Author Bio

The Pips at Currensee World Headquarters have been hard at work building an exciting new feature for our clients. From now on, when you allocate to a Trade Leader, we will look to see if the Trade Leader has any open positions and whether or not we can get you a price that is favorable to that of the Trade Leader. This means that if the Trade Leader is in a drawdown, you’ll automatically get the trade, but in a better position than everyone else in that trade.

I bet you’re asking, “What does this mean to me? How can I use this to my advantage?” Well, that’s easy. If you’re following a Trade Leader who has historically been a strong trader, but they’re currently in a bad position, you could create a second allocation to that Trade Leader and, as the trade gains market position, you’ll not only gain on the original trade, but also on the new trade associated with the second allocation. Of course, if the original position loses market position you would see losses on both positions. We recently had an Investor report a $1,000 gain while following Joiny Jiang’s C account because he used this simple strategy.

The Trade Leader program provides many opportunities for you to customize the experience to you. If you’d like to know how to create an additional allocation, or if you want to know about how to use some of our Advanced Controls, please feel free to reach out to me, or a member of my team, and we’d be happy to assist 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. Investor returns may vary from Trade Leader returns based on slippage, fees, broker spreads, volatility or other market conditions.

Author Bio

A Porter Cluster is not just a bunch of beers, it’s when in industry or a kind of business gains traction in a particular place and seemingly competitive businesses thrive side-by-side due to the concentration of talent, investment capital, customers, and just the sheer entrepreneurial buzz of all that innovation in one place.  It’s pretty exciting, and even more exciting, the Boston Business Journal just declared a cluster for alternative investing right here in Boston, and Currensee is right in the middle of it.

In the February 22-28 edition of the Boston Business Journal, Kyle Alspach writes,

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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. Investor returns may vary from Trade Leader returns based on slippage, fees, broker spreads, volatility or other market conditions.

Author Bio

It’s that time of year again.

No, I’m not talking about time to get your holiday shopping done (though that’s likely to apply to most readers). Rather, I’m talking about the time of year when the strongest seasonal patterns tend to take place in the markets. They are driven by a combination of things like year-end tax-related portfolio adjustments (think tax-loss selling in the stock market ) and accounting year-end corporate cash movements (think repatriation of foreign profits), among other things.

The result of all this is patterns like the so-called Santa Clause rally which can take place in the stock market, and the January effect in previously beaten down stocks (ones which were subject to tax-loss selling in December, though this effect has waned a bit). We also see some very interesting patterns in foreign exchange rates in December and January. These are well documented in the report Opportunities in Forex Calendar Trading Patterns, but the one which is likely to get the most attention among traders and market observers is the tendency for the euro to be strong and the dollar weak in December, but then to reverse course come the new year.

That begs the question, though, whether it makes sense to trade the markets during the holiday period. This question comes up so often that it was featured as one of those common inquiries answered in Trading FAQs by the experienced traders and market pros who contributed to that book. If you are involved in social trading you will no doubt notice that some traders are active during the holidays and some just decide to pack it in and wait until the markets are back to full participation in January.

Volumes definitely drop off in December as the month progresses. There’s no doubt about that. This is particularly so in years when there’s been a lot of action and significant developments heading up to that period – think elections, major fiscal or monetary policy decisions, etc. That tends to lead mentally exhausted market players to just want a break when they can get it, often resulting in very dull days.

That said, the light volumes can also produce very sharp market moves. If something does happen, because there are so few traders looking to play against a rally or sell-off, the market can go a long way before finally running out of steam. This creates a kind of barbell type distribution to market volatility where you tend to have a lot of very narrow days with a few high movement ones mixed in.

It must be noted that some traders and trading systems can deal with this well. Some can’t. Whether you trade for yourself or through an auto-trading or trade matching system like Trade Leaders, it is worth understanding how your account performs in different types of market conditions. Knowing what the year-end and year-beginning markets are like, you can then make adjustments to either reduce your risk of loss or take better advantage of the opportunities presented.

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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. Investor returns may vary from Trade Leader returns based on slippage, fees, broker spreads, volatility or other market conditions.

Author Bio

In academic terms, the Disposition Effect is a psychological bias in traders and investors to take profits quickly and let losses run. This is something which has been talked about in the markets for many years. It comes from a combination of risk aversion effects and a bias toward certainty over uncertainty. In other words, we humans generally prefer a sure gain, even when there is the prospect for a bigger one, while at the same time we prefer having the prospect for a smaller (or no) loss, rather than a sure one.

It’s pretty easy to see how these biases can turn into being quick to book a gain, but giving the market a chance to turn around rather than taking a sure loss.

It is to avoid the potential negative outcomes from this bias – not making as much as we should on winning trades, and taking losses which are much bigger than they should be on the bad trades – that we introduce systems and processes in our trading. For some it goes as far as strictly mechanical trading. For others it includes rules about where to place stops and how to move them up with the market. They attempt to enforce a discipline on us to avoid allowing psychological biases like the Disposition Effect to negatively impact our performance.

Keep in mind, however, that this needs to apply to social trading as well.

In most cases, when using an auto-trading or mirror trading system like Trade Leaders you have the ability to make changes to trades that are done in your account. As a result, there may be the temptation to close out or cut-back a winning trade before it is done by the trader you are following. This is not something that is good idea.

Consider the math of trading performance. Expected returns follow this formula:

R = (win% x avg. winner) – (loss% x avg. loser)

If you close out winning trades early you are impacting the size of the avg. winner. That lowers R – the expected return. This could go so far as to produce a negative expectancy in the most sensitive systems.

In other words, as a social investor you need to ensure you abide by very similar discipline as you would if you are trading in your own right. Don’t let the Disposition Effect drag down your performance.

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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. Investor returns may vary from Trade Leader returns based on slippage, fees, broker spreads, volatility or other market conditions.

Author Bio

On September 26, Currensee announced the launch of their newest Forex investment product, the Intelligent Multiple Account Manager (IMAM). This product came in response to recent regulations on PAMM accounts that made it harder for some managers and CTAs to offer them without registering as Commodity Pool Operators or CPOs.
Previously, PAMM accounts had allowed investment management firms and CTAs the ease of managing individual client accounts by pooling them together and trading the aggregated capital and distributing gains and losses on a percentage basis. However US regulators determined that this method was too similar to a Commodity Pool operation, but without the CPO regulations, putting smaller PAMM investors at risk for liquidity problems.

Now, with Currensee’s IMAM solution, managers have an alternative to a PAMM that still provides a way to enjoy centralized management, and does it without additional record keeping and accounting hassles.
The IMAM will help managers by allowing them to set allocations from one central location for all accounts. It differs from a PAMM by using Currensee’s Intelligent Trade Replication Technology (the same techy goodness that makes the Trade Leaders Investment Program possible), which executes trades at the same time, but separately in each investor’s individual account, at each investor’s correct position size and leverage. This is the key differentiator that makes the Currensee IMAM more than just a PAMM alternative
For more information on how the IMAM works, visit Currensee IMAM

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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. Investor returns may vary from Trade Leader returns based on slippage, fees, broker spreads, volatility or other market conditions.

Author Bio

In June of 2012, a proposal by the National Futures Association requiring stricter regulation of PAMM accounts went into effect, sending many money managers and CTAs scrambling for PAMM account alternatives.

A PAMM account, or Percentage Allocation Management Module, is simply a way for investment management firms and CTAs to manage individual investor accounts more efficiently. Multiple individual accounts are aggregated into one “Master Account,” which is traded by the money manager or CTA. It is operated as one pooled account and the P&L is divided equally among the investors based on their equity in in it.

In April of 2012, James Bibbings, a former NFA supervising auditor, wrote a very informative post discussing the implications of the pending proposal. Appearing on SeekingAlpha.com, the post explained how the NFA felt PAMM accounts too closely resembled Commodity Pools, without being registered as such.

The points they brought up described multiple instances of structural problems. Issues with liquidity and margin were posing risks to investors and contributing to questions about the fairness of the division of P&L among sub-accounts. In the proposal, the NFA recommended the restructuring of PAMM accounts as a means of eradicating any dangers they could cause participating investors.
Bibbings also notes that PAMM scrutiny has reached the state level. Pennsylvania state security regulators saw the PAMM allocation system as a mechanism that was generating a “synthetic securities product.” This view made PAMM accounts subject to many additional securities laws and regulations in Pennsylvania, and could do so in other states, too.

At the time of Bibbings post, things weren’t looking good for PAMM accounts as they fell under intense regulatory scrutiny. Two months later, after the proposal took effect, “traditional” PAMM accounts began disappearing to make their necessary compliance changes. Some companies have seized the opportunity to create PAMM alternatives and others offer consulting services to help existing PAMMs comply with the new rules.   These instruments play an integral role in providing CTA’s and Money Managers with the key benefit of PAMM accounts: centralized management.

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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. Investor returns may vary from Trade Leader returns based on slippage, fees, broker spreads, volatility or other market conditions.

Author Bio

Yesterday, Currensee officially announced Jonathan Jesse as Vice President of Engineering. With over 15 years of software development, engineering, and technology experience, Jesse will undoubtedly be an integral asset to Currensee’s team of technologists.

With a rapidly growing financial technology company, comes the inherent need to build a strong group of seasoned software engineers to support that growth. This is something that Currensee has been successful at from the beginning, which is demonstrated in the emphasis put on the size and talent of the current engineering force.

Few Currensee employees know the back-end of the company as well as Director of Software Development, Emanuel Kdziela. Having been with Currensee from its start, Emanuel knows the Forex collaboration platform inside and out. It’s always interesting to learn why people love to do the jobs they’re doing, and with Emanuel’s near four-year tenure with Currensee, something must be keeping him coming back each day.

“It’s a company with a lot of promise, clearly on its way to success and presents interesting challenges,” says Emanuel. “I also like the people I work with and enjoy our culture.”

Culture is definitely what sets Currensee apart from the Boston financial crowed, and likely what has kept us progressing throughout the years. The Currensee “Pips”, our 30+ person team, are truly the ones who make being here everyday an absolute pleasure. This group of innovative and hard working professionals comprised of engineers, sales people, product developers, marketers, and many more, have all contributed to building Currensee into what it is today.

Recently, we have been quite fortunate in our ability to further expand upon our team of technologists as a means of improving our product and continuing to foster its growth and development. As an already engineer-heavy company, more brains can only add to the innovation, right?

“The tech team here at Currensee is great because it is made up of top notch, smart, hard working engineers,” says Emanuel.

As demand for portfolio diversification with alternative investments increases, the Forex industry has seen an overall surge in investor interest. As a pioneer on the front of bringing both retail and institutional investors professional Forex money managers through advanced autotrading software, Currensee has been undergoing a bit of a growth spurt itself.

But, as with all great things, there’s still a splash of reality to be mindful of. Working at a company that’s redefining an industry while carving out a new technology and investing concept isn’t always all glamour.

“It definitely has its challenges and difficulties, but that just makes success that much more meaningful and rewarding,” says Emanuel.

That’s the beauty of Currensee, though. If you want to be challenged in your career and grow as a professional, working at a young – but not too young – FinTech firm is where you need to be.

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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. Investor returns may vary from Trade Leader returns based on slippage, fees, broker spreads, volatility or other market conditions.

Author Bio

This month, we were very excited to learn that Currensee would be featured in the magazine Alternative Latin Investor. This bimonthly publication covers the alternative investing industry in the Latin American region. The Latin American (LatAm) markets are among the fastest growing areas for the industry globally.

What was most interesting about the piece was the perspective put on Currensee, as it was being observed through the eyes of the LatAm investment industry.

Titled “Currensee: The Next Step in Forex Trading,” the article began by explaining a few aspects of foreign currency trading that are alluring to the LatAm investing industry. Characteristics like the massive size and liquidity of the world currency market, the speed and flexibility in which transactions can be executed, and being aware of the potential to generate returns during times of volatility are all attracting LatAm investors to Forex.

The ALI’s article discusses two aspects of this program have been particularly appealing to LatAm investors: transparency and diversification.

Because Currensee began as a social network for Forex traders to collaborate, communication has always been an integral component of how Currensee operates. Though today the focus has shifted more towards the Trade Leaders program, communication is still there and it equates to a high level of transparency.

“What’s unique is that our customers can give one another permission to view their actual trading activity and performance… There’s a level of transparency beyond any alternative investment I know of,” says Currensee CEO Dave Lemont.

LatAm investors are also drawn to the program’s ability to achieve “double diversification.” What this means is that as an investor in the Trade Leaders Investment Program, investors benefit from asset class diversification in the Forex market as well as diversification in their individual accounts by choosing from a variety of Trade Leaders. This new method of diversifying is an exciting development for the world of investing.

The article drives home the points around diversification for all investors and the proof is in the numbers – the fact that from 2000-2010, the S&P 500 has dropped a cumulative 3.7%. That means if you’re one of the many who had been adhering strictly to the general 60% stocks/40% bonds rule of thumb, you ultimately lost out.

Lemont says: “The stock market is manipulated by big players and algorithmic traders on a daily basis. The foreign currency market is so much bigger: US$4 trillion a day, with 24-hour trading. We’re not going to get together and move the euro today. But we could get together and move the price of a small-cap stock.”

So although collaborating and trying to move the euro is not likely something investors can achieve, keeping a diversified portfolio is. Keep cool and keep it diversified.

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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. Investor returns may vary from Trade Leader returns based on slippage, fees, broker spreads, volatility or other market conditions.

Author Bio

A few weeks ago, one of our contributing writers, John Forman, posted on when the best time of day to trade Forex was. The question was inspired by the Q&A session of our last Trade Leader webinar featuring Currensee’s Taylor Growth, who explained the benefits of using a conservative Forex trading strategy.

Recently, we were able to get some insight on this question from another Trade Leader; Gabor, Asirikuy Trading. Gabor trades using a technical strategy based on indicators such as Chart Patterns, Bollinger Band, RSI, Stochastics.

Gabor says:

“It depends on the currency pair. The rule of thumb is that the bigger the liquidity of the market, the better to trade it. Liquidity is changing during the day even for heavily traded pairs. E.g. the London session is considered to be the best time to trade the European majors (EURUSD, GBPUSD, USDCHF). Big liquidity does not necessarily mean directional price movement – we can experience the formation of congestion zones many times during liquid hours. But when balance between bulls and bears is broken during a highly liquid period, chances are that it is going to be a meaningful movement, the beginning of a trend.

To support my statement, I examined one of the short-term trend following systems that I trade at Currensee.

It’s a momentum-based strategy, which trades the H1 EURUSD. If price momentum reaches a certain threshold, the system opens a market order in the direction of the momentum. In other words, if the open/close of the hourly candle is bigger than a preset % of the daily volatility, we enter the market. I ran a simulation of 12-year price data and then grouped the market entries by hour. The result is shown on the chart.



As you can see, most entries are in the overlap of the European / US sessions which starts in the range of 1 p.m. GMT (New York) – 2 p.m GMT (Chicago). This lasts to the last hour of the London/Frankfurt session,  5 p.m. GMT. The Asian / European overlap is the second most busy period from 8 a.m to 10 a.m GMT.”

