That's just the way it is
Things will never be the same
That's just the way it is
...Some things will never change

2pac - Changes

In modern life, our focus is often on change. We quickly assess something as either Good changes or bad changes.

Change is also the lifeblood of the financial markets which would, of course, be pretty dull if everything remained static and prices never moved.

However, the opposite is true in these days of computerised and algorithmic trading.

Prices are rarely static and fluctuate throughout the trading day, which blends seamlessly into the next business day across the working week, which may eventually extend into the weekend as well, but I digress.

As much as our lives are driven by or focused on changes, they are underpinned by many constants, things that don’t change over time no matter how much the world and our everyday lives do.

Information

One of the constants today is information, inside thirty years, the internet and world wide web have become an integral part of our lives. To the extent that we can overload ourselves with information on almost any subject imaginable in seconds.

However, there is a big difference between having that information at our fingertips and understanding a subject or topic thoroughly, and it's very easy to conflate one with the other.

You can feel like an expert when in fact you may have missed the point entirely. Reading between the lines is often what's most important, and we need to recognise that we don't know as much we think we do and be comfortable with reconciling ourselves to that.

In trading, even in the information age, we can only ever hope to see a fraction of the big picture. The only comfort is it's exactly the same for almost everybody else.

If you think you really can understand the exact reason the market has gone up or down, think again. The financial media will say the market went up or down for the same reason. Could they ever admin something like: “There’s no story we could slap on this for why the market went up today. It just did”. No.

Greed and fear

Another constant in trading is the role of Greed and Fear these are the two primary drivers of investor behaviour, particularly when we are looking at that in aggregate.

That is, when we consider the trading crowd. The crowd has always been with us, journalist Charles Mackay wrote about them in his 1841 work Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

In the book, Mackay looked back to events in 1720, the South Sea bubble, and the Dutch Tulip mania of 1637, to highlight just how crowd behaviour, driven initially by greed and subsequently by fear, leads to the creation and bursting of investment/trading bubbles. If those bubbles become big enough then they can not only affect the markets but also the real economy too.

Speculation is as old as the hills and financial crises are nothing new. In fact, in modern times they have become cyclical, occurring around once every 10 years or so, for example, we had the 1987 crash, the Russian default and Asian currency crisis of 1998 and the subsequent dot com crash. That was followed in turn by the Credit Crunch and Global Financial Crisis of 2007/8 and more recently the COVID crash.

A decade is enough time for a new generation of traders to enter a market and each new generation believes that “this time it’s different” a phrase which is often described as being the four most dangerous words in trading.

Traders make the same mistakes and fall foul of the same biases and behaviour as their forebears did. It’s just that now there are scientific labels for it (we do love to put a label on something).

If you read trading books like the Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefevre (first published in 1923) you instantly recognise patterns of behaviour regularly seen among market participants today.

Too much risk

One of those behaviors is taking too much risk or over-trading, relative to your capital base. That's often brought about because markets move in one direction for an extended period. People climb on board the trend, and the longer it goes on the more they believe it won't end and the greedier they get.

They don't deliberately mean to do this but one of the characteristics of bubble behaviour, because that's what this is, is the participants inability to tell that they are in a bubble. The narrative simply changes. When you’re inside the bubble you will cut off contact with or ignore those on the outside looking in or who have a different viewpoint or opinion.

Market aphorisms or sayings are grounded in the truth and experience of history they may sound quaint, but they are there to teach us a lesson, and none more so than

 “It's only when the tide goes out that you see who’s swimming naked”

In this case, the tide going out is the market changing direction and those swimming naked are the overleveraged and overlong bulls in the bubble. Markets crash because the trading crowd wakes up to the existence of the bubble simultaneously, and everyone heads for the exit at the same time, as greed turns into fear.

A good trader knows not to outstay their welcome, and that it is always better to leave the party before the end.

We’re not saying that markets don’t change and evolve over time and that a strategy you use will work forever, but the same fundamental principles like we’ve tried to highlight such as greed and fear never will.  Some things will never change.

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?

ง่ายๆ ถ้าคุณต้องการให้เงินในบัญชีเทรดที่คุณเพิ่งฝากไปหยกๆ หมดไปอย่างรวดเร็ว เพียงแค่คุณทำตามขั้นตอนต่อไปนี้

1. พยายามหาอินดิเคเตอร์ ที่สามารถใช้ได้ในทุกสถานการณ์ – และเมื่อคุณคิดว่า อินดิเคเตอร์ของคุณแหล่มกว่าใครๆแล้ว ให้คิดว่าอินดิเคเตอร์ตัวนี้จะผลิตเงินให้คุณได้มากมาย ให้คุณทรด Volume ใหญ่ๆ เทรดเยอะๆ และคิดว่าบัญชีเทรดของคุณจะมีแต่ บวก บวก และก็บวก!

2. เมื่ออินดิเคเตอร์ของคุณบอกคุณว่า ตอนนี้มัน Oversold แล้ว ให้ เข้า BUY ได้เลยทันที ไม่ต้องคิดอะไรอย่างอื่นแล้ว ไม่ต้องคิดว่าจะมีข่าวใหญ่ๆกำลังจะออกหรือไม่ อินดิเคเตอร์นี้ชัวร์ที่สุดในโลก!

3. ไม่ต้องสนใจสถานการณ์เศรษฐกิจไม่ต้องดูปฏิทินข่าวใดๆทั้งนั้น - เรื่องพวกนี้มันน่าเบื่อมากจริงๆ อย่าไปสนใจมันก็ได้ ดูกราฟเฉยๆ เดี๋ยวก็มีจังหวะที่อินดิเคเตอร์ของคุณบอกเองว่าถึงเวลาเข้าตลาดเพื่อทำกำไร

4. เชื่อการวิเคราะห์ของคนอื่น - ให้เข้าไปดูในกรุ๊ปต่างๆที่คนพูดเกี่ยวกับการเทรดฟอเร็กซ์และอ่านไปเรื่อยๆจนคุณเจอความคิดเห็นที่คิดเหมือนคุณเป๊ะเลย ให้เชื่อเขา และทำตามที่เขาบอก คนคิดแบบเรามีน้อยจังแฮะ เราและเขาคนนั้นจะรวยไปด้วยกัน

5. เข้าไปดูคนอื่นแสดงความคิดเห็นเกี่ยวกับวิธีการเทรดของเขา และลองทำตามดูเลยทันที ไม่ต้องหาข้อมูลอะไรเพิ่มเติมเลย ทำตามเขาไปเดี๋ยวก็ได้กำไรแบบเขาเอง

6. ไม่ต้องวางแผนการเทรด ถ้าเห็นจังหวะปุ๊บ ให้เข้าเทรดปั๊บ ไม่ต้องคิดเยอะ
7.ให้คิดถึงแต่ว่าคุณจะเทรดได้เงินเท่าไหร่ ไม่ต้องคิดว่าโอกาสในการขาดทุนมีเท่าไหร่ เพราะเรามั่นใจว่าเรามีแต่จะได้ กับได้ !

8. ไม่ต้องเซท Stop loss คนเก่งๆเค้าไม่ต้องมีหรอก Stop loss คนอย่างเราไม่มีวันแพ้

9. ใช้อารมณ์ในการเทรดมากๆหน่อย เห็นกราฟแล้วรู้สึกว่าต้องเข้าได้แล้ว มันเป็นจังหวะที่ดีมากๆ เห็นแล้วเข้าเลย

คำแนะนำ
ทำตามวิธีการเหล่านี้ให้มากที่สุดเท่าที่ทำได้ อีกไม่นานเท่าไหร่ บัญชีเทรดของคุณจะต้องเกือบเป็นศูนย์ (หรือติดลบ) แน่ๆ
แต่.....ถ้าไม่อยากให้บัญชีเทรดขาดทุนมากๆ คุณน่าจะรู้ว่าสิ่งเหล่านี้คือสิ่งที่ไม่ควรทำ

1. ความปลอดภัย

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

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