Online Forex Trading For You

Sunday, July 26, 2009

Can You Trade Like A Hedge Fund Manager? (Part II)

By Ahmad Hassam

You must read Part I of how hedge fund managers develop forex trading strategies in a step by step manner before you continue with Part II. You should know that hedge fund managers are always edgy as most of the traders are. They constantly look for trading strategies that work because markets do not remain the same and conditions keep on changing.

Hedge fund managers aim is to make good money consistently while always on their guard because a trade can go bad any time. If a trade goes bad, they know beforehand how to get out of a bad position before it results in a huge loss. You as individual investors also would put your own money at stake in the hope of making good money.

Ranging and trending are two primary trading methods. Many hedge fund managers like to follow the trend. Dont forget the saying, Trend is your friend. If you want to become a trend trader, than you need to understand and anticipate trends that may develop in currency pairs. If you want to do range trading, you should understand what best times when currency pairs are ranging and how to do scalping and when.

You also need to decide the time frame that you will trade most. You should decide whether you will use the 5 min charts, 30 min charts, 4 hour charts , daily charts etc and why.

Will you only day trade or hold your position overnight? If you are doing a job, will you trade after hours? What time of trading best suits you? These things should be very clear in your mind before you start trading.

Learn the art of entry and exit. You will need to learn technical analysis for this. Technical analysis is essential for your success. Should it be multiple entry, multiple exits? Should it be single entry, single exit? Should it be multiple entries, single exit? Should it be single entry, multiple exits?

You should understand the money management rules. Never ever put more than 1% of your equity at stake in a single trade. Learn to calculate the risk/reward ratio.

Now, test drive the forex system by back testing and forward testing. Back testing can be done on Metatrader and other platforms. Forward test your strategies on a demo account.

Open a mini account and try to test it live with a small amount of money. This way you will not lose much money but will be playing against your emotions.

In the end, forex trading is all about developing discipline in yourself and controlling your emotions. You dont get this feeling in demo trading when you know nothing is at stake and you are under no stress of losing your hard earned money.

Now is the time to get intimate with your strategies. There are two main types of trading strategies"one has a high percentage of profitable trades in a number of trades and the other has a high profit factor per trade.

The key here is to know exactly what type of market environment your strategy performs well in and what type of market environment your strategy fails in, because only then will you know when it is time to pull the plug.

Drawdown is very important. Know how much drawdown you can afford. You can establish bench mark figures using a back test for each trading strategy. Decide before you trade, how much drawdown is acceptable before you need to pull the plug out of the trade.

The last step of thinking or trading like a hedge fund manager is self reflection. Oftentimes we become so absorbed with trading that we do not notice the obvious.

This is why it is important to spend some time on a weekly or monthly basis to go over or reflect on your trading. You need to establish a certain ROI level for yourself and keep on tweaking your trading strategies until you start achieving that figure. - 23311

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