or security into fear. The identifiable rapid transition EVENTS are driven by market psychology (the players within). And those rapid transition events CAN be predicted by preparing your trades for predicted/scheduled future EVENTS (and sometimes ongoing events). We talked a lot about geopolitics and some economic events in the last article. But there are others.
You don't really need to know a lot about them, you just need to know that they are predictable events, which means meaningful volatility, which means risk management.
You don't need to be an economist or try to out-analyze these events (though that might lead to some edge), because you can safely assume that the forecasts are already priced in. You can assume that the majority of major market players did their own research or got access to better research. Tough to out-edge those guys. There's a reason they own the porn industry. "Thank God I don't have to use my brain too much." No, don't even. I would rather not create anymore dumb rich people, we got enough already and boy are they big liabilities.
Part 4: Losers Wouldn't Know
A forecast isn't a foresight, its a guesstimate. We talked a lot about the inherent delusion built into speculation. Obviously, these guesstimates COULD be wildly wrong. The actuals could be 5 standard deviations away from the expert consensus estimate. Therein lies the potential for major volatility. Forget the digits, I want you to look at the econ calendar as opportunites for entry or exits in your trading system, and ignore the estimate. Or, if you already are exposed to the pair, I want your to prepare your position for these events ("prepare" will be further discussed). Both of these routes can constitute proper risk management in conjunction with key technicals, which is the focus of the next section.
There are a ton of events that don't appear on the econ schedule though. Only the cool kids know about these. We did geopolitics already, the tough unscheduled stuff. But there is more to discuss.
END OF MONTH + END OF QUARTER REBALANCING
It's hard to predict cause commercials and institutions use broad cross-asset reasoning to balance portfolios, but generally the mindset is derived from a need to hedge across the major/minor/cross currencies (g10). The safest bet is to just expect volatility, and therefore prepare your risk management in concert. Dont spend cognitive resources trying to predict direction. Just look at the Biden campaign. Now that's how you conserve cognitive resources.
LONDON FIX
There are multiple fixes, but the London fix is the biggest and most relevant for majors because most of the money and most of the villains have congregated there. It occurs at 4PM City time (London time) and it's basically used as a benchmark for NON-SPOT market operations, like agreements/forwards between companies or branches within companies to convert currency to meet payment responsibilities like payroll, invoices, debts, etc. That was determined to be the "fairest" way, instead of negotiating over spot prices. The exact exchange values are determined with less oversight than you would hope but usually as an average of price range around the 4PM period. It just means that you have another volatility roadbump as a retail trader. For the powerful and wealthy, it might mean other opportunities. We don't always play the same game, even if it seems like it.
The fix is even crazier during those end of month rebalancing events. Consider them gravitationally attracted.
WITCHING HOURS
This is the period when Wall Street performs satanic rituals for profitable insight. You probably won't have to worry too much about this now that we got Maxwell behind bars, and I really should've just covered it more directly in the seasonality article. This hour is just the last hour of trading on the third friday of every month (unless it's a holiday), where some options and some futures expire. The lead up to the hour itself can involve unusual price action from complex arbitrage. There is recent interest in resolving this inefficient period by developing special rollover/settlement options. CME Group (the largest futures group) is working on this, so I wouldn't do too much of a deep dive looking for edge because it might not exist for much longer. At most, you should just remember to increase risk oversight on the third friday of each month, and that a few months (March, June, Sept, Decem) have larger expiry loads, so be extra careful.
That's the speedrun.
Part 5: Steak Salesmen
Trump tweets. Now in the steak salesman era of American politics, Presidents also like to hype or influence economic information, and significant portions of the market will react. You gotta follow the man in the OO if you want the complete global macro coverage.
We have less than a year left of insured Trump tweets, and a speculative 4 more years of Trump tweets. I do consider a high probabilty of a Trump reelection, 70%+. Twitter market influence is here to stay either way, though it would be more subdued without Glormphf. This ties into a reliable source of fundamental certainty, which is the dependency of timezones and market newsflow. That is, big US market newsflow happens during the business day, by and large. Everyone is awake, everyone is at work. This is obvious but useful nevertheless. Lets say there is some kind of unscheduled macro leak, like a major Korean newspaper claims that a CCP trade minister said that TRADE DEAL PHASE 1 might be off the table.. the market will react poorly and all of this will occur overnight for the US and for EU. However, when the sun shines on that side of the world, we will get an update, and usually a correction, that calms markets. You can use that reaction cycle as a tradeable pattern in future instances. This type of pattern happens all the time, a few times a month at least.
