Sunday, July 26, 2009

Trade like A Hedge Fund Manager (Part II)

By Ahmad Hassam

You must have read Part I of how hedge fund managers trade forex. You need to understand that hedge fund managers are always on their nerves edge. They constantly look for strategies that work.

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 should also decide the best time frame that you will trade most. You should decide whether you will trade the 5 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 4 hours, daily or weekly chart 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.

Learning the art of entry and exit is essential for your success. Should it be single entry, single exit? Should it be single entry, multiple exits? Should it be multiple entries, single exit? Should it be multiple entry, multiple exits?

You should learn money management principles in depth. It is good money management principles and their consistent application that will make you survive in the long run. Never ever try to put more than 3% of your equity at stake at one time. Understand how to calculate the reward/risk ratio for each trade. Never trade if the reward/risk ratio is below 3/1

Now, this is the time to take a test drive of the forex system that you have developed by back testing and forward testing. Back testing can be done on Metatrader and other platforms that are freely available online. Forward test your strategies on a demo account using live data.

A better approach would be to open a mini account and try to test it live with a mini lot. You will not lose much money this way but you will be playing against your emotions like when you will put large amount of your money at stake using this strategy.

Ultimately trading is all about developing discipline and controlling emotions. You dont get this feel in demo trading when you know nothing is at stake.

Get intimate with your strategies. There are two primary types of trading strategies"one that has a high percentage of profitable trades and one that has a high profit factor.

The key factor here is to know and find out what type of market environment your trading strategy performs well in and what type of market environment your trading strategy fails in. Because only then will you know what works under what conditions and what does not work.

Understand how much drawdown you can afford on your trading account with this trading strategy. You can establish a bench mark figure using a back test. Decide before hand how much drawdown is acceptable before you 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 good to spend some time on a weekly or monthly basis to self reflect on your past trading performance. You need to fix a certain level of pips per day for yourself and keep on tweaking your trading strategies until you reach that figure. - 23309

About the Author:

Saturday, July 25, 2009

What Are Stock Indexes? (Part II)

By Ahmad Hassam

Modified capitalization weighting involves adjustments to the capitalizations of the various component issues of the Nasdaq-100 index. The NDX contract at the CBOE is based on Nasdaq-100 as is the MNX. The Nasdaq-100 is a modified capitalization weighted index.

Russell 2000 is the well known benchmark for small capitalization sector. Several Russell Indexes have become benchmarks for specific areas of investment management. Frank Russell Company is one of the leading global investment consultants. It is also involved in performance measurement, analysis and investment management.

Russell 3000 Index as the name implies includes 3000 issues and these 3000 companies represent 98% of the investable US equities. The index is adjusted for certain factors such as cross holdings and the number of pairs in hands.

Russell 3000 is further split into subsets like Russell 1000 Index and it covers the top 1000 companies. It is about 92% of the value of the entire 3,000 stock index. The Russell 2000 Index is the smallest 2000 companies in the Russell 3000 Index. It represents about 8% of the value of Russell 3000.

From the business point of view, the Wall Street Journal is probably one of the most perfect business franchises. A franchise that is very hard to duplicate. The net worth of most of its readers is in seven figures. Dow Jones is the publisher of this journal.

DJIA became an important business barometer over the years. Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) comprising 12 smokestack companies made its debut in the year 1896 and it grew to encompass 30 large industrial companies.

The DJIA is still one of the worlds best known stock measures. It consists of 30 largest and most liquid blue chip stocks in the US. The average is maintained by the editors of the Wall Street Journal.

The DJIA unlike the S&P 500, Russell 3000 Indexes or the Nasdaq-100 is a price weighted average. The highest price issues hold the most influence over the average. Recently Microsoft (MSFT) and Intel were added to the DJIA.

A 1 percent move in a $90 Microsoft stock would have a greater impact than a 1 percent move in a $30 Intel stock. ETFs exit on many Dow Indexes like the DJIA, the Dow Jones Total Market Index, the Dow Jones Global Titan Index and various sector indexes.

Wilshire serves over 400 organizations in over 20 countries representing over $2 trillion in assets. Wilshire flagship index is the Wilshire 5000 Total Market Index.

Over the years, it has increased to 6500 issues representing the increase in the number of companies in the US. It represents the broadest index for the US equity markets.

The Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) database contains nearly 25,000 securities covering 50 countries. It calculates nearly 3,000 indexes daily and services a client base of over 1,200 worldwide. One of the advantages of MCSI and its foreign indexes is consistency. - 23309

About the Author: