Archive for the “Community Platform” Category
In business school, we used to say “B’s make degrees” but in the startup world, we don’t settle for less than A’s, and a B round of venture financing makes a lot more than a few degrees of difference. With $8 million in B-round financing from North Bridge Venture Partners and Egan-Managed Capital, we’re going to be able to do a lot more for our trader members, our investors and the Forex world. Here’s our top three:
- Accelerate our expansion around the world. Forex is a global market and we’re going to be a global business.
- Develop Currensee Market Watch™ and other proprietary social indicators. We’ve been working on the first real-time social sentiment indicator that shows what traders are doing based on actual trades, which will also include advanced data options, such as real-time market depth, and new customization features. You’re gonna love it.
- Drive the Currensee Trade Leaders ™ program. The financing will allow us to increase the velocity of the Trade Leaders Program, the first Forex social trade automation service that allows traders to follow the most successful Trade Leaders in the Currensee platform and create their own Forex investment portfolios.
Jim Moran of North Bridge Venture Partners joined our board during the A round, and now we welcome Travis Connors from Egan-Managed Capital to the Currensee board. You can read their comments on investing in Currensee and the Forex social space in our funding press release.
This is no Oscar, and we’re certainly not going to rest on our laurels, but we do need to thank our members – especially the early ones – for being there and giving us feedback and encouragement (and sometimes that other stuff too), and making the community happen. You’ve told us how much you like the Currensee trader network and platfor and that what gives our investors confidence. In the words of our CEO, Dave “El Capitan” Lemont,
“The Forex market is ready for change and we are now in an even better place to accelerate our international expansion and product development to bring that change to the market. We continue to bring trust and transparency to Forex traders around the world and we’ve already seen broad traction from the traders who have joined our trading social network over the past year. We are ready to advance the platform, take the trader network to the next level and become the primary destination for Forex traders.”
Watch this space for more exciting news.
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Be sure to read the full risk disclosure before trading Forex. Please note that Forex trading involves significant risk of loss. It is not suitable for all investors and you should make sure you understand the risks involved before trading. Performance, strategies and charts shown are not necessarily predictive of any particular result. And, as always, past performance is no indication of future results.
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This week is an abbreviated trading week as the North America holidays curtail forex volatility at the outset of the week. When the markets do get back into swing the top focus looks to still be on Greece and if they are willing to accept the fiscal measures that will appease the markets. Greece is in no position to bargain so I would expect that we’ll see Greece saying all the right things this week. Those headlines will be scrolling on the ‘Feeds’ section on Currensee.
 The immediate reaction in the markets I’d expect will be one of relief. Relief that Greece, for now, is still using the Euro as its currency of choice and not a weakened Drachma. In this situation the Euro should gain. It might be about time as well as it was just 2 months ago that Euro was trading above 1.50 versus the US Dollar.
I could be wrong though. Greece may say something this week that surprises us all. If that is the case and the markets are back at full strength then there will certainly be a reaction. Will we see a move to 1.35, 1.33 or even sub 1.30? It could happen as the markets will be looking past Greece and worrying about the other European (PIIGS) countries with the same problems who have been in the passenger seat up until this point.
These headlines will be scrolling down the ‘Feeds’ section on Currensee but what if you are away from the trading desk? You may be in Australia sleeping, or in Belgium working or in the ‘States out buying a coffee. All could happen. If you are Long Euro’s on the expectation that Greece will say the right thing but they surprise the markets then watch out. Are you protected? Well you should be.
I bring this up because the last time a nation withdrew from the Euro zone currency the markets witnessed a phenomenal move. Of course I’m referring to 1992 and the UK’s withdraw from the ERM. The British Pound went from above 2.00 to less than 1.55 to the US Dollar in a short time. You might suggest that times have changed and this could never happen again, well think again and remind yourself what occurred in 2008.
We’d all have loved to be on the right side of those trades and maybe you were in 2008. George Soros was in 1992 and became a financial sensation ‘overnight’. Successful traders usually have targeted areas that they expect to take profit and utilize stop-loss levels when their expectations prove to be wrong. The last thing that you want to have happen is to have one bad trade wipe your account out or ruin a string of profitable trades. Utilize a stop-loss to protect yourself.
Where you place that stop is a whole different story. One mistake that I made last month was moving my stop-loss around. For example I placed a slew of Yen trades on and nearly all the trades started out in the direction that I expected. I became comfortable and ignored the zig-zag of the market and moved my stop-loss essentially right on top of my entry price. Fast forward 8 hours later and the price level was where I expected the Yen to be but I was stopped out of most of my trades. Lesson, use a stop-loss but put it far enough away so your trade won’t be derailed but you will be protected if the markets go against your expectations so that you can live to trade another day.
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Be sure to read the full risk disclosure before trading Forex. Please note that Forex trading involves significant risk of loss. It is not suitable for all investors and you should make sure you understand the risks involved before trading. Performance, strategies and charts shown are not necessarily predictive of any particular result. And, as always, past performance is no indication of future results.
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Posted by Dave Lemont in Collaboration, Community Platform, Forex Trader Network, tags: Does Currensee support demo accounts?, forex back-tested performance, forex chat rooms, forex demo account, forex forums, forex trading social network, forex trading systems, real-time trade collaboration
There has been much discussion in forums lately suggesting that Currensee should support demo accounts and we certainly understand why people are asking for this. Let me explain why we do not have any short-term plans to do this.
First off, we recognize the value of demo accounts as a valuable tool for learning, experimentation and for testing trading systems and new approaches. However there is nothing like real trading. When real money is on the line, what people may really be willing to do may be quite different. This is one reason why I personally would never take seriously the performance of a trading system that has no real performance, just back-tested performance in a demo account. You cannot assume that the leverage used or the distance on the stops would reflect the level of drawdown that the trader would be willing to take with his or her real money.
On the other hand we truly want to keep Currensee about real-time trade collaboration. This is a guiding principle of our Forex Social Trading Network. And today the best way to ensure this is to make sure that our members have real trading accounts and the trades they are sharing are real trades. This creates a very powerful social dynamic that cannot exist in traditional forums and chat rooms. As a trader in Currensee when I make a suggestion to the community that there is an opportunity to go long on the GDP/JPY and I never make the trade then I lose social credibility in the community. But when I do make that trade – whether I win or lose – my trading friends can rely on the fact that I truly believe with my wallet that this is a valid trading idea. And when I close my position my trading friends can rely on the fact that I believe that my winnings are sufficient or I cannot tolerate any more loss. Additionally, our social indicators are based on the actual real trading activity of the Currensee community. These indicators are growing more interesting by the day as the community grows rapidly, and we want to ensure that our members know that the social indicators are based entirely on real trades.
So if you do have a demo account, we suggest you take your time to prepare yourself for real trading and when you are ready just open your real account and securely link it to Currensee. Our network is ready to welcome you!
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Be sure to read the full risk disclosure before trading Forex. Please note that Forex trading involves significant risk of loss. It is not suitable for all investors and you should make sure you understand the risks involved before trading. Performance, strategies and charts shown are not necessarily predictive of any particular result. And, as always, past performance is no indication of future results.
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This is one of an occasional series of guest posts by John Forman, Senior Foreign Exchange Analyst for the IFR Markets group of Thomson Reuters and author of The Essentials of Trading. John is a 20+ year veteran of the financial markets. He holds an MBA from the University of Maryland and a BS from the University of Rhode Island, both concentrating in Finance.
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One of the complaints I hear fairly frequently about trading, especially for those who do it actively on a short-term basis, is how lonely it can be and how easily one can feel they are going it alone. Trading, after all, is in many ways a very individual pursuit for folks in the retail trading realm.
Things are different on the trading desks of banks and institutions. If you haven’t seen the trading floor of a place like Goldman Sachs then think about rows of desks with traders sitting side-by-side. They are generally grouped by market so that information and ideas can easily flow back and forth between the traders, analysts, and salespeople (the latter are responsible for customer-facing activities). Even in places that are smaller operations where there aren’t the big trading rooms, like many hedge funds, interaction and exchange between and among the various participants is built in. In other words, no trader operates in isolation.
I personally don’t work for a company which actually does trading. We instead focus on market intelligence. The bottom line, though, is that we provide the readers of our analysis and commentary with stuff which is aimed to be actionable. Even here we are set up in a trading room type of environment to facilitate information and idea exchange. I cover forex, but I’m surrounded by bond market analysts and frequently talk with them about things impacting both our markets.
Now individual traders not trading from prop shops and the like don’t have the ability to sit in a room full of other traders and have that kind of interaction. Up to this point they have been restricted to exchanges in chat rooms and on forums, but that comes with considerable drawbacks, not the least of which is the inability to know if others are legit. With the introduction of Currensee, however, forex traders now have the ability to interact with each other in a real collaborative way, knowing exactly what the others in their group are doing.
You can work together
Some folks will no doubt be thinking they don’t really want to know what others are doing or thinking. I can appreciate that view as I have long found that reading other people’s commentary muddles my own analysis. That said, however, I have also found that in some cases I have meshed really well with someone else in terms of technical trading and between us we came up with really good trading ideas.
The trick in developing a good trading collaboration is finding people who compliment your style of trading. Obviously they have to trade what you do in the timeframe you trade. Someone focused on day trading EUR/USD isn’t going to do much for someone who swing trades the JPY pairs. Beyond that, though, intermixing different ways of approaching the market can be very rewarding.
For example, you may be very good at fundamental analysis but not so great with technicals. Working with someone who has that complementary skill set could produce a very profitable relationship.
Also, some folks are fantastic market analysts. They can tell you exactly where the market is going on a consistent basis. Maybe they have a problem sticking to a trading plan, though. If they were joined with people who are very disciplined, but not so strong with finding good trading ideas they could developing a good partnership.
Plus the learning
And of course there’s the educational angle in all this. It should be obvious to everyone how much more quickly one can develop their trading abilities by watching others in action. It could be as simple as picking up a new way of trading based on Bollinger Bands or price action. Maybe it’s the placement of stops. Perhaps it’s a way of playing the market in a shorter or longer time frame. There’s always something new to learn in the markets for those looking to do so.
Think of collaborative trading as being like a school study group. You each bring something different to the table in terms of knowledge, perspective, and experience. That feeds into the learning of everyone in the group.
So don’t be shy!
Get in there and find out what trading collaboratively is all about. Take advantage of the tools and methods of interaction Currensee offers now and will be offering in the future. Make new friends and meet fellow traders from around the world. The more you do that the better your chances will be of finding someone (or several of them) with whom you can talk about the markets and trading and work together toward better trading for you both.
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Be sure to read the full risk disclosure before trading Forex. Please note that Forex trading involves significant risk of loss. It is not suitable for all investors and you should make sure you understand the risks involved before trading. Performance, strategies and charts shown are not necessarily predictive of any particular result. And, as always, past performance is no indication of future results.
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The Currensee Market Watch widget indicates how the membership of the trader network is positioned. This is both in terms of long/short as well as in the money or out of it. The further the bar goes to the left of the central line the larger the number of shorts, while the further right the other bar goes the more longs there are in that pair. When the bar is green it indicates those traders are in the money. When it’s red, the traders are underwater on their positions.
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This is one of an occasional series of guest posts by John Forman, Senior Foreign Exchange Analyst for the IFR Markets group of Thomson Reuters and author of The Essentials of Trading. John is a 20+ year veteran of the financial markets. He holds an MBA from the University of Maryland and a BS from the University of Rhode Island, both concentrating in Finance.
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Using EUR/USD as an example, we can see in the graphic at left how there are a lot of shorts, with relatively few longs. The longs, however, are profitable at this point in time while the shorts are in losing money. This is all based on the average entry price for those trades.
Now, it’s early days yet. The number of traders included and the amount of volume covered in the Market Watch figures hasn’t reached a critical mass as yet. Once it does after the site goes live, however, this widget could provide some very interesting insights.
The most obvious analysis of this data is to use the Currensee trader bias as either a contrary or confirming indicator. Generally speaking, retail traders are not very good when it comes to being right about market direction when taken as a collective. We’ll see whether that holds true with the Currensee membership, though. Volume weighted social indicators may end up being a better confirming than contrary reading.
There’s more to it, however.
What I’m going to be very interested to see is whether the figures are going to be useful in a convergence/divergence sort of fashion, and also in a leading/lagging manner. By that I mean if there is a disagreement between the positioning of EUR/USD traders and USD/JPY vis-à-vis their dollar bias what does it mean? And which pair tends to lead the way when the market changes course? And what does the cross tell us?