Part 6: The Confusion of Traders
COT data. The Contusion of Traders data is the most freely available source of information that approximates open interest and institutional sentiment in forex. You probably know that real volume data is available for most financial assets on major exchanges (like stocks), but due to the derivative and OTC nature of forex, this real information on liquidity, sentiment, and volume is priveledged knowledge held privately by individuals and institutions to generate edge and to fiddle with spreads. COT data is a close but not exact representation of this liquidity and sentiment via commodity futures contracts held by trading funds, institutions of a market-making nature, or brokers. Unfortunately, this data is compiled and released weekly, and not in real-time. So it has a 1 week lag, and more during holidays. However, it is still very useful from a fundamental perspective for long-term traders. OI (open interest) shows DEMAND. You can find this data via google, and there are few dedicated people on a certain factory related forex site that put out excellent weekly COT reviews. Generally speaking, you want to look for strong competing trends between speculators and commercials. You will want to track your risk management to that trend. Quite frankly, you rarely want to trade against a strong COT data-derived trend unless you are making a special type of carry trade. If you want to bet against the trend, you incur the same risk-managment responsibilities of a commercial (deep pocket institutions, money makers), except you remain a pathetic and shallow pocketed retail trader. This is counter-intuitive because your capital is vastly limited both in size and use.
Okay let's circle back to riskon and riskoff and tie them into econ events.
Part 7: Securities Industry Essentials Exam
The stock market is a critical component of fundamentals because it serves as a reliable indicator of riskon vs riskoff. Money considers the share market (like NASDAQ/DOW/SP500/NIKKEI, etc) risky. I find this absolutely clown-tier in the current year, considering Central Banking debt/asset strategies. Digression. It considers other equities like corpo bonds, debentures, warrants, etc, as accessories to share performance, at least when looking at drivers for riskon sentiment. Unfortunately, the stock market runs through exchanges that do not operate on a 24/7 basis, unlike forex. The old world still functions on sleep. Imagine sleeping when you could be making money.
You can alleviate this issue by looking at the futures market, where you can follow different stock markets while live exchange data feeds are stopped. You need to be mindful of which stock market to follow based on time of day. Recall that NA and EU represent most of the influence on sentiment only while live.
Commodities like energies and metals are perhaps even clearer examples of risk sentiment. With the exception of gold and silver, most commodities are riskon, and act as a signal for demand within economies. Since economies are the underlying to markets, markets interpret commodity demand (which generally reflects as higher prices), as a sign that economies are growing. Copper in particular because of its valience application in much of the developed, tech-dependent world.
Part 8: The Pyramid Club
National bonds were discussed in prior articles. Bond PRICE rises (because demand increases) during riskoff periods. Now, this is only true for SAFEHAVEN countries. Well-managed, top-twenty economies. This is because demand for a national bond can drop if investors think the country is at risk of debt restructuring. Though, as prior mentioned in the carry article, this issue is more political than it is economic in nature, and a bailout is always available. It might be easier to think of national bonds as 'loans' citizens can give to governments. Writing a loan for a trustworthy debtor could be an economically benefitial thing, but vice versa for a debtor who is struggling. In general, as a forex trader, just focus on US national bonds. Note that there are varity of national bond types, but the distinction between them is less relevant than the overall yield and price conditions. It only becomes relevant if you have a lot of money to invest, which we all know you don't have.
Now what about yields? Sadly, as bond prices rise, the yield (added interest value) drops. Though in the grand scheme of things... yields are pretty much in net decline these past 10-15 years, which are the only kinds of timeframes they are truly relevant in anyway, except as a sentiment measure with glance value. Obviously, in a riskon environment, more investors, and therefore more money, shift into riskier avenues; so demand drops and bond prices drop. Now, there are other factors that influence the pricing of national bond yields and other country-level assets, namely interest rates set by a central bank, yield curve issues, and other money operations between the central bank and private banks. As mentioned in the article on carry trades, the importance of staying up to date on central banking activity and rationale is paramount in the world of forex. I'm not going to give a 21st Century Central Banking ECON 301 course here; just research the history of Gold Man Sachs' corporate management and you'll be ahead of the game.
