What Is Cryptocurrency? Here’s What You Should Know

Cryptocurrencies let you buy goods and services, or trade them for profit. Here's more about what cryptocurrency is, how to buy it and how to protect yourself.

A cryptocurrency (or “crypto”) is a digital currency that can be used to buy goods and services, but uses an online ledger with strong cryptography to secure online transactions. Much of the interest in these unregulated currencies is to trade for profit, with speculators at times driving prices skyward.

The most popular cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, has had volatile price moves this year, reaching nearly $65,000 in April before losing nearly half its value in May. In recent weeks, the price of bitcoin was back in the $45,000 range (You can check the current price to buy Bitcoin here.)

Here are seven things to ask about cryptocurrency, and what to watch out for.

What is cryptocurrency?

Cryptocurrency is a form of payment that can be exchanged online for goods and services. Many companies have issued their own currencies, often called tokens, and these can be traded specifically for the good or service that the company provides. Think of them as you would arcade tokens or casino chips. You’ll need to exchange real currency for the cryptocurrency to access the good or service.

Cryptocurrencies work using a technology called blockchain. Blockchain is a decentralized technology spread across many computers that manages and records transactions. Part of the appeal of this technology is its security.

read more : https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/investing/cryptocurrency-7-things-to-know

Win at Forex – A Simple 3 Step Forex Trading Strategy for Big Gains

So you want to win at forex? Then you need a logical robust forex trading strategy you can apply for success and that's exactly what were going to look at here.

Let's go through the 3 simple steps to get you up and running on the road to profits.

1. Your Trading System

Let's start with a form of trading that has worked and will always work - trading breakouts to new highs or lows. It's a fact that most major forex trends start from new highs and lows and by buying breakouts, you can be in on all the big trends that yield the big profits.

You need to trade longer term and this means looking for resistance points on a daily chart. Ideally, you want at least 3 tests and the more the better and to make the breakout even more valid look for the spacings of these tests to be wide apart.

Be patient, good breakouts don't come around every day - but by waiting for them you get the odds in your favour. Trading frequency has no bearing on profits, so trade only when you see a valid break of resistance and this will occur only a few times a month.

2. Confirming the Trading Signal

If you want to trade breakouts you need to make sure that price momentum is on your side to increase the odds of success and now you need to make momentum indicators an essential part of your forex education. If you don't know what they are look up our other articles.

In summary - they are leading indicators, to gauge the strength and momentum of price. You want momentum to support any break before executing your trading signal as the odds of continuation of the trend are greater.

Good ones to look at are Relative Strength Index (RSI) stochastic, Average Directional Movement (ADX) - There are others - but these are a great place to start.

3. Money Management and Stops

The good thing about breakout trading is your stop level is obvious - behind the breakout point.

What you have to be careful of is making sure your stop remains behind normal volatility and protects you, so it's not to close to see you taken out by random volatility and allows you to stay with the trend. For this, wait for the price to get moving, until you have a cushion of profit and then trail your stop behind the 40 day moving average and use the 20 day moving average, to add to positions.

You can experiment with different averages - but these are two that tend to work well in strong trending markets.

Another trick is to bank partial profits on surges to overbought levels and buy dips to put the position back in i.e. the 20 day moving average or nearby trend line support. This is a great trick for smoothing your equity curve.

Putting it all Together…

The above is a simple forex trading strategy to help you win at forex trading.

Breakout trading works and will continue to work. If you confirm your breakouts with momentum, you have the odds on your side with your market timing and the stop loss and money management tips; will keep you in all the big forex trends.

Forex trading is not about complicated methods or trying to be clever, it's about having a simple robust trading system; you understand, can have confidence in and therefore can apply with discipline.

Simple Robust Forex Trading System + Applied with Rigid Discipline = Forex Success

Keep in mind you need to have the discipline to apply your forex trading strategy if you don't - you don't have one.

Trading is all about maintaining rigid discipline and this trait is vital for success.

Anyone can make money with the above tips and win at forex. Try the above for yourself and see.

Is psychology your biggest weakness in trading

I have read dozens of trading books. Some helpful and some not so helpful. However, one common theme runs throughout all the books I've read on trading: Trading Psychology.

