As little as ten years ago, if you had asked the average person on the street to describe a Forex trader, they would probably have envisaged someone along the lines of Jordan Belfort, the city slicker portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street. In the brave new world of 2018, however, things have changed.

A large part of that is through necessity – where it used to be enough to have some money tucked away in a savings account and a half decent pension plan, these things are simply not delivering any more. Interest rates are still rumbling along at low levels, pension funds are in crisis and there is a gloomy perspective that you would do as well to hide your money under the floorboards.

So the search for alternative investments is certainly a driver. The other is the technological age. The internet has taught us that plenty of things we though mysterious are actually quite simple if you only have the right app. While true to an extent, it is as easy to lose everything trading forex as it is to make some significant returns. Here are some rules every would-be forex trader needs to follow.

Rule No.1: Only fools dive in

If you think you can make a killing in forex trading without setting up the basics first, you would be better off heading to the track and putting your money on a horse.

Find yourself a trusted forex broker, set up your account and practice with it in demo mode before you go anywhere near your first real trade.

Rule No.2: Keep it simple, stupid

According to apocryphal legend, the phrase KISS strategy was originally coined by the US Navy 50 or more years ago. Whether true or false, it is the most important forex tip you will ever follow. There is a choice of hundreds of currencies that you can trade if you really want to, and hundreds more convoluted ways of doing so. But if successful and established traders find success by following the KISS strategy, there is definitely a lesson to be learned for beginners.

Rule No.3: Avoid day trading

This is a refinement on Rule No.2. The hurly burly of day trading, coupled with the chance to leap in, make a killing and leap out again might sound as exciting as a night at the casino, but it also has other similarities with the roulette wheel that make it a poor choice. The problem is, there is so little in the way of useful data to inform decisions over such a short period.

Rule No.4: Winners are always ready to lose

Some trades go well and others go wrong, that is the way it works in the currency markets. Naturally, you want more winners than losers, but an even more fundamental rule here is that whatever happens, if a trade goes as badly as it can possibly go, you need to be able to carry on to the next one. That means following the well-known two percent rule, and sticking to it no matter what.

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Silver is definitely the new gold when it comes to investing in precious metals. For much of human history, silver and gold have alternated as the currencies of choice. Gold has always been the more expensive older brother to silver while silver has been the precious metal of the common man. Silver is uniquely positioned to increase its value in the future at higher rates than gold.

Gold Isn’t the Safe Haven Anymore

Gold has traditionally been the safe haven currency. When times are bad, people would invest in gold to protect themselves from uncertainty. Like clockwork, gold prices would go up in times of crisis and go back down when things would return to normal. People knew that gold would keep its value. In fact, a common claim is that 1 ounce of gold will buy a decent men’s suit and has at any time in the last 200 years.
Things are changing. Gold is no longer the only safe haven currency. In many ways, this status is being supplanted by Bitcoin. China, a traditional devourer of gold, has embraced Bitcoin. The people have embraced it for all of what it offers and more. The additional benefits of anonymity and the ability to easily transfer it has made it quite popular. The Chinese government is not altogether happy about the rise of Bitcoin, but it is what it is.
It’s really difficult to foresee what will happen in the next economic crisis. We do know that more people will seek out car title loans completely online. We do know that more people will apply for public assistance. We do know that gold and silver will hold their value, but it’s not clear if gold will increase its value in response to the crisis.

Silver Is More Accessible

While gold is having its status as a safe haven supplanted, silver is also replacing it as a better precious metal investment vehicle. Gold is trading at very high prices. These prices have been stagnant for several years at a relatively high level. These high and stagnant prices mean that gold is not very accessible.

Silver is just more price accessible. People can make a small investment in silver at its current price level and still see a good return on their investment. On the other hand, that same small investment in gold would yield them a few grams of gold that is bought at a premium and sold at an inferior price. This results in a much lower potential return.