Also.
VIX is another simple and popular tool for measuring the riskon vs riskoff environment, though as I have already warned in prior articles, volatility is not synonymous with risk due to its vulnerability to black swans, and risk management based on traditional volatility measures is not sufficient. And keep in mind that VIX has a sleep schedule.
Part 9: Gekkos & Goblins
It's easy to get lost in all the words, statements, claims, projections, predictions you get from experts, twitter, reports, releases, news, and media. But you have to stay laser focused on the flow of cash itself. Adding 'value' or 'growth' and removing 'liabilities' or 'obstacles' are nice terms, but they don't exist in reality. You can't put them in your pocket. You can't buy a house with them. Remember, ultimately it's all about the bucks, the rest is just conversation. Where ever there are billions sloshing around, there lies your market. You just need to watch the money move to understand the risk transitions.
Though, don't follow it too closely, you might see something that was meant to be hidden.
Part 10: Most Successful People were Bullied
Society has an odd way of bullying people into conformity (and therefore mediocrity). But if you weather the mental pressure to conform, you end up outside the predicted plot. A place where no one can reach you. When making money is involved, that's usually a good thing.
The last man standing is usually the risk management specialist, yet the biggest risk is not taking any risk at all. A paradox? You're not trying to avoid all loss, you're trying to be the best at managing loss. You can't be a risk management specialist without RISK being involved somewhere. You have to suffer the bullying before you can step outside of the plot.
"Most men take few risks, and then they all die in the end anyway." The interesting characters in GOT died before the show ended, because they took interesting risks. If they didn't, then HBO wouldn't have made any money. The show was profitable because unexpected events drove interesting storylines, the writers weren't afraid to kill people off, break their paradigms, or run them through intense pain and embarrassment. You are HBO and your trades need to be like Littlefinger, for instance. He spent a lot of time worshipping risk and chaos, but wasn't he the most meticulous character in the show? What about Tyrion? He appeared to keep a low profile for most of the show, but actually took huge risks.
Confused? Here's the sum of these analogies: You will get bullied by the market. But if you can break your mental paradigms, kill off bad strategies, and survive the pain and embarrassment, you'll be the last man standing.
Well, technically I'll be there, wondering what took you so long.
Conversely. Don't worry, too much knowledge is the best problem you can have.
Part 1: Modern Chartfare
When you started trading, you were probably 360 no-scoping your trades. You probably had a few win-streaks, and then a demoralizing losing streak. You felt your win/loss ratio falling and you sought out new strategies, new weapons. So you turned to the internet for ideas, like you would for anything. The omnipresence of advertising and social media caught your attention first. You turned to a metric shitload of wealth gurus. Instagram, telegram, pictogram, etc. Sure, the bros pitching this stuff look like older versions of the kids that bullied you in school, but now they're here to make you money, right?
Nice try nitwit. Now you're making a new kind of losing investment. This is an important piece of "risk management," and I wasn't sure where to fit it in. But those educators, ARE your competitors. Your investment isn't a potential return, its accounts recievable to Guru LLC. When you make enough money trading, you don't need to shill services for income. Remember, forex is a meta marketplace itself, AKA a place to trade services. Most of which are scams or overpriced.
Wealth and warfare go hand in hand. In capitalism, the true battlefield is your bank account, the true center of gravity is your mindspace. The weapons are languages, visuals, platforms, technologies.. And I can tell, trust me, that most of you are easily exploited noncombatants, unarmed and unable to defend yourself or stake a claim to survival in this eternal warzone. Step one to making wealth is protecting whatever amount (no matter how pathetic) of wealth you currently have. Step two is to stop chasing paywalled wealth gurus who draw no income from trading, or any profit that do is embarrassingly mediocre. Greed makes it too easy for the fishermen these days. But wealth that lasts is quiet and deals in many faces. You have to go looking for it, it doesn't try to find you. That's why I'm not selling you on overnight wealth, I'm buying you a lifetime of better risk taking behavior. You need to stop being a wierdo who idolizes mediocre profits.
