Hi Traders,

By popular demand, we wanted to share our top five most used tools and features that are provided to you for free in our client area.

These are a bit like my Top Five Tools for Traders, but these are a little different as they're all internal rather than other websites or companies. 

Here are 5 of the most popular tools (in order) our clients are loving:

#1 - Analyst Views by Trading Central. This is my personal favourite. You can view it in the hub now, download it and use it as an indicator on MT4 desktop (in "Downloads on Hub) or visit your "News" tab in MT4 where it's constantly updated too.

#2 - The Economic Calendar is a must too. Are you using this already? If you're trading and don't know what announcements are coming up, you could easily be blown away by a big move and have no idea why. My favourite is that it will show you the historical price impact of previous announcements. You can even save the future events as a calendar invite!

#3 - News Tab - Knowledge is power. You know that already. You might already have your own news sources which are cool, but with Fusion's news tab, you can create a personalised feed (e.g. only show me EURUSD) or see what's most popular for others. Don't be an uninformed trader.

#4 - Sentiment - I love the idea of knowing what the crowd is bullish or bearish on. What are people talking about? Why are they talking about it? Check out our post on why this is important.

#5 - Technical insight is excellent if you'd like to go into a deeper dive on technical analysis on Forex and Indices. I prefer these charts over MT4 truth be told and want to know short, medium and long term outlook for each trade I'm considering.

That's it for now. We've built these for you and believe they'll truly help you excel as a trader.

#6 – Historical and Live Spreads Tool - with this tool, you can see how spreads have fluctuated over time, as well as the current live spreads. This information can be incredibly valuable in helping you make informed decisions about when to enter and exit trades. No more surprises, no more hidden fees – just transparent, competitive pricing. Read our blog post to learn how spreads actually affect your trading costs. 

Much of what we write about in these articles is about the mindset and behaviour of traders and trading. The reason for this is quite straight forward; it's because it's the decisions that we make and take that will ultimately determine how we perform as traders.

Yes, of course, price changes in the markets will play their part but, in the end, it's our decision whether to get involved or not and that determines how much capital we commit to trade, how long we hold the position for, and what the ultimate outcome of the trade will be.

Hidden costs

When we examine the costs of trading, we tend to focus on commissions and spreads and our PnL, but there are other costs, costs that we don't consider when really, we should.

These are the costs of inactivity and indecision, the costs of listening to outside influences more than to your own inner feelings and intuition. They are the costs of missing out, what economists call "opportunity costs".

Self-doubt among traders is not unusual, and in truth, it's better to exercise a degree of caution than to be 100% confident about everything you do. Hubris has been the downfall of many traders, and we certainly advocate being prudent with your risk. That said, It's always worth testing your thinking and assumptions and checking that they are still valid before you trade.

The problem comes when you start to talk yourself out of the trade entirely. After all, trading is a risk and reward business. There can be no profit without the possibility of loss.

A trader's job is to try and ensure that the risk that they take is in proportion to the potential rewards they could make. Not taking that risk could be limiting your potential as a trader which in turn may be limiting your rewards or returns.

Moments of clarity

Sometimes as a trader or investor, you will enjoy a moment of clarity, a moment of pure thought and insight, in which you can see exactly how a market setup or situation will playout. Moments when you just know you are right

If that moment of clarity coincides with significant moves in the markets, then that can be a very valuable situation indeed. But only if you act on it.

Allow me to tell you a personal story. During the great 2020 downturn in oil (where a Saudi/Russia price war caused prices to go NEGATIVE), I found myself holding oil from $30 a barrel and riding it all the way down watching in sheer horror. I kept buying the dip. How much lower could it go, I thought? I ignored every rule and everything I've written in the past about this. I didn't put a stop loss on. I told myself it was a long-term trade that I would stay in forever. Prices surely couldn't go below $20. That's madness. Then… The unthinkable happened in the futures price – it went negative.

Thankfully, Fusion's price didn't go negative (we use Spot Crude oil) but with spot prices at $15, I was sitting watching Netflix on my couch, and my heart raced as I saw it go down like World War III just started. The news sites told me nothing new had happened (funny how we search for any narrative to make sense of it all). Here it went. $14. $12. $11. Back to $12. Back to $11. $10. $9. Thoughtful me knew these prices were unsustainable. I told myself I would hold until it hit $0 if it had to. My account was down 70%. I'd never suffered such steep losses. I felt sick. I then couldn't sleep. I woke up, and it was still down a lot but had recovered from $7.

Watch out for the narratives.

I started to read more about what others were saying. What the hell was going on? Would this happen again? Yes, there was nowhere to store the oil (so the narrative went) but surely rationality would prevail. Seriously, how could you have negative prices? It was impossible to find anyone bullish in the media or otherwise. People assume if something just happened, it will occur again Goldman came out and said to expect more negative pricing. But I just couldn't believe it was so cheap. I knew it was time to buy more!

But then I didn't buy it. I waited for another opportunity for when I knew "the worst was over" I was so sure things would bounce back, but I didn't have the guts to buy one more time, and the opportunity passed me by forever. I let the external narrative cloud my previous judgement. But I was just so worried I couldn't think properly. Within days, it had doubled back to $15 a barrel. Then it was $20 a week later. At the time of writing it is $40 a barrel. By the time you read this, it might be $60 a barrel. Who knows? All I knew was fear and too much outside influence completely warped my view, and I failed. I just wanted to survive the calamity. While I survived to write you this, I did not do as well as I could have.

Self-belief

People often talk about having the courage of their convictions, but in trading, it's not really about courage, it's about belief, belief in yourself and your ideas and be prepared to back them, rather than talking yourself out of them, or allowing yourself to be talked out of them by others.

We all like to take advice and read and hear the opinions of so-called experts. But the absolute truth is that nobody really knows what going to happen next in the markets.

For example, nobody was predicting that an 11-year bull market in equities was going to end and end so abruptly in Q1 2020. Or that US unemployment would spiral to +14.7% in a single month.

Do not get me started on the rebound from the lows in March. To be bullish on the markets in April and May of 2020 was to look like you had lost your mind given the narratives surrounding COVID.

So-called "market legends" like Druckenmiller and Buffett told everyone it was not the time to buy. Sadly, so many would have listened.

Let's not forget Yogi Berra's famous saying "It's hard to make predictions, especially about the future" which is why it's best to take these so-called forecasts with a grain of salt. The best that any expert can do is to make a prediction or forecast about the future. And the longer the time frame that the forecast is over, or the more unusual the circumstances under which it is made, then the more significant the room for error and the higher the chance that they are simply wrong.

Loss aversion

As humans, we are subject to subconscious emotional biases that can cloud our decision making. One such bias is loss aversion.

Loss aversion can hamper a trader in two distinct ways. It's most commonly associated with the practice of running losses, ignoring stops and breaking money management rules when a trader can't or won't accept that they were wrong and refused to close a losing position.

The other way that loss aversion can muddy the waters is in our initial decision making. You see as species we are poor judges of risk and reward; we don't calculate probabilities very well, and the upshot of this is that we do not like uncertainty.

To the extent that when we are faced with situations that have a series of potential outcomes, we tend to favour the outcome with the highest degree of certainty. Even if that outcome is the least beneficial to us financially. Which, of course, is the exact opposite of the risk versus reward culture that we spoke about earlier.

Fortune favours the bold.

Though we might not like to admit it, our subconscious is often trying to talk us out of taking risks. Outside influences from the media, fear, our aversion to loss and a preference for certainty may often be our worst enemy as traders.

As Howard Marks said, "If you're doing the same thing as everyone else, how do you expect to outperform them"?

There have been several once in a generation trading opportunities over the last six months. I wonder how many of us were bold enough to seize the day and take advantage?

ไปสู่เว็บไซต์ www.fusionmarkets.com

คลิ๊กที่สัญลักษณ์ รูปคน เลือก “สร้างบัญชี”

กรอก Email สร้างรหัสผ่าน ยืนยันรหัสผ่านอีกครั้ง

กด ยืนยันข้อกำหนดและเงื่อนไข

จากนั้นเลือก “ ลงทะเบียน ”

เลือก “ เปิดบัญชีจริง ”

โดยแถบเครื่องมือต่างๆจะอยู่ทางด้านซ้ายมือ

ยืนยันตัวตน

กกรอกข้อมูลของคุณ (เป็นภาษาอังกฤษ)

จากนั้นเลือก “ ถัดไป ”

ตั้งค่าบัญชี

เลือกประเภทบัญชี Classic หรือ ZERO

เลือกค่า Leverage ที่ต้องการ สูงสุด 1 : 500

เลือกสกุลเงินที่ต้องการ

จากนั้นเลือกคำถามเพื่อความปลอดภัยและใส่คำตอบของคุณ

ยืนยันข้อกำหนดและเงื่อนไข จากนั้นเลือก “ ถัดไป ”

อัพโหลดเอกสาร ยืนยันตัวตน 2 อย่าง

ประเภทที่ 1

ภาพบัตรประชาชน, ภาพใบขับขี่, พาสปอร์ต

(สามารถใช้เอกสารประเภทที่ 1 สองอย่างได้ โดยไม่ต้องใช้เอกสารประเภทที่ 2)

ประเภทที่ 2

เอกสารยืนยันที่อยู่ต้องตรงกับที่สมัคร

1. ทะเบียนบ้าน (หน้าแรก และหน้าที่มีชื่อ)

2. ใบแจ้งยอดค่าน้ำ,ค่าไฟฟ้า,ค่าโทรศัพท์ (รอบแจ้งไม่เกิน 6 เดือน)

3. Statement ธนาคารที่มีชื่อและที่อยู่ชัดเจน (รอบแจ้งไม่เกิน 6 เดือน)

เลือก “ ยืนยันบัญชีของฉัน ”

จากนั้นรอการอนุมัติบัญชีจากเจ้าหน้าที่

1. ความปลอดภัย

มันคงไม่ดีแน่หากคุณจะเอาเงินที่คุณหามา ได้ ไปลงทุนกับใครก็ไม่รู้ที่คุณไม่รู้จัก แต่ ข่าวดีก็คือ มีหน่วยงานที่เชื่อถือได้ในแต่ละ ประเทศที่ให้ความสำคัญกับการลงทุนของ คุณและกำหนดกฏเกณฑ์ที่เข้มงวดเพียงพอ ให้การลงทุนของคุณนั้นปลอดภัย สิ่งที่ สำคัญที่สุดที่ควรดูว่าโบรกเกอร์นั้นอยู่ภาย ใต้การควบคุมของหน่วยงานทางการเงิน หน่วยงานใด ถ้าดำเนินธุรกิจภายใต้หน่วย งานเหล่านี้ คุณสบายใจได้เลยครับ

Fusion Markets prides itself on its low-cost approach to trading, but have you ever wondered why access to low-cost execution is important and what part it might play in your long-term success as a trader?

You might not even link the two things together, and I can see why. After all, a few pips of spread, or dollars and cents of commission paid, is small potatoes when you are trading in tens of thousands of dollars worth of currencies and other instruments daily.

But not so fast because these costs make a difference in the long-term, and that is the timescale that Fusion wants to be your partner in the markets.

Let’s look at some numbers and imagine that you are a moderately active trader with a strategy that you deploy across five instruments daily. On average, you make 20 trades per day. Let’s call you Trader A. You have a friend who deals with another broker using a similar strategy, but they don’t offer Fusion Markets low commission rates. Let’s refer to them as Trader B.

You pay our low commission rate of USD 2.25 per trade whilst Trader B pays $5.00 per trade. You both trade 20 times a day, five days a week. That means that you, Trader A, pay $225 per week in commission while your friend, Trader B, pays $500 in commission per week. That’s $275 more than what you pay.

Now let’s scale that up...

Over a month, that’s a difference of around $1,100 commission, and over the course of the year, Trader B pays an additional $14,300 dollars more in commission than you for the same or similar trades.

That means that Trader B will pay away an astonishing $71,500 of additional commission over five years of this type of active trading.

Not only does Trader B pay those additional costs, he or she also “pays” the opportunity costs of not having that money available to them. Money that could have been saved or invested or that could have helped pay off the mortgage, the car loan or a nest egg for your kids that much quicker.

All that before we even consider the possibility of compound growth on that money over time.

Tighter spreads matter too.

Now not only do lower commissions benefit your trading and finances so do tighter spreads. After all, some brokers charge astronomical amounts in spreads.  

Spreads are the difference between the bid and ask prices in the market, the prices at which you can buy or sell a financial instrument like a currency pair or equity index.

Each time we buy or sell an instrument at the market price, we are said to be” crossing the spread” or if you prefer incurring the cost of spread in our trade.

The spread is seen as a cost because we have to make it back before our trade moves into profit.

Think of it like this: Instrument A is priced at 100-101. We can sell at 100 and buy at 101.

If we buy a unit of instrument A at 101, we incur an immediate running loss. That’s because our trade is valued at the price that we can sell the unit of instrument A for, and in this case, that’s 100.

In making the trade, we have incurred the spread as a cost. To make those costs back, we need to see the price of instrument A move up to 101-102 or higher. If it does that, it means that we now can sell our unit of instrument A at the price we paid for it. That is, we are now at breakeven on the trade.

And if the price of instrument A moves to 102-103, then we have a running profit on our trade because the bid price of Instrument A is now above our trade entry-level.

Spreads in FX trading may appear small but don’t forget that trade sizes are typically larger here.  Remember that a standard FX lot is US$100,000 of notional value.

What’s more, FX trading is leveraged, meaning that clients can gear up their account and at the maximum available leverage of 500:1 (30:1 if you're a retail client with ASIC), that means that a deposit of just US$ 2000 could control 10 FX lots or US$ 1,000,000 worth of a currency pair.

Even a small value like the spread in EURUSD grows pretty quickly when you multiply it by another 6 or 7 figure number. So, the difference between a 0.1-0.2 pip spread, that you typically find at Fusion Markets, in this most active of currency pairs, and a 1-2 pip price that you might well find elsewhere, quickly becomes material (in your head, you can do the math - 10-20x the figure is a LOT).  Our Historical and Live Spreads Tool is designed to allow you to see how spreads have changed historically, discover our average, minimum and maximum spreads and, consequently, make better informed trading decisions. 

Quite simply, the narrower or tighter that the spread you pay is, then the more chance you have of your trade moving into profit and doing so more quickly. Which, in turn, means more of your trades are potentially viable. Of course, you still have to do the leg work and get the direction of your trade right, but tighter spreads also mean that if you are wrong, and you cut or close the position. Then you are doing so at a more advantageous price, which can help keep your trading losses to a minimum.

Think of trading like an Olympic hurdle race. With a low-cost broker, you have a tiny hurdle to jump over in the form of lower costs. Your friend at Broker B has a giant hurdle he has to jump over every time he enters a trade. Who has the better chance of success here? Do you want to jump over a 1 ft hurdle or a 6 ft hurdle?

Successful trading is not a get rich quick scheme. It’s about finding and honing a style or system of trading that works for you and applying that to the markets over time. Successful traders often talk about slanting the odds of success in their favour, and they try to do this not just for the trade that’s in front of them now but for all of their trades during the months and years they are active in markets. Having a trading cost base that works in your favour can play a key part in this. It means the margin for error can be 10x lower than what your friend pays at Broker B.

So, isn't it time you stopped paying too much to trade?

These are unprecedented times for all of us. Not only have we seen the financial markets crash, moving from an 11-year bull market into a bear market, with a -33% correction (only to see it bounce back up 25%!), in less than a month, but we have also seen the oil price collapse, thanks to a price war between two of its biggest producers and an oversupply. On top of which we have the small matter of the Coronavirus and associated lockdowns and isolation to contend with. What a time to be alive! 

Life has changed dramatically in the space of just a few weeks and things we took for granted can no longer be relied upon.

If you watched the way the financial markets have been performing over recent weeks you will have experienced a rollercoaster of emotions that has matched, if not exceeded the peaks and troughs of the market. What kind of market are we in? General fear and greed? Are professional Investors rushing to cash and dumping everything they can? Algorithms? Passive Investing/ETFs exacerbating moves? Everything and anything is being put on the table but these moves are unprecedented.

 If you're not confused, you're not paying attention. 

You‘ve probably been conflicted, part of you may have wanted to bury your head in the sand and hope it all goes away. Another part of you may have wanted to sell everything and “head for the hills” except (literally speaking) of course you can't because you are under lockdown.

Let’s be clear these are stressful times. Even hard-nosed professional traders who have seen market crashes before are in unchartered territory at the moment and are trying to work out what to do next.

And just like you, they have been behaving a bit like a rabbit caught in the headlights. That is, not sure whether to run or stay put.

Before we can decide what to do next, we need to take a step back and examine why we’ve been behaving and thinking as we have.

Firstly, we need to realise that it's not personal or unique to us. Everyone is stressed at the moment, they are out of their routine and under immense pressure. concerned for the wellbeing of families, friends and finances.

At times like these our everyday decision-making processes take a back seat and the way our brain and body operates undergoes subtle but important changes.

When we are severely stressed our blood chemistry changes dramatically, adrenalin, noradrenaline and cortisol are produced by and pumped around our bodies.

These chemicals increase our heart rate, our pace of breathing. and ready our muscles for action. Without us being aware of it we are preparing for fight or flight.

Why does this happen?

Well, the truth is that a prehistoric part of our brain is taking control of our actions. There are "Two-yous" in your brain. A rational, deliberate, thoughtful you. And an emotional, fast-thinking you.

The frontal cortex of our brain, which is the part of the brain that we normally use for decision making, becomes less active and a part of the brain that's sometimes referred to as our reptile mind, called the amygdala, takes over.

The amygdala is an almond-shaped cluster of neurons and nuclei buried deep in our brains, frankly, it’s a “throwback”.  It has its own independent memory systems and it deals with our emotional and physical responses to stress and fear.

The amygdala evolved to make us alert to danger and to keep us alive if, for example, we came face to face with a large predator. These days, for most of us, confronting a large predator, is a remote possibility.

However, the amygdala's response to heightened levels of stress and stressful situations have become baked into our brains thanks to millions of years of evolution. Such that it’s become part of our subconscious, and something we are only faintly aware of and are not able to control.

So if you have been watching the markets or financial TV recently and have felt your heart pumping, your brow sweating, your muscles tensing and have found yourself only able to focus on the screen, even ignoring someone who is speaking to you, in the same room, you are not alone or to blame. You only need to watch five minutes of television or visit a news site to see blaring counts of the death toll, economic shutdown and other news that puts your amygdala in the driver's seat.

When our reptile brain takes over our decision making becomes short- term and driven by fear and our long-term strategic thinking goes completely out of the window.

That's why it's so dangerous to make financial decisions under stress at the heat of the moment if you will.  A few rash decisions or actions that are taken then can easily undo years of hard work.

So how can we try and counteract these primaeval forces in our brain and psyche?

Well, the first thing to do is break the cycle, so walk away from the source of stress be it the TV or the computer screen and gather yourself. If you can get into the garden or get some fresh air for a few minutes that will help.

Having removed yourself from the situation you can try to re-impose some order.

Think about the timescales you are investing or trading over. If you are trading FX you may be taking short term positions, but they are likely to be part of a longer-term plan. Perhaps you can re-appraise this as a once in a generation buying opportunity?

Remind yourself what your investing goals are and over what time scales were you trying to achieve them.

I very much doubt your plan was about weeks or even months was it?

Your plans were probably conceived to play out over several years, weren't they?

It also helps to think about who you are investing and trading for and why.

Perhaps it's for you and your family or other loved ones, thinking about these long-term goals can help you centre yourself once more. When I'm investing or trading I think about 65 year old me retiring and ask myself "Will I care about today's trading result then? Or even in one year?"

If you do need to make a decision or take action on your portfolio, try to make that decision when the markets are shut and you are free of distraction. You will find that you can think a lot more clearly in those circumstances. That clarity is only likely to benefit your finances over the longer term. Take a minute to take some deep breaths.

Remember, this too shall pass.