Author Bio

Today is another Currensee first – the first Forex trading social network, then the first rewards-based Forex marketplace, and now the first success-based social trade automation system.  We’re proud to announce the launch of the Currensee Trade Leaders Program,

As Currensee Trade Leaders, experienced Forex traders can attract and acquire trade “followers” from the fast growing Currensee trader network and be compensated for trading without the tedious effort of recruiting customers, managing money and reporting results.

The Trade Leader program is a great fit for traders who are confident in their success, open to the transparency of real trade performance and looking for a way to be compensated for trading successfully without all of the administration and effort.

So if you think you can trade Forex and you think you want to be compensated for trading success without a lot of administrative overhead, we think you should apply to become a Currensee Trade Leader!

Author Bio

What is the hardest part of trading?  For traders new to foreign exchange it may be finding the right currency pair to trade.  For others it may be figuring out which time horizon to trade or learning which economic indicators have the ability to make markets move in rapid fire fashion.  Even for experienced traders that are used to hitting the “mine” and “yours” buttons it may be the technology needed which may require VPS access.  For me it has been the transition from running models in Excel with DDE feeds to learning MT4 and developing code.

Even with all those potential obstacles trading the Forex markets does offer opportunity and reward.  I’m not trying to sound like a commercial there but any market that has seen its top traded security, EUR/USD in this case, trade up more than 20% in 6 months with generally little risk of that security going to zero offers some value.  Yes there have been some emerging market currencies that have caused major pain for investors but the Forex market wasn’t alone in suffering trading and investing losses in those instances.

One of the beautiful offerings on Currensee is the “Strategy” section.  Here traders that opt to offer their strategy, and many do, show the strategy they use.  Not only is the strategy description offered but their performance is broken out by currency pair and other behavioral metrics such as the average duration of a trade is displayed.

Where else will you find such valuable insight?  You can have this work two ways for you as well.  Especially if you are inquiring about a strategy that you may want to use and want to see if someone else is already using it.  For example what if you think that “trading the (economic) numbers” is a useful strategy.  Or how about “chart pattern recognition.”  There certainly are no guarantees that the trader using the strategy is making the right decision every time but certainly this is a valuable warehouse of information.

Let’s take an example.  Have you traded “Cable” or the “Loonie” before?  That is GBP/USD and USD/CAD respectively.  In my experience Cable tends to be a very choppy currency.  It doesn’t move from 1.50 to 1.60 in a straight line very often, its more like a major zigzag formation between the 2 figures.  Some counter-intuitive thinking may be needed every once in a while.  The strategy “CB Counter Trend” shows an accumulated 614.14% gain by the trader that posted this strategy.  Its description says that it is a “a counter trend system” using 5 minute charts and their target is 20 pips per trade.  For more details on this particular strategy please visit the Strategy section.

I have not used this exact system myself but it sounds perfect for GBP/USD and some other pairs.  Of course this isn’t the only strategy that shows merit and from my account there are over 160 strategies that post returns and even more strategies that showcase their description.

If you are looking for strategies and more trading ideas then you may want to visit the Strategy section 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.

Author Bio

The tables are turning on the American job market, as seen in the excellent Non-Farm Payrolls. Also the forex market’s reaction looks different than we got used to in the past year. Is the forex market getting back to normal? The Currensee community foresaw the dollar’s strength.

American employment figures included three positive surprises: a drop of only 11K jobs, a revised loss of 111K jobs last month (revised from 190K) and a lower unemployment rate – 10%. The reaction in the forex markets was a surge of the dollar across the board.

Currensee Community forecast proved correct

Before diving into the risk factor, let’s look at the Currensee community. Did they expect good or bad employment figures? Well, for many forex traders, especially techies, this isn’t the question. The question is: did they foresee the dollar’s leap?

The answer is yes. According to a survey, 80% of the community predicted the strengthening on the dollar across the board. The community was more certain about certain currencies than others. I find these figures quite interesting:

The Risk Factor

In the past year since the breakout of the financial crisis, good news would  usually send the dollar down. Why? Risk appetite. When the world economy, led by the US, is showing signs of recovery, there is less demand for the dollar, the safe haven currency. Bad American news cause traders to flock to the safe haven currency – the dollar. Risk appetite and risk aversion are phrases we got used to.

The major American indicators in the upcoming week are the weekly jobless claims on Thursday and retail sales on Friday. We will see how the markets react to this data, and how the community predicts them, after being correct about the NFP.

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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.

Author Bio

I come from the retail brokerage world. A zero-sum game where every broker was always trying to one up the other guy all based on price. How low can you go was always the question the execs battled and price ruled when there was fierce competition for the same customers.

Price competition certainly continues to exist today, but what’s interesting is that brokers and other financial services players are finally catching on to other ways of differentiating. Some tout service, others executions, still others research and reporting. Zecco emerged in 2006 and announced Free trades and shook up the market. The big guys scrambled and soon everyone was offering free trades. What next? The emergence of forums, communities and networks was just beginning and Zecco realized that creating a trading community could help differentiate their offering.

Recently, Zecco announced that their CEO is moving out and the CIO is stepping up. The Broker News blog covered this news and talked about the trading community space with the new CEO, Michael Raneri. The reporter says,

“Aside from Scottrade no other broker has dabbled in the community space, and Scottrade is still a relatively small effort. Zecco may have an opportunity to play in the same waters as kaChing, Covestor and even sites like Currensee. And Ranieri agreed. The opportunity to tap into the wisdom of the crowds exists, and in fact Raneri used that term several times in our conversation.

Wisdom of the crowds, eh? Sounds right up my alley, so I went ahead and joined the Zecco community. A few things struck me off the bat. First, while it seems like a great idea to let everyone join the community without linking their brokerage account, I felt lost and confused. There I was in a community with a bunch of people with zero trades (see image) and zero faces (yes, that’s me) with not much to say.

I wasn’t sure what to do next so I started looking at peoples’ profiles. Most of them hadn’t done much or said much which supports Raneri’s comment, “The community tends to mirror the blogosphere,” he admitted. “Some are very active while 90% are just lurking. But what’s important is we can mine the community for data.”

I get it. It’s all about the data, sure, makes sense. But if 90% are just like me and just lurking, you only have data for 10% of your community. And, that leaves, in my opinion, a way-watered-down “forum-like” experience for the majority of people who haven’t fully joined and may never see the value because of their initial experience.

Maybe Raneri has some tricks up his sleeve to improve his community. We have found here at Currensee that a trading community is only as good as the activity of the traders. We are lucky to have lots of active members who participate in our trader network and add value every day. My advice to Raneri is, rather than focusing on building another free community, put your heart and soul into building a valuable trading community where people actively share ideas and insights based on real trades and real information. Hm, sounds familiar…

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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.

Author Bio

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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I mentioned the Commitment of Traders data previously in terms of its usefulness for tracking the positions market participants are carrying in the futures market (see Taking the Trader Positioning Data to the Next Level). The action in the British Pound of late provides a pretty impressive example of how you could have seen ahead of time the prospects for a big reversal were you tracking the COT figures.

Take a look at how short the big traders had gotten in BP futures.

Notice in particular the Bullish column under Large Speculators. See how as of October 13th that group was 88% short (100%-12%). That’s a massively lopsided market.  When a market is so imbalanced like that it sets up for some real volatility when things start going in the other direction. We’ve seen that this week in GBP/USD.

GBP/USD rallied from about 1.5850 to almost 1.6650 in 7 trading days. That’s nearly 800 pips and a great deal of the action, especial the October 15th rocket ride, was the result of short stops being tripped. Basically, we saw a short squeeze in