Part 2: Lunch is NOT for WIMPs
Most of the information in this article is available to find online for free with enough effort, it's just not prioritized by the get-rich shills on major social media platforms. That's the problem. You're still getting bullied out of your lunch money.
I have a counter-offer, I'll buy you lunch instead. At the conclusion of this series in a few months, I will launch a free, private signal service (based on one of my own profitable strategy systems), to build a new type of community, and to help demonstrate the effectiveness of my risk ethos promulgated across this series. I'll get into earning details in a later article, but those master accounts are traded by my hand and produce a minimum positive number of pips per month. Bottom line, it's enough for lunch at Dorsia. But it's not enough to replace a job. Answers to all questions will be provided when the time comes, and performance will be fully transparent. There will be rules for the community and the private signal, rules that may not make sense at first or seem unfamiliar, but everything will be free, always. I don't need your money, the federal reserve has given me plenty. Instead, I will 'trick' you into prioritizing the right things, to protect and develop your networth and lifeworth. From this new kind of community, I will eventually select a few unique individuals to inherit and run my forex trading systems, so I can focus on business creation.
In the meantime, you should be utilizing free websites like FxBlue or Psyquation to manage and study your account risk overtime. You'll be able to see clear differences in the before and after comparison corresponding to your trading experience before finishing this series vs afterwards.
Part 3: Factoring Events
Alright, this will be a bit disjointed but let's start the race to the bottom.
Some investors will pitch their fund or their style as event-driven trading. I simply call event-driven trading by another phrase, 'risk management.' That's all it is.
EVENTS ARE THE ONLY FORM OF VOLATILITY THAT MATTERS.
The priority for your risk management across long-term timeframes is not entirely explained in simple volatility equations. I have briefly mentioned this in prior articles. But the investing boomerisms about volatility are right and wrong. Volatility is the key to risk management, right, but only if you understand the threat origination of volatility itself, which most don't. Which is why they lose. Volatility is the rapid transition of fear into security or security into fear. The identifiable rapid transition EVENTS are driven by market psychology (the players within). And those rapid transition events CAN be predicted by preparing your trades for predicted/scheduled future EVENTS (and sometimes ongoing events). We talked a lot about geopolitics and some economic events in the last article. But there are others.
You don't really need to know a lot about them, you just need to know that they are predictable events, which means meaningful volatility, which means risk management.
You don't need to be an economist or try to out-analyze these events (though that might lead to some edge), because you can safely assume that the forecasts are already priced in. You can assume that the majority of major market players did their own research or got access to better research. Tough to out-edge those guys. There's a reason they own the porn industry. "Thank God I don't have to use my brain too much." No, don't even. I would rather not create anymore dumb rich people, we got enough already and boy are they big liabilities.
Part 4: Losers Wouldn't Know
A forecast isn't a foresight, its a guesstimate. We talked a lot about the inherent delusion built into speculation. Obviously, these guesstimates COULD be wildly wrong. The actuals could be 5 standard deviations away from the expert consensus estimate. Therein lies the potential for major volatility. Forget the digits, I want you to look at the econ calendar as opportunites for entry or exits in your trading system, and ignore the estimate. Or, if you already are exposed to the pair, I want your to prepare your position for these events ("prepare" will be further discussed). Both of these routes can constitute proper risk management in conjunction with key technicals, which is the focus of the next section.
There are a ton of events that don't appear on the econ schedule though. Only the cool kids know about these. We did geopolitics already, the tough unscheduled stuff. But there is more to discuss.
END OF MONTH + END OF QUARTER REBALANCING
It's hard to predict cause commercials and institutions use broad cross-asset reasoning to balance portfolios, but generally the mindset is derived from a need to hedge across the major/minor/cross currencies (g10). The safest bet is to just expect volatility, and therefore prepare your risk management in concert. Dont spend cognitive resources trying to predict direction. Just look at the Biden campaign. Now that's how you conserve cognitive resources.
LONDON FIX
There are multiple fixes, but the London fix is the biggest and most relevant for majors because most of the money and most of the villains have congregated there. It occurs at 4PM City time (London time) and it's basically used as a benchmark for NON-SPOT market operations, like agreements/forwards between companies or branches within companies to convert currency to meet payment responsibilities like payroll, invoices, debts, etc. That was determined to be the "fairest" way, instead of negotiating over spot prices. The exact exchange values are determined with less oversight than you would hope but usually as an average of price range around the 4PM period. It just means that you have another volatility roadbump as a retail trader. For the powerful and wealthy, it might mean other opportunities. We don't always play the same game, even if it seems like it.
