Great Loss and Interesting Training

Today I was notified by my partner that due to some platform issues, he lost some 400 pips on a single trade. Apparently there is widely weak sentiment against the USD. Of course there are major reasons behind this event, but I believe it is really more due to speculation than anything else. While the US is facing a decline, and will continue to go downhill unless they align their economic pillars according to their comparative advantage in services.

As for myself, I've been in the Starhub Product and Services training for 2 days now...I must say there is so much to learn that I don't quite know if I am exactly prepared to do sales during SITEX itself. But I'll take it as a learning process and practise my sales abilities. Really tired. And I bet it would be worse for the next 4 days. I must think positive. In fact, I even visualised during the course that I served customers in the best possible attitude, being able to meet their needs and surpass expectations of what good service is.

I'll be back on monday or sunday evening (if I still have any energy left) to report on my very interesting experiences.

A startling beginning

Woah...last night I stayed up overnight to not only finish my most concise economic review/report to date, but to also witness the opening of the International Forex market at 5 am. Man, it sure was a shocking day. First of all there was no movement of the chart until suddenly there was a huge jump in values of pairs to the detriment the USD. That basically means I lost alot of money. Well, fortunately most of that were virtual trades. I held the ,what I believe were oversold, positions of the USD in the view that the US market would cause a realignment of the USD after the holidays. But no way would I have expected that USD was heavily sold the moment the market was opened.

Frankly I suspect the People's Bank of China is behind this sell off activity. It was only a stupid me that did not follow all the sentiments and articles that pointed to this move. Definitely I didn't expect the move to have occured over the weekend, but I should have at least believed in the weakness of the USD.

In any case, given the current situation, by 7pm today, I see the USD has recovered partially from the furious attack in the morning. I will continue holding my pro-USD positions and observe if my beliefs are true.

One thing I cannot figure out, however, is the movement of the JPY. Apparently, the JPY has been weakening against most currencies today. This doesn't quite make sense given the much needed Yen to reverse the carry trades in the market.

I'm gonna start work tomorrow, the next two days being training at the Starhub Centre, and then to the Roadshow at SITEX. I found out this is a no-commission job, but nevertheless I would do my best to gain all the sales experience possible. Also, this might be my chance to get into other starhub roadshows, and another item to add to my sales experience column of my CV.

Oh, we also made progress in the refining of the economic reporting method by introducing a summary table so as to easily see the relation between news and the forex directions. The following is an illustration.

Today will easily seem like an uneventful day but I managed to complete a brief proposal for a idea for an alternative method of attracting tuition assignments. Well, still not that impressive.

Of course I'm still in a rut since I don't seem to want to start on my financial article reporting. Considering if I should modify the way I report the stuff, because the way I am doing it now doesn't seem that useful to see the trends between news and forex directions.

Earlier, my partner scientist suggested I inform him the moment I get wind of a major news that could hugely impact the forex trends. But for now, that isn't working too well since I don't always read the papers the day I purchase it.

However, that is set to change for the next few days, because now I am personally involved in the investing, I am deeply motivated to read for all the latest news. Also, next week should prove exciting. I will keep my eyes open for news, especially those concerning the USD.

One more thing, partner told me he missed the darn exciting thursday and friday tradings because his trading account got cancelled. Haha, he tried accessing it from his friend's house. Wonder what's wrong with that...shouldn't one be able to access their account as long as they have an internet connection? Would a difference in IP from the regularly used computer cause the cancellation? I'll figure it out later when support starts again.

One more thing: I declare I'll consciously seperate news and analysis in my report.

A non-forex day

Ok, I didn't quite do anything concerning forex this saturday. But I did manage to work out a proposal on another initiative I am looking into with a partner in the tuition industry. And my own flyers to promote my own tuition for 'A' levels economics students.

And I'm supposed to look at how to streamline my newspaper summary/report to make it useful for my purpose of researching on the link between news and forex directions. And that would save me some time on the report too, because the time taken to complete the length is pretty bad. I used some 5 hours to complete my 12 pages the last week.

I think my report this week will be focused on what is the possible direction for the USD, GBP, EUR and JPY markets. The USD is hugely oversold by closing last week. So it would be interesting to see what is gonna happen in the coming week.

Enter the forex market!

Today's pretty exciting too, because I managed to settle all the administrative problems and started using a platform called Marketiva to trade.

Now, they offer USD10,000 in a virtual account to play with. And I treated it as that, money to gamble, since it is my first day at handling the forex market. I found it really easy to use and I don't have to strain my eyes to read any graphs or data.

However, there's the downside. I stretched myself out and tested the market using simple technical method of support and resistance levels by looking at the past performance of the pairs. And put simply, that didn't work. Overall, all my trades lost 100+ pips each. So I currently, nearing the market close, would have chalked up some 1000+ pips loss. But thank goodness all these are in virtual amounts.

But considering what I did today, I thought it would be really scary to see so much red in a day. And I realised what I heard at some forex pre-seminars I attended is pretty true. It take mental strength to be a big player or investor, whichever one believes a person involved in the forex market to be.

I shall wait for a rebound next week, when the US markets get more active again.

Happenings

Today several new things happened.

One. I went for my first sales interview. That was for SITEX with Starhub. Not sure if I'll get in, but I believe I did fairly well during the interview. This is to serve as my platform to sales training and effective p2p interaction, both of which are essentials to any biz i start later.

Two. I started my forex account on Marketiva. This would be a fresh start to being able to meddle in the market myself. I'm getting this feeling that news isn't that impt to the directions in the market, but that is pure speculation which I should ignore for now. For my first few trades, they are simply gambles, to familiarise myself with the functions and such.

Three. I managed to work out a theoretical model for how interest rates affect the state of the economy and thus the forex rates. However, I am facing a gap in information as to the links between overnight interest rates (set by Central Banks) and those reflected in long term consumer and investment loans.

First day, Fresh beginning

OK...here goes...so I've finally gotten down to starting a blog to record my progress along this path of discovering my financial destiny. It hasn't been that long but I sure had a good time knowing people and discussing ridiculous ideas.

All these started with the now-famous "Rich Dad Poor Dad." From there I got to know of many ways to make money, and quite a few friends who would like to make money too.

Basically I'm down to Forex now. And I'm conducting an experiment on the relationship between news and the forex directions of the major currencies now. So far the progress has been haphazard. Really need a better way to gather news. Currently, I do a daily review of important news in Business Times (Singapore) and send the report weekly to my partner who settles the (technical) trading part.

Haven't really had time to observe patterns since there is simply too much info on my report vs his. Wonder where this will all lead us to...