It is interesting to compare this response to that given by Trade Leader Taylor Growth. Since he is a range trader, he feels that the lower trading volume in the NY afternoon, Asian, and early-European sessions yield the highest success rates. He explained that the best time of day to trade really depends on the strategy the trader is using. Since his conservative strategy is very technical, it fares better in Asian sessions when trading European pairs. Since it’s nighttime in Europe while the Asian markets are most active, no European news releases are making their way out and influencing trades.

To see how these two Trade Leaders’ trading strategies have been working for them, check out the Leaderboard.

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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. Investor returns may vary from Trade Leader returns based on slippage, fees, broker spreads, volatility or other market conditions.

Author Bio

Last week’s webinar session featuring Currensee Trade Leader Taylor Growth delivered strong information on a “conservative” trading strategy and its pertinence to these current tempestuous market times. The concepts touched upon and insight provided could be quite useful to anyone involved in Forex, so I thought I would share some of what was revealed.

With a historical success rate in the high 90’s and currently up 1.5% this month, Taylor Growth seems to be doing something right. Tom Dawson, COO at Taylor Growth who spoke on the company’s behalf, attributes this success to a few key concepts: preparation is integral, you must consider multiple sources of influence like technology and the economy, and you need to have rules and systems you believe in.  Not long ago, the world of Forex was something new and uncharted – an environment he compared to the Wild West.

“There was a need for a conservative, careful, and productive company. One that was going to do a good job in producing real results that were accessible to people,” Dawson explained. He went on to say how it’s easy for someone with millions of dollars to achieve world-class results in Forex, but it’s a completely different story when you can only put 10K into the market, and that is why skilled traders are needed to help in attaining these results. Dawson finds solace in knowing that even though it may not seem it, there is in fact consistency in foreign exchange.

“One of the great things about Forex is that every month, companies all over the world have to move their money to do things like pay rent, etc. It’s the daily moving of this $4-5T that acts as a stabilizer bringing things back to equilibrium,” he explained.

By using range trading and understanding that over time, there will be various ebbs and flows in Forex, Dawson sees that no matter where a currency goes, it will usually always return back to its point of origin. This general paradigm of consistency is what inspired Taylor Growth’s goal of being able to achieve the highest risk adjusted return possible while producing smooth results – or, as Dawson put it, “taking the chop out”.

He explained how the use of Pattern Recognition when looking at what’s going on in the marketplace allows this consistency to actually be seen. It becomes apparent that there are repeatable, definitive patterns that occur, such as how the dollar is stronger and weaker at different times of the month. Taylor Growth has seen such a high success rate because they pay close attention to these patterns and base their decisions on them, which is something that’s hard for a computer to do.

Even with Taylor Growth’s scrupulous attention to macroeconomic detail, there will always be some degree of risk. Knowing this, he’s formulated a few ways he believes are the most secure for protecting investors from losses. Setting automated stops is not something Taylor Growth generally practices. Instead, when things start moving against them, they cut the trade themselves as a means of managing risk. By using a balanced combination of betting small, understanding which patterns are in confluence with them, and being comfortable with taking a loss when a trade moves within several hundred pips, Taylor Growth has achieved a historical success rate in the high 90’s. On larger trades, however, they do set hard stops to abstain from risking more than 1%.

One deterrent of automatic stop losses Dawson touched on was the way they can react to a Flash Crash.

“Problems can arise when a market is thinly traded at a particular time and if it moves up or down 200-300 pips, you run the risk of losing the trade because of the stop, even though you were correct. If the stop weren’t on, you would have eventually won the trade,” he explained.

The webinar was concluded with a Q&A session that touched on topics such as stop hunting, among others. Our next webinar will be taking place Wednesday, May 9^th 2012, 12:00pm ET / 6:00pm CET where CEO Dave Lemont will reveal five secrets of investing in the growing Forex market – sign up here.

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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. Investor returns may vary from Trade Leader returns based on slippage, fees, broker spreads, volatility or other market conditions.