The fix is even crazier during those end of month rebalancing events. Consider them gravitationally attracted.
WITCHING HOURS
This is the period when Wall Street performs satanic rituals for profitable insight. You probably won't have to worry too much about this now that we got Maxwell behind bars, and I really should've just covered it more directly in the seasonality article. This hour is just the last hour of trading on the third friday of every month (unless it's a holiday), where some options and some futures expire. The lead up to the hour itself can involve unusual price action from complex arbitrage. There is recent interest in resolving this inefficient period by developing special rollover/settlement options. CME Group (the largest futures group) is working on this, so I wouldn't do too much of a deep dive looking for edge because it might not exist for much longer. At most, you should just remember to increase risk oversight on the third friday of each month, and that a few months (March, June, Sept, Decem) have larger expiry loads, so be extra careful.
That's the speedrun.
Part 5: Steak Salesmen
Trump tweets. Now in the steak salesman era of American politics, Presidents also like to hype or influence economic information, and significant portions of the market will react. You gotta follow the man in the OO if you want the complete global macro coverage.
We have less than a year left of insured Trump tweets, and a speculative 4 more years of Trump tweets. I do consider a high probabilty of a Trump reelection, 70%+. Twitter market influence is here to stay either way, though it would be more subdued without Glormphf. This ties into a reliable source of fundamental certainty, which is the dependency of timezones and market newsflow. That is, big US market newsflow happens during the business day, by and large. Everyone is awake, everyone is at work. This is obvious but useful nevertheless. Lets say there is some kind of unscheduled macro leak, like a major Korean newspaper claims that a CCP trade minister said that TRADE DEAL PHASE 1 might be off the table.. the market will react poorly and all of this will occur overnight for the US and for EU. However, when the sun shines on that side of the world, we will get an update, and usually a correction, that calms markets. You can use that reaction cycle as a tradeable pattern in future instances. This type of pattern happens all the time, a few times a month at least.
Part 6: The Confusion of Traders
COT data. The Contusion of Traders data is the most freely available source of information that approximates open interest and institutional sentiment in forex. You probably know that real volume data is available for most financial assets on major exchanges (like stocks), but due to the derivative and OTC nature of forex, this real information on liquidity, sentiment, and volume is priveledged knowledge held privately by individuals and institutions to generate edge and to fiddle with spreads. COT data is a close but not exact representation of this liquidity and sentiment via commodity futures contracts held by trading funds, institutions of a market-making nature, or brokers. Unfortunately, this data is compiled and released weekly, and not in real-time. So it has a 1 week lag, and more during holidays. However, it is still very useful from a fundamental perspective for long-term traders. OI (open interest) shows DEMAND. You can find this data via google, and there are few dedicated people on a certain factory related forex site that put out excellent weekly COT reviews. Generally speaking, you want to look for strong competing trends between speculators and commercials. You will want to track your risk management to that trend. Quite frankly, you rarely want to trade against a strong COT data-derived trend unless you are making a special type of carry trade. If you want to bet against the trend, you incur the same risk-managment responsibilities of a commercial (deep pocket institutions, money makers), except you remain a pathetic and shallow pocketed retail trader. This is counter-intuitive because your capital is vastly limited both in size and use.
Okay let's circle back to riskon and riskoff and tie them into econ events.
Part 7: Securities Industry Essentials Exam
The stock market is a critical component of fundamentals because it serves as a reliable indicator of riskon vs riskoff. Money considers the share market (like NASDAQ/DOW/SP500/NIKKEI, etc) risky. I find this absolutely clown-tier in the current year, considering Central Banking debt/asset strategies. Digression. It considers other equities like corpo bonds, debentures, warrants, etc, as accessories to share performance, at least when looking at drivers for riskon sentiment. Unfortunately, the stock market runs through exchanges that do not operate on a 24/7 basis, unlike forex. The old world still functions on sleep. Imagine sleeping when you could be making money.