Silver Has Upside

Price accessibility shouldn’t be the only reason to make an investment. It just makes it easier. The real reason to invest in silver is that it has upside. There are three major factors behind this upside.

1. It’s an industrial metal. It’s widely used in industry for a myriad of different processes and products. This creates a steady demand for the metal and a pricing support level. As supply decreases, the prices will rise due to its industrial demand.
2. Silver is a jewelry metal. It has very nice aesthetic qualities. It’s beautiful and can be fashioned into a variety of jewelry.
3. It’s a traditional currency. It’s been used as a coin for centuries all over the world. It has recognized value. Its coins have stood the test of time. People understand that silver represents money and there is a continual demand for silver coins.

It’s clear that silver should be the go-to precious metal for anyone looking to invest in precious metals going forward. Silver has the upside and the price accessibility to make it a champion.

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Betterment is a novel new investment platform that takes the guesswork out of investing. They’re not the new kids on the block anymore, having been around since 2008, but they’re still new to a lot of investors. If you’re hoping to learn more about Betterment, here are three reasons that you might want to consider the service. Betterment offers a whole lot of value to users, especially users who are new to investment. We’ll examine some of their most important value propositions below.

• Betterment’s Automated Diversification. Diversification is central to the strategy of any good investor. It essentially prevents investors from putting all of their eggs in one basket. When a single stock or an entire sector goes south, being invested in entire markets makes these losses a lot easier to compensate for. Betterment achieves automatic portfolio diversification through their new robo-advising methods. They put investors’ portfolio contributions into several pre-chosen ETFs. These ETFs represent index funds from US markets, international markets, developing markets, and more. The user also has a choice of how much of their portfolio to place in stable bonds, which are also automatically diversified.

• Betterment’s Great Prices. Betterment charges their active customers only 0.35%, at most. People who deposit larger balances could pay only 0.25% of even 0.15% annually. That’s much less money than one would ever pay for a traditional investment advisor. Betterment is also likely to outperform these traditional advisors, many of whom don’t even beat the index every year. For such high prices, one would expect traditional managers to make the investor a lot more money, but they generally don’t. Betterment’s model is often described as “set it and forget it”, and there’s good reason why. By starting a simply account and making regular contributions, a user can set the stage for reliable returns in the long run, with little money paid and little daily oversight required.

• Betterment Makes it Easy to Follow Goals. Lots of Betterment users use the service to prepare for distant retirement. Betterment makes this easy by showing you just how much money you can expect to make in the time between now and your planned retirement date. You’ll see how your funds can be expected to grow in strong investing climates, as well as weak ones. You’ll see how much you need to contribute to comfortably achieve your goals. The platform brings a lot of great visualization tools to the party, one of the most difficult aspects of understanding our portfolios.

Betterment offers a lot more value to users, especially people who have never invested before. They make it easy to roll over accounts like IRAs, they offer free tax-loss harvesting, and they even offer free service for new users. Their algorithms are powerful, giving reliable returns to users based on insights gleaned from millions of data points, not the hunches of a few experts. The market is too diverse and wild for anyone to legitimately claim expertise over it. Instead, the automated diversification methods built standard into Betterment are enough to do better than investors of yesterday.

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How You, Too, Can Capitalize Off Of Brexit

Despite the fact that some time before the British referendum to leave the European Union, four out of five European hedge funds had bravely put their money on the UK remaining in the EU, a certain number of firms saw some pretty impressive returns after their betting against the grain of popular opinion of economic policy and the cash debate. According to Craig Weynand, the NuWave Matrix fund rose in profits by 12% on the day of the vote. Other hedge fund managers, like CIO Ryan Tolkin of Schonfeld Strategic Advisors among others, as well as legendary investors George Soros and Stanley Druckenmiller also made fantastic gains from the sudden market volatility. How did these people achieve such successful gains even if, in the case of the hedge fund managers, they did not place bets on the outcome? The answer is simpler than you might think…

Understand The Risk

China is being crushed by their debt and poor economic policy, as is most of Asia. The Brexit decision is a testimony to the success (read: absolute failure) of the EU’s experiment in artificial currency, the Euro, which has been a central point in the cash debate. The whole world will feel the consequences of Brexit, consequences that will change depend on how prepared economically those countries are.