Let me tell you, as a professional market analyst I spend a lot of time looking at what is going on around the pair I’m focused on at the given moment. I don’t just look at it’s price action and news events. If I did I’d miss what’s really going on. In particular, I look to see if there’s an element not in line which might tip me off that something new is about to happen. Differences in positioning among related pairs could be one of those tip offs.
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Be sure to read the full risk disclosure before trading Forex. Please note that Forex trading involves significant risk of loss. It is not suitable for all investors and you should make sure you understand the risks involved before trading. Performance, strategies and charts shown are not necessarily predictive of any particular result. And, as always, past performance is no indication of future results.
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As a Forex newbie looking to re-engage after my first substantial trading loss, I decided to rely more heavily on my Forex trading team for the last several weeks for good trade ideas. I noticed a particularly successful team member trading some of the pairs I trade, and decided to follow her into a few trades. While these were not all wins, my performance on a few trades pulled me out of ‘the hole.’ I am enjoying team trading, I feel like I am leveraging the hard work of others.
Another means of getting back in the swing of things – reading about the basic strategies of smart, experienced traders. I have been reading a few blogs lately, to try to find someone I can follow for a while. I investigated Kathy Lien’s blog, as I know she is well-respected in the Forex world. I spotted a few items on BabyPips that have been (in my newbie mind) actionable; there is always sure to be something on my USD/JPY. I found the Pick of the Day useful today, it validated my suspicion that I had better put a stop-loss on my trade – quickly.
I have settled into a comfortable trading pattern and have managed to add a little to my balance. My several months (!) experience has given me a feel for how quickly I should move on an open position, and now I am simply hungry for a real strategy that fits me for the medium term.
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Be sure to read the full risk disclosure before trading Forex. Please note that Forex trading involves significant risk of loss. It is not suitable for all investors and you should make sure you understand the risks involved before trading. Performance, strategies and charts shown are not necessarily predictive of any particular result. And, as always, past performance is no indication of future results.
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This afternoon, Currensee will be hosting a free online panel discussion featuring three bright stars from the worlds of trading and forex – Jamie Coleman (author of ForexLive and former managing editor of Reuters FX Hub), Shaun Downey (technical analyst at CQG and I-traders.com) and Boris Schlossberg (director of currency research at GFT Forex) – discussing how trade collaboration, the psychology of trading and the wisdom of the crowds is creating a new category of social data.
  
We’re really excited that these good folks have taken the time to appear on our panel and answer not just our questions but also yours! We’re going to start off with a quick check-in on the outlook for the USD/JPY from technical, fundamental and social viewpoints, and then move into some questions about how the experts see the issues around volume and sentiment in Forex. Please join us at 2pm ET today for a chance to pose your fx trading question to Shaun, Jamie and Boris. There are just a few seats left…
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Be sure to read the full risk disclosure before trading Forex. Please note that Forex trading involves significant risk of loss. It is not suitable for all investors and you should make sure you understand the risks involved before trading. Performance, strategies and charts shown are not necessarily predictive of any particular result. And, as always, past performance is no indication of future results.
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The Forex market moves because of two conditions:
- People think it should move, and
- The people that thought it should move in a certain direction realized that they were wrong.
If everyone were right all the time the market would never move. That would be very boring indeed.
Support and resistance points are the points are the battlefield points in this market, if you’ve seen any movies like “Braveheart” or “Gladiator” you probably remember the military battlefields where the British fought the Scottish or the Romans fought the rest of the world. I have to say that it has always fascinated me – how do you get so many people from opposite sides to show up at the same location in the same time thousands of year before Twitter?? But getting to the point these ancient battlefields are the perfect example of support and resistance. These points have no significance other than the decision of many traders that something should happen there.
How are traders communicating between themselves on these battlefields? Well, they don’t actually communicate, all they do is rely on similar analysis. For example one of the most common way to draw support and resistance points is based on pivot calculation, and anyone who knows that math behind it can tell you that it presents no significant insight at all.
So all the people that believe the market is either “Long” or “Short” will bring their soldiers (money) to these points and have a battle. Whoever wins this one can continue to the next battlefield (the next support or resistance point), and the losing team will collect their wounded (the people who were smart enough to put stop losses in place) and bury their dead (the people who got a margin call and will not return to fight today) and continue to the next battlefield. Surprisingly enough (or not so surprisingly) the winners of the last battle are happier and less reluctant to fight, while the wounded only want to get their dignity back. And this is why after breaking the first support or resistance it’s more difficult to break the second or the third one. Now just imagine what happens if the pivot soldiers have accidentally identified the battlefield in the same place as the Fibonacci soldiers and the moving average soldiers – It’s almost like the Scottish bringing the Irish to help them and the British bringing the French to help – we get an even bigger battle.
So what can Social Indicators do for you? Since the Forex market is driven by what Forex traders want it to do, it’s important to identify these three things:
- Where is the battlefield?
- Who has the strongest army?
- Which side has more wounded in it?
We’ll be covering more of the specifics of these questions and their answers in future posts.
See you on the battlefield.
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Be sure to read the full risk disclosure before trading Forex. Please note that Forex trading involves significant risk of loss. It is not suitable for all investors and you should make sure you understand the risks involved before trading. Performance, strategies and charts shown are not necessarily predictive of any particular result. And, as always, past performance is no indication of future results.
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Posted by David Karp in Community Platform, Currensee, Forex Trading, Market Analysis, tags: dollar index and stock market correlation, Dow, EUR/USD, triangle formation, USD, VAL, Value Area Low
There are two interesting discussions brewing on Currensee.com right now that started overnight as Europe woke up and looked at the numbers. First, Shaun noted that the USD and the DJIA have been locked together lately and those who buy bucks when stocks bear have done well:
The slavish correlation between the Dow and the Dollar remains unchecked and while the Buy on Dips (Bods) are being rewarded in stocks this looks to continue. However, when looking for clues to whether stocks are making a top and by default the Dollar a low, is to look at the Bond market. Both the 10 year Note and TBonds are in a classic triangle formation…
Meanwhile, Barak notes that his Value Area Low (VAL) calculation on the EUR/USD is at a critical point:
Just wanted to point out an interesting critical point to take into consideration. VAL=1.4535 calculation from two days ago (that is the “Value Area Low” of which 70% of market activity and transactions hangs on a previous day, the upper bound of this area was [VAH=1.4600], it’s a significant area the market tend to check on the move from one day to another)…
The discussion goes from there with lots of good info on the Value Area method and associated triggers, while folks following Shaun’s chart are sticking with their stock market triggers.
Join the discussion and follow Barak and Shaun’s trades on Currensee.com!
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Be sure to read the full risk disclosure before trading Forex. Please note that Forex trading involves significant risk of loss. It is not suitable for all investors and you should make sure you understand the risks involved before trading. Performance, strategies and charts shown are not necessarily predictive of any particular result. And, as always, past performance is no indication of future results.
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I wish I had the time to go to my local fishmonger for my Dover sole and the baker for my fresh baguette for dinner this evening. Instead I need to go to the supermarket and some weeks I have it all delivered so that I can get everything I need for a whole week from one place. Think of the Currensee dashboards in the same light. There are three dashboards – one for trading, one for research and one for fun and community. It is one stop shopping for the information, analysis, and real time trade information needed to make the most informed trading decisions every trading day.
The trading dashboard hold all of the key information that Currensee provides to make your trade decisions – your position table that contains all of the detailed trading information of your mates’ trades and the social indicators and price charts that tell you what the rest of the community and the market is doing in real time as well as a friends feeds that is a minute by minute update of trades and posts being made by your friends in the community.
The research dashboard holds all the key financial information in one place so that you do not have to go the baker’s website to learn about what’s heating up on the Euro. News is available from your favorite sources like CNN, the BBC, Reuters, etc., various charts on the correlations you may be interested in on the S&P, gold or other commodities. RSS feeds of the best commentary you like to read from the most insightful websites right there at your fingertips
To customize each of these dashboards you can simply pick from the extensive widget library which is growing all the time to pick and choose and drag and drop to a location on your dashboard that makes the most concise and useful presentation for your daily trading analysis. And when it is time for a break, the fun and community dashboard has a link to your popular IM tools, Skype for quick conversation with your friends about your positions, or a link to your Facebook page to catch up on all your buddies that are missing out on all the fun of trading on Currensee.
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Be sure to read the full risk disclosure before trading Forex. Please note that Forex trading involves significant risk of loss. It is not suitable for all investors and you should make sure you understand the risks involved before trading. Performance, strategies and charts shown are not necessarily predictive of any particular result. And, as always, past performance is no indication of future results.
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