You can alleviate this issue by looking at the futures market, where you can follow different stock markets while live exchange data feeds are stopped. You need to be mindful of which stock market to follow based on time of day. Recall that NA and EU represent most of the influence on sentiment only while live.
Commodities like energies and metals are perhaps even clearer examples of risk sentiment. With the exception of gold and silver, most commodities are riskon, and act as a signal for demand within economies. Since economies are the underlying to markets, markets interpret commodity demand (which generally reflects as higher prices), as a sign that economies are growing. Copper in particular because of its valience application in much of the developed, tech-dependent world.
Part 8: The Pyramid Club
National bonds were discussed in prior articles. Bond PRICE rises (because demand increases) during riskoff periods. Now, this is only true for SAFEHAVEN countries. Well-managed, top-twenty economies. This is because demand for a national bond can drop if investors think the country is at risk of debt restructuring. Though, as prior mentioned in the carry article, this issue is more political than it is economic in nature, and a bailout is always available. It might be easier to think of national bonds as 'loans' citizens can give to governments. Writing a loan for a trustworthy debtor could be an economically benefitial thing, but vice versa for a debtor who is struggling. In general, as a forex trader, just focus on US national bonds. Note that there are varity of national bond types, but the distinction between them is less relevant than the overall yield and price conditions. It only becomes relevant if you have a lot of money to invest, which we all know you don't have.
Now what about yields? Sadly, as bond prices rise, the yield (added interest value) drops. Though in the grand scheme of things... yields are pretty much in net decline these past 10-15 years, which are the only kinds of timeframes they are truly relevant in anyway, except as a sentiment measure with glance value. Obviously, in a riskon environment, more investors, and therefore more money, shift into riskier avenues; so demand drops and bond prices drop. Now, there are other factors that influence the pricing of national bond yields and other country-level assets, namely interest rates set by a central bank, yield curve issues, and other money operations between the central bank and private banks. As mentioned in the article on carry trades, the importance of staying up to date on central banking activity and rationale is paramount in the world of forex. I'm not going to give a 21st Century Central Banking ECON 301 course here; just research the history of Gold Man Sachs' corporate management and you'll be ahead of the game.
Also.
VIX is another simple and popular tool for measuring the riskon vs riskoff environment, though as I have already warned in prior articles, volatility is not synonymous with risk due to its vulnerability to black swans, and risk management based on traditional volatility measures is not sufficient. And keep in mind that VIX has a sleep schedule.
Part 9: Gekkos & Goblins
It's easy to get lost in all the words, statements, claims, projections, predictions you get from experts, twitter, reports, releases, news, and media. But you have to stay laser focused on the flow of cash itself. Adding 'value' or 'growth' and removing 'liabilities' or 'obstacles' are nice terms, but they don't exist in reality. You can't put them in your pocket. You can't buy a house with them. Remember, ultimately it's all about the bucks, the rest is just conversation. Where ever there are billions sloshing around, there lies your market. You just need to watch the money move to understand the risk transitions.
Though, don't follow it too closely, you might see something that was meant to be hidden.
Part 10: Most Successful People were Bullied
Society has an odd way of bullying people into conformity (and therefore mediocrity). But if you weather the mental pressure to conform, you end up outside the predicted plot. A place where no one can reach you. When making money is involved, that's usually a good thing.
The last man standing is usually the risk management specialist, yet the biggest risk is not taking any risk at all. A paradox? You're not trying to avoid all loss, you're trying to be the best at managing loss. You can't be a risk management specialist without RISK being involved somewhere. You have to suffer the bullying before you can step outside of the plot.
"Most men take few risks, and then they all die in the end anyway." The interesting characters in GOT died before the show ended, because they took interesting risks. If they didn't, then HBO wouldn't have made any money. The show was profitable because unexpected events drove interesting storylines, the writers weren't afraid to kill people off, break their paradigms, or run them through intense pain and embarrassment. You are HBO and your trades need to be like Littlefinger, for instance. He spent a lot of time worshipping risk and chaos, but wasn't he the most meticulous character in the show? What about Tyrion? He appeared to keep a low profile for most of the show, but actually took huge risks.
Confused? Here's the sum of these analogies: You will get bullied by the market. But if you can break your mental paradigms, kill off bad strategies, and survive the pain and embarrassment, you'll be the last man standing.
Well, technically I'll be there, wondering what took you so long.
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