Yen Falls Versus Dollar Amid Speculation Japan Intervened in Markets

The yen plunged against the dollar and euro amid speculation Japan intervened in markets to weaken its currency.

The yen sank 3.2 percent to 78.30 per dollar as of 10:34 a.m. in Tokyo. It lost 2.8 percent to 110.38 per euro.

Japanese Finance Minister Jun Azumi said earlier today he’s ready to take “determined” steps in the currency market if needed after the yen rose to a fresh post-World War II high against the dollar.

He told reporters in Tokyo today that speculative activity is strong in the currency market, adding that the yen’s moves don’t reflect Japan’s economic fundamentals.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-31/yen-falls-versus-dollar-amid-speculation-japan-intervened-in-markets.html

EES FX listed on CNS Latency chart

See EES FX on CNS Latency chart - 1ms to trading server

Hedge funds a super gamble

Philip Falcone grew up in the mining town of Chisholm, Minnesota, population 4976. The youngest of nine children who lived in a three-bedroom house, Falcone excelled at ice hockey and played for Harvard.

After college, a burgeoning career as a professional hockey player was cut short by injury and he then cut his teeth in the markets as a trader at Barclays Capital.

Now, Falcone is best-known as a "billionaire New York hedge fund manager". Geared to the gills like most hedge funds, his Harbinger Capital Partners made a poultice in the bull market; in Australia, too. Falcone's most notable play being a 16 per cent stake in Andrew Forrest's Fortescue Metals which reaped him hundreds of millions in profit when he sold down two years ago.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/business/hedge-funds-a-super-gamble-20111014-1lp2n.html#ixzz1c6PM4n4s


Hedge Funds

Greeks move €228billion into Swiss banks

Greece in flames over cuts (while fat-cats secretly shift €228billion into Swiss banks accounts)

• Wealthy are moving euros through foreign subsidiaries in Cyprus
• 50,000 people descend on Athens as 48-hour general strike begins
• Hundreds of flights and ferries cancelled as workers walk out
• Greek parliament will vote on fresh austerity measures tomorrow

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2050895/Greek-fat-cats-secretly-shifted-200bn-euros-Swiss-bank-accounts.html

Greek protesters clashed with police in central Athens after Prime Minister George Papandreou vowed to push through a further round of austerity and appealed to Europe to cut Greece’s debt load at an Oct. 23 summit.


http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-18/papandreou-presses-austerity-as-strikes-hold-greece-hostage-.html

Multiple Time Frames or Pairs in an Expert Advisor

Many strategies incorporate multi-timeframe analysis in their decision making process. Consider the example of a moving average cross strategy. The most basic version says to buy when a fast moving average crosses above a slow moving average. Multi-timeframe analysis involves jumping to a chart of a longer period to consider the setup there, as well.

Example:
The 20 period SMA (fast) crosses above the 50 period SMA (slow) on the M15 chart.
Now jump to the H1 chart. Is the fast SMA greater than the slow SMA on that chart, too? If so, then the trade is allowed. If not, the EA skips the signal and waits for another one.

The technique has the potential to work if your strategy offers some type of statistical advantage. Moving averages sometimes work when applied using a trader's discretion of general market volatility. If you leave an MA cross strategy on a chart unattended, however, my expectation is that you would have no better chance than trading at random. Adding another layer of analysis will not change the fact that the basic premise offers no advantage.

MetaTrader does not restrict Expert Advisors to reading information from the applied chart. When you program an EA to trade on EURGBP M5 chart, you may also read price information from the EURGBP M1, EURGBP H1 or any other chart available. You can even read information on multiple pairs.

Some traders like to watch correlated currency pairs. EUR/USD and USD/CHF typically share a -90% correlation. When EURUSD goes up, USDCHF typically goes down. Exceptions do occur, and those traders tend to look for exceptions on the expectation of them ironing themselves out. Expert Advisors make this fairly simple to handle. You just program the question, "What's the last closed price of EUR/USD M5 and USD/CHF M5?" The code gives you the answer, then the EA can make decisions with it.

EES Hybrid Trading Model (video)

Video explaining the "Hybrid" trading concept
http://eesfx.com/portal/support/support-videos/72-hybrid-trading-model

Violence necessary to achieve protesters goals: journalist

Occupy L.A. Speaker: Violence will be Necessary to Achieve Our Goals

Citizen journalist Ringo captured this speaker at the Occupy Los Angeles camp a few days ago letting the cat out of the bag: After dismissing nonviolence as a dead end, he admits that for the Occupiers to achieve their goals, violence and bloodshed will be necessary:

http://pajamasmedia.com/tatler/2011/10/11/occupy-l-a-speaker-violence-will-be-necessary-to-achieve-our-goals/

Occupy New York chant:“You Can Have Sex With Animals.”

Also read: “Occupy Wall Street and the Delusions of the Left”

How to Flush your Windows DNS Cache

Click start and run, type command.

Then type: ipconfig /flushdns

http://www.whatsmydns.net/flush-dns.html

Computer Deal of the Day

Wall St. Protests continue

Wall St protest expected to swell... 

Unions lend muscle...

College Walk Out Planned; 'Anonymous' Releases Threat Against NYSE...

Occupy Wall Street 'Stands In Solidarity' With Obama Front Group...

BIDEN: 'The bargain has been breached with the American people'...


Herman Cain to protesters: If you're not rich 'blame yourself'...

Senate to Vote on China Currency Manipulation Bill

While China has purposely devalued it’s currency, hurting the value of the U.S. dollar over the last decade, neither the Obama or G.W. Bush administrations have actually taken the step to formally designate China as a currency manipulator in any annual reports in the past decade. Failure to designate China as a currency manipulator prevents the U. S. government from being able to apply tariffs on Chinese imports or start investigations into currency manipulation. Senate Democrats will now introduce a bill on Monday that will try to push the issue of China’s currency manipulation, and supposedly open the door for U.S. companies to seek tariffs against Chinese imports if they are found to be artificially keeping their products cheap through keeping it’s currency devalued. Considering our current recession, provoking a trade war with China is a very dangerous thing according to many political insiders, including Jon Huntsman, the former ambassador to China and current presidential candidate who told Fox news, " You take action against China, you can expect them to rebut that action with commensurate tariffs," he said. "During a recession, you don’t want a trade war." 


http://conservativedailynews.com/2011/10/senate-to-vote-on-china-currency-manipulation-bill-monday/

China expressed strong objections on Tuesday to a bill in the United States Senate that would threaten higher tariffs on some Chinese goods in response to what the bill’s sponsors call China’s policy of keeping its currency artificially depressed to give its exports a price advantage.


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/05/world/asia/china-criticizes-senates-currency-manipulation-bill.html

BIS report: High Frequency Trading in the FX market

High-frequency trading (HFT) has increased its presence in the foreign exchange (FX) market in recent years. A discussion is emerging about its benefits and risks, though the assessment is often hampered by difficulties in identifying and quantifying HFT as distinct from other forms of automated trading. It is crucial to have a clearer understanding of what HFT is (and is not) and what it does (and does not do) before assessing its implications from a policymaker's point of view.

This report examines the facts about HFT in FX, including its definition, effect on other market participants, behaviour in normal and stressed times, and key differences with HFT in equities. It also identifies issues pertaining to market functioning, systemic risks, and market integrity and competition that may warrant further investigation. This report was prepared by a study group chaired by Guy Debelle, Assistant Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia.

JEL classification: F31, G14, G15

http://www.bis.org/publ/mktc05.pdf

BIS Report HFT Trading Systems

Trader Rastani tells BBC collapse is imminent, Goldman rules the world, be prepared

Common Money Management Formulas

All of the EAs that we program at OneStepRemoved.com generally use one of three types of money management. I don’t really like that term, though. I believe that position sizing formula is generally more accurate.

The options are:

Fixed Lot Size

Use a percentage of available margin

Lose a certain percentage of the account balance whenever the stop loss is hit.

Most MetaTrader users are accustomed to using fixed lots. It’s far and away the most common method found in commercial EAs. If you’ve watched any of the videos on this site or spoken with me, you know that I generally have a low opinion of most commercial EAs. Just because everyone does it does not mean that it’s a good idea!

Whenever a customer order mentions the idea of using a Risk input to control the lot size, it typically means to use a selected percentage of the available margin. Say, for example, that you trade a $10,000 account on 1% margin (100:1 leverage) and want to use 2% of available margin on any given trade. If you have no open positions, then the margin to use is $10,000 * 2% = $200.

The lot size is the outcome of the following formula:
Lots = Margin to Use / Margin Required per standard lot

Going back to our example, you simply plug in the numbers:
$200 / $1000 per standard lot (100:1 margin) = 0.2 lots, which is 2 mini lots.

The MQL4 code for this is
double lots = (AccountFreeMargin() * Risk) / MarketInfo( Symbol(), MODE_MARGINREQUIRED);

The advantage to this method is that the lot size remains consistent barring a dramatic change in available margin. I don’t actually see that as an advantage, but many traders like seeing the same lot size on most trades.

The disadvantages are numerous. If you like to trade on high leverage and trade many different instruments, you can easily get yourself into a margin call. If your strategy calls for placing a stop based on price action, the amount lost will vary depending on where the stop is placed. Some trades might lose $20 while others lose $100.

double lots = Risk * AccountEquity() / MarketInfo(Symbol(), MODE_TICKVALUE) / Stop;

My favorite method is to select my lot size based on the equity loss if my stop is hit. If I risk 0.5% on a $10,000 account and my stop loss is 20 pips away, then desired lot size is
lots = 0.5% * $10,000 / $10 per tick per standard lot / 20 pips = 0.25 lots, or 2.5 mini lots

The lot size decreases whenever the stop loss distance increases, and vice versa. A 60 pip stop loss would require a lot size of
lots = 0.5% * $10,000 / $10 per tick per standard lot / 60 pips = 0.083 lots, or 0.8 micro lots after accounting for rounding.

The varying lot size drives most traders crazy. I believe such rationale ignores the logic of trading. Trading is a statistical outcome, a distribution of events that theoretically returns a net result greater than zero. We call this profit in daily life.

If your trading system is x% accurate and you know the profit factor is greater than 1, why on earth a trader would haphazardly bet different dollars amount on every trade is beyond me. The effect is no different than randomly choosing to bet $10 on this trade and $100 on the next. The random, system-less method of choosing position sizes for your trading system would overwhelm the nice, even distribution that you’re expecting from the signals.

Wall Street Protest Begins, With Demonstrators Blocked

Wall Street Protest Begins, With Demonstrators Blocked

By COLIN MOYNIHAN

Robert Stolarik for The New York TimesProtestors gathered in Lower Manhattan for what some called the United States Day of Rage.

For months the protesters had planned to descend on Wall Street on a Saturday and occupy parts of it as an expression of anger over a financial system that they say favors the rich and powerful at the expense of ordinary citizens.

As it turned out, the demonstrators found much of their target off limits on Saturday as the city shut down sections of Wall Street near the New York Stock Exchange and Federal Hall well before their arrival.

By 10 a.m., metal barricades manned by police officers ringed the blocks of Wall Street between Broadway and William Street to the east. (In a statement, Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman said, “A protest area was established on Broad Street at Exchange Street, next to the stock exchange, but protesters elected not to use it.”)

Organizers, promoters and supporters called the day, which had been widely discussed on Twitter and other social media sites, simply September 17. Some referred to it as the United States Day of Rage, an apparent reference to a series of disruptive protests against the Vietnam War held in Chicago in 1969.

The idea, according to some organizers, was to camp out for weeks or even months to replicate the kind, if not the scale, of protests that erupted earlier this year in places as varied as Egypt, Spain and Israel.

Bill Steyert, 68, who lives in Forest Hills, Queens, stood near the barricades at Wall Street and Broadway and shouted, “Shut down Wall Street, 12 noon, you’re all invited,” as tourists gazed quizzically at him.
Talking to a reporter, he elaborated, “You need a scorecard to keep track of all the things that corporations have done that are bad for this country.”

Nearby, Micah Chamberlain, 23, a line cook from Columbus, Ohio, held up a sign reading “End the Oligarchy” and said he had hitchhiked to New York. “There are millions of people in this county without jobs,” he said. “And 1 percent of the people have 99 percent of the money.”

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/17/wall-street-protest-begins-with-demonstrators-blocked/?pagemode=print