As an individual, you might be wondering what you can do to prepare for a volatile and risky market. A great place to start is to look to the greats; for instance, the aforementioned Soros and Druckenmiller. What did these incredibly wealthy and influential men do long before the Brexit decision was even brought to referendum?

Well, Druckenmiller just told the attendees of the Sohn Investment Conference in May to get out of stocks and get into buying gold. George Soros dialed back his US holdings and invested in the SPDR Trust. Really, investing in gold may be the best move in the wake of the British referendum. Every group or individual who made returns of any major kind after what Remain-ers claimed would be the fallout after the vote on the 24th of May has one thing in common: they all invested in, or already owned, precious metals.

A Safe Bet

Peter Donisanu compared the economic results of the referendum to Black Wednesday. Part of his comparison is correct: People have flocked to “safe haven” assets, such as government bonds, but even the prices of the precious metal have been predicted to begin to fall starting in August. A different safe option would be the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, which has many of the trademark qualities of a safe-haven investment.

Diversify, Diversify, Diversify

As in any great shift in economy, the safest move after the UK’s departure of the European Union is, as usual, to diversify your portfolio with a variety of safe investments. There has never been a better time to get a few more eggs in your basket, and your financial health will certainly be better for it.

By Harald Seiz, Multi-Business Entrepreneur & Expert on Gold

https://karatbars.com

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When I first read the words “binary options” I wasn’t sure what it meant. Even though I have a strong background in financial products, the industry keeps introducing new ways to invest. Some of them are complex and hard to understand (not to mention they could be very risky) and some others, like binary option trading are quite simple, yet unknown to the public. I’ve dug into this topic with the help of Banc De Binary to offer you a quick guide about this relatively new investment product.

What is binary option trading?

Binary options’ rose in popularity back in 2008 due to heavy market swings. In fact, this is a great vehicle to benefit from market volatility. It has gained in stature both among investors looking for a simple and profitable way to trade, and also among first-time traders hoping to better understand the markets and grow their assets. As opposed to other types of investments requiring you to do heavy research on various metrics, binary options simply require that you choose a market direction for a specific asset. Binary options trading is solely based on the direction the asset will take (up or down) and you can trade on both.

Here’s an example:

For example, assume you think company XYZ is doing well and you think the stock price will rise momentarily. On the binary options platform, you see the potential return is 85%. If you buy the option for $100 and the XYZ goes up, you will earn back your $100 plus $85. If the stock goes down, you lose your $100. If the stock is back at the same price at the option expiry, you get your $100 back.

How to successfully trade binary options

At first, this seems complicated as you must determine where the asset will go: up or down in a short manner of time (these options are usually traded and expire the same day). The idea here is more to “trade based on the events” of the day than thinking long term. For example, when there is a catastrophe happening (like the huge fire in Alberta, Canada since the beginning of May), you can think that Canadian insurance companies along with oil sands companies will be affected.

Finding this information is not always easy.This is why it is recommended to find a brokerage service providing you with a list of events each day telling you what is happening on the stock market and how it will affect various asset classes. After reading these, you can then login to your binary option platform and look at the potential return for each asset. The usual expected returns vary between 70% to 90% per trade. But don’t forget that if you are wrong, you lose 100% of your investment. This is why it is a good strategy for a part of your portfolio but definitely not for your entire nest egg.

How to trade binary options

There is an easy 4 step process to complete if you want to start trading:

1. Select the asset you wish to trade.
2. Select the expiry time for the trade.
3. Enter the amount you wish to invest in the trade.
4. Click ‘call’ if you believe the asset value will go up, or ‘put’ if you believe the asset value will go down.

As you can see, all type of investors, beginners to advanced can benefit from this new investment vehicle.

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