FXtrek.com
FXtrek.com bills itself as a "one stop for foreign exchange traders," and for those who consider themselves just a step or two away from real-life forex trading, it's a stop worth making. Little more than a year old (FXtrek.com was launched in April 2001), the website - with its FXtrek.com University, mini- and regular demo accounts, live picks, neural net forecast, and IntelliCharts - provides the means for a seamless journey for the would-be forex trader from neophyte to master dealer.
"Master dealer"?! Why not? FXtrek.com makes no bones about some of the main attractions that forex dealing holds for individual investors. As the website founders suggest in their introduction: "You can become very rich in a short time if you are on the right side of the foreign exchange market at the right time. The foreign exchange market ... is huge and its leverage is enormous." While the possibilities of relatively rapid wealth are not unique to forex trading, access to a 24-hour market (no more "before-the-bell analysis or after-hours earnings reports," FXtrek.com boasts), low costs (both in terms of commissions and bid/ask spreads), and as much as 100:1 leverage are quite a new world for those more accustomed to stock, futures, or mutual fund trading.
Although the forex market is the biggest market in the world, with more than $900 billion a day traded (or "dealt," in forex parlance), retail access for average traders has not always been easy. Even for those retail forex traders who were able to ply their trade, access to most sophisticated data analysis tools and much market information long remained hard to come by. This is where FXtrek.com comes in.
MARKET INFORMATION AND INTELLIGENCE
FXtrek.com has most of what you would expect in a forex website. Spot price quotes are readily available on the homepage, as are forex charts covering a fairly wide range of the most popular tradable currencies - from the euro and yen to the Singapore dollar and Korean won. In fact, the homepage of FXtrek.com features a currency watch table that lists 10 currency pairs for easy and quick cross-referencing of the major tradables.
FXtrek.com's IntelliCharts feature a healthy variety of indicators - three different moving averages, Bollinger Bands, and parabolic stop and reverse (SAR), as well as stochastics, moving average convergence/divergence (MACD), and directional movement index (DMI). FXtrek.com's charts also feature some more exotic formatting options such as the ichimoku and the Schaff trend cycle. Bars, lines, and candlesticks are the three ways to display price action, with time scales varying from one- and 15-minute charts to hourly, daily, and weekly charts. Tick charts are available from a pulldown menu at the top, as are Fibonacci retracements and regular trendlines.
Figure 1: Currency watch. FXtrek.com's currency watch is an easy-to-scan guide to spot prices on the major currency pairs.
The StreamTrek table provides real-time streaming quotes on 11 major
currency pairs. StreamTrek also has a function through which operators
can add less common currency pairs. Pairs can be deleted simply by clicking
on them in the StreamTrek table and selecting "delete" from the popup menu.
Another interesting feature in FXtrek.com's Market Information section
is the Power Search, which allows operators to scan the market based on
a variety of criteria - from bid and ask prices to 52-week highs and values
based on various indicator readings.
Much of FXtrek.com's proprietary analysis is based on artificial intelligence techniques. In fact, a suite of analysis tools in FXtrek.com (the Forecast tool, Live Picks, and regression analysis) all use AI to help determine likely price moves and volatility ranges. Even chart patterns such as triple tops/bottoms, triangle breakouts, and moving average crossovers may be discovered by FXtrek.com's artificial intelligence and reported as bullish, bearish, or worth watching on the website's Live Picks page. Regression analysis - with both charts and commentary - is also a part of the analysis suite made possible by FXtrek.com's proprietary AI.
WHEELING AND DEALING
FXtrek.com is a website that understands that people often learn about forex dealing because they want to get started with some real-life trading. FXtrek.com makes this process seamless without making its entire educational presentation seem like just a simple selling pitch for its sponsoring brokerage. FXtrek.com features an informative "dealing guide" that points out trading hours, minimum account sizes, margin rules, and types of orders accepted at FXtrek.com's desk at FXCM, one of the largest online foreign exchange dealers. There is also a free demo account available to help new forex traders - as well as those accustomed to other dealing platforms - get the hang of forex trading.
One of the attractions of FXtrek.com and FXCM is their mini-account offers. Mini-accounts ($300 minimum, but at least $2,000 recommended) can be traded exactly like the regular FXtrek.com dealing accounts ($2,000 minimum, but at least $10,000 recommended), with a money management caveat or two to protect smaller accounts. They are excellent for new forex traders (who may be new to trading altogether) as well as for those traders whose undercapitalization would make them otherwise ill-equipped for full-sized forex trading.
Figure 2: Intellicharts. FXtrek.com's IntelliCharts include most of the popular indicators, such as moving averages, stochastics, and more.
KEEP ON FXTREK.COMING
FXtrek.com is accessible as a variety of products. Currently, two trial products are available - one including a regular demonstration dealing account and one featuring a mini-demo account. The "FXtrek.com Complete" package includes IntelliCharts and a set of analysis tools that includes real-time streaming quotes, regression analysis, Live Picks, Power Search, live commentary, and free trading. The package is $100 a month. For those less interested in the FXtrek.com analysis and tools suite and more interested in getting started dealing forex currencies, FXtrek.com also provides applications for regular and mini-accounts. Those interested solely in IntelliCharts can contact FXtrek.com for a separate arrangement.
For technically oriented traders, one of the attractions of forex is that technical analysis is a great ally in understanding and determining currency price moves. Because currencies tend to trend better than other commodities such as wheat, gold, or (these days) many stocks, a variety of popular technical approaches - from moving averages to stochastics - can be employed effectively in forex trading. FXtrek.com provides a solid, basic background in technical analysis; its University section notes that "technical analysis is so important that almost no investor can trade successfully without it." While not providing the dizzying array of technical indicators found in larger charting software programs, FXtrek.com's IntelliCharts are more than adequate for most technical traders to use with confidence.
Interviewed in Jack Schwager's The New Market Wizards, "supertrader" Bill Lipschutz (who spent eight years as Salomon Brothers' largest and most successful currency trader) noted that, in addition to intelligence and "extreme commitment," the most important characteristic for a would-be forex trader is courage. Why? "It's not enough to simply have the insight to see something apart from the rest of the crowd," Lipschutz explained. "You also need to have the courage to act on it and to stay with it."
No institution, publication, or website can inject intelligence, "extreme commitment," and courage into an aspiring trader. But given the first two qualities, there is much in the way of education, learning, and, yes, demo trading that can help a neophyte forex dealer gain the necessary confidence to place real, winning trades in the forex markets. FXtrek.com - with its emphasis on guiding traders from their first chart study to their first profitably closed out trade and beyond - is a strong source.
- David Penn is a Staff Writer for STOCKS & COMMODITIES.
InvestAvenue.com
Full disclosure: I browse Invest Avenue.com - a financial website with insights from a variety of fundamentally and technically oriented money managers and analysts - every day. As in every single day. So it should come as no surprise when I suggest that it is one of the best financial websites for those looking for clues to the behavior of markets around the world. If, as far as you are concerned, markets are markets, wherever they are, and you are willing to pursue the best opportunities wherever they may be, then InvestAvenue.com should be a part of your daily financial reading regimen as well.
Founded two years ago, Invest Avenue.com is essentially a digest of financial opinions. As such, diversity of perspective and analytic technique is at a premium, without InvestAvenue.com having to go out on a limb in search of the nearest available contrarian or Elliott wave theorists (though InvestAvenue does feature talented representatives of both). From Bangalore Asha, an economist with Northern Trust, to Jonathan Wilmot, chief global strategist for Credit Suisse First Boston, InvestAvenue.com boasts almost 150 contributors. This includes luminaries such as William Gross and Paul McCulley, the "bond gurus" at Pimco, Jake Bernstein, and John Bogle of Vanguard. Whether you want to read exactly what had Bill Gross concerned in GE Capital's near-record $11 billion debt offering this spring, or how Alan Greenspan will negotiate the fine line between an overly accommodative monetary policy and reinflation (hint: read the commentary by Paul Kasriel of Northern Trust), there are few other places on the web that offer these kinds of insights, completely free.
InvestAvenue is registered in Canada, but it has a significant presence in the UK as well. Adds founder and managing director Yves Casa, "The proprietary research published on InvestAvenue is unique and quite helpful for thousands of readers." First Financial Exchange, a full-service online foreign exchange company providing both trading software and access to the spot currencies market, is the website's sponsor.
InvestAvenue.com features articles on a variety of themes: commodities, currencies, emerging fixed income, emerging macro economics, emerging stocks, finance 101, fixed income, technical analysis, and more. The website also has a tools section that includes charts and quotes, a reading list, currency converter, economic calendar, and "20 Trading Rules" to help readers put this information to its most productive use: making gains in the markets.
Figure 1: InvestAvenue.com
InvestAvenue.com's content is updated daily, so the information is always fresh. In fact, some of the insights - such as the squeeze on gold hedgers anticipated by John Hathaway of Toqueville Asset Management - are downright prescient. InvestAvenue.com also provides an e-mail newsletter service that allows readers to pick and choose from which sections - currencies, technical analysis, stocks, macro, fixed income, emerging markets - they would like to receive twice-weekly selections.
The seamless blending of fundamental and technical information is another boon for InvestAvenue.com. The website founders, former hedge fund managers who likely are familiar with the benefits of combining both approaches when managing money, count this among their mission goals and, by all accounts, they have succeeded. From Richard Moroney's earnings-related breakdown of Johnson & Johnson to Alexander Bezrodney's Elliott wave analysis of the US inverted 10-year cash yield, InvestAvenue.com caters to as wide a cross-section of the serious investing public as any financial website I've come across. That so many of InvestAvenue.com's contributors are professionals making investment decisions on behalf of thousands of clients (and their millions of dollars, yen, euros, pesos, and rupees) makes InvestAvenue.com feel like a more immediate source of information compared to those websites where journalists and reporters attempt to parse through an economist's argument for the best quotes and soundbites.
One of the things that has amazed me in the time I've spent watching and writing about the financial markets is how readily available good information is - particularly by way of the Internet. I do not mean to suggest that all the financial information on the Internet is helpful, or even accurate. But because of this site, a sound financial education on just about every investment and trading subject really is only a few mouse-clicks away. Investors will make mistakes, just as analysts and money managers will make mistakes. But over time, as both education and experience grow, these mistakes (hopefully) become less costly and less frequent. Websites like InvestAvenue.com that offer free observations, insights, and critiques on the financial markets from real-live working professionals in the field do more to help the serious investor or trader understand the world of finance, economics, and asset management than hundreds of hours spent living in Adam Smith's Money World or listening to the talking touts of CNBC.
- David Penn is a Staff Writer for STOCKS & COMMODITIES.
Originally published in the September 2002 issue of Technical Analysis of STOCKS & COMMODITIES magazine. All rights reserved. © Copyright 2002, Technical Analysis, Inc.