Some trading guru's say that trading psychology makes up 90% of your trading success whilst your system and rules and money management make up a mere 10%. Whilst this may be a bit drastic, I do believe that psychology is the area where traders struggle the most. Most beginner traders focus more on buy and sell signals and order execution, while experienced traders will suggest that trading psychology is the area that they should focus on in order to become consistent, profitable traders.

Its so much harder to look inwards to improve your trading than to focus on external factors. Traders would rather search for that perfect indicator or that Holy Grail system than focus on their own weaknesses and psychological makeup because its difficult, really difficult.

As individual traders we have two ways of handling this. Firstly, we can try to overcome our the psychological issues that are holding back our trading or we can automate our trading so that psychology plays no part at all. Its a choice between overcoming our weaknesses and eliminating them from our trading.

Overcoming psychological issues in trading is a long and hard process that one can improve and control but never eliminate entirely. You could seek the advice of a trading coach or take a course or read books, but ultimately learning to control your emotions and psychological state will be a life long journey of discovery. We are particularly susceptible to psychological weaknesses when we are tired or under stress. Trading under these conditions makes it even more challenging to deal with, however due to the nature of the market we often trade in these circumstances.

By building an automated trading system you eliminate human error and psychological issues from your trading. An automated trading system is one where you build and test your trading strategy and then instead of manually making the trading decisions based on your rules based system, you build a simple automated program to run your system automatically. This eliminates trading errors such as entering the incorrect lot size or limit price, forgetting to enter a stop loss or closing a trade too early. More importantly though, it eliminates the possibility for you to move your stop loss out, or enter a trade that has not been confirmed as an entry by your trading system. Worse still is riding a losing trade for fear of realising the loss. Traders can rationalise strange behaviour in the heat of the moment and easily sabotage their results by deviating from their rules based trading plan. Your auto trading program will never deviate from the rules that you set and never get fatigued. Your auto system doesn't get stressed, greedy or fearful.

If it is true that trading psychology makes up 90% of your trading success, then why not remove it from your trading by introducing automated trading software? This allows you to focus on the other 10%; the actual rules based trading system that every trader needs in order to be successful. This is the fun part! Traders enjoy building and testing trading and money management systems.

Focus your efforts on developing a water tight system that suits your needs and use automation to implement your plan. You'll reduce your error rate and improve your trading results. The fewer mistakes you make the better trader you will be.

Using FOREX Trading Robots

When you are a FOREX trader that has been using a FOREX trading robot to help with your trading it really is a fairly new field. The fantastically intertwined combination of the human intelligence and the abilities of the FOREX robot will provide you with a very useful tool.

With the advent of the FOREX trading robots it has opened up the world of FOREX trading for everyone from a newbie trader to those who are veteran FOREX traders. After some tinkering around with and automated FOREX robot or even purchasing your own robot you can really set yourself up to start making some really great profits.

There is one thing that is for sure. If you use a FOREX trading robot you will have a rather distinct advantage over traditional trading practices.

So here we go with the obvious question "Whats a FOREX Trading Robot?" Well a trading robot is used for the purpose of crawling through markets to search for specific signals. For instance a robot could be searching for combination of particular indicators and by indicators it is meant items such as weight price action, technical price patterns and forward projection scanning.

When the trading robot has successfully found a combination that it is supposed to be looking for it will begin to make calculations and then it will be to calculate what amount can be purchased for a profit.

It is for this reason that FOREX trading robots are often referred to as expert trading advisors. There are many trading robots that are so advanced that they can do the searching and calculations all on their own much to the delight of both newbie FOREX traders and the most seasoned of veterans. FOREX trading robots are incredibly popular with traders of all skill sets.

One of the hugest benefits of a FOREX trading robot is that the FOREX trading community is running 24 hours a day and 7 days a week and the FOREX trading robots are automated you will not miss a bit of the action while you are sleeping. Making the choice to use a FOREX trading robot will put you one step ahead of the rest of the pack. Since they are such an advanced piece of software they are able to do some incredibly accurate calculations that are rarely wrong.

The really great thing about a lot of these FOREX robots is that most designers of this type of software offer a demo version of their software so that you will be able to determine if the software will live up to its claims. This way you know that you have gotten the best FOREX trading robot for your unique trading needs.