Re: forex trading: whats your idea about it and the MetaTrader program?
Interesting that Metatrader is accessible. I didn't know that. I might have to play with it; I've never found a good screener.
You're not going to get accessible charts, but you can get xlq which is an Excel add-on and then you can do stuff like build tables of price by month. In general you have to make up for the lack of charts with mathematical analysis and stuff (and that's not just trading, that's anything--metrics for work etc).
I would stay away from forex. Start with stocks. They're simpler to understand and less volatile, plus I've heard lots of bad things about the forex brokers. You can use something like Fidelity to place your orders. I would stay away from automated algorithms. If it's bugged it will spend all your money before you can blink. If the market changes it will spend all your money before you can blink. Etc.
I wouldn't try to start trading right now. Wait for the markets to be normal. Covid has everything everywhere acting in ways that don't make sense--for example slight indication that maybe we might be getting a little bit back to normal is causing 10% jumps. That sounds great, but news the other way is causing equally big drops, and between the current u.s. protests and everyone saying that we might have another Covid wave in the fall (which the markets are ignoring, I don't know why), it's probably not over.
But there's three problems, and they're why I don't trade actively, besides Covid of course.
First, without around $100000 you don't have enough money to play the probability game. You can't model trading as "I buy one stock, make money, and sell" You need to model it as probabilities of winning trades and get things such that you've got 5 or 6 trades going on and on the whole you win because overall your probability of winning was 60% and your expected value was high enough. Otherwise your first big trade that goes south ends your trading forever by eating all your money. If you have under $50000 or so, you have an even bigger problem, in that any sizable trade ties up all your money and you can't do proper risk management *at all*. You've got stops but stops won't reliably trigger if the market does anything weird. You've got options, but most brokers won't give you access to the options trading levels you need to use them as a risk management strategy without trading experience.
You're going to say but I can just by less shares, but only orders of 100 shares tend to execute reliably and Fidelity for example is flat out blatant about this. 100*$100 is already 10000, and all the big companies trade in that range.
Second, there's taxes in at least the U.S. which penalize you for short-term asset holding. If you buy and sell really fast, I believe it's taxed at the ordinary income rate. You can get an S&P 500 index fund and let money sit there for the next 10 years and you'll get a 5% to 7% (or possibly higher) return, and be taxed at the end (probably around 15% but if you're retiring off it there are ways to avoid that and get it down to 0%). If you trade actively you're taxed on your profits for the year, and the funniest part is that your profits for the year can be positive by the tax code even if you lost $100000 (because the IRS only lets you write off $6000 of losses, if you profit $100000 on 3 or 4 trades and then lose $1000000 you can only write off $6000, and you're still taxed on $396000 of it even though you just ran out of money and can't pay the tax). Since it's ordinary income rate if you're successful enough you're looking at 20% or 30% taxes for swing/short-term/algorithmic trading. This varies per country though, and if you're in a favorable enough country it may not matter. You can avoid the big losses with proper risk management, but if you make a 10% return then after taxes it's equal to the 5% to 7% return you would have made by just buying the S&P500 and holding for 10 years or something, so you have to do really, really well to beat that strategy.
And third, actually doing better than buy-and-hold is a full-time job. If you have a normal full-time job, you probably can't do this. You need at least a few hours a day to follow the markets and check in on your trades and stuff, and you need to be able to respond if a big news headline comes out.
When I retire (or "retire") I will probably try swing trading, because if you know a lot of math and practice at it you can make good returns, but until then my dayjob personally gives me more, and I won't have enough money for proper risk management until 5 or 6 years from now. But then again, if you just buy some apartment buildings or let a financial manager manage it for you you can get the good returns and not do anything and go enjoy the beach or whatever instead, and if you keep your dayjob and can get 401K matching you can do buy-and-hold tax free and by the time you retire you're set. And if "I don't have 401k matching", "I don't have a job", "I only make minimum wage" describes you, you're not going to be able to successfully trade unless you get absurdly lucky--you have to have significant amounts of money you can afford to lose as the price of entry, otherwise you might lose it and be in a lot of trouble. Of course the goal is winning, and it's not guaranteed you will lose anything just like it's not guaranteed you'll profit, but $10000 isn't enough to get started and you can't afford to risk money you might need for other things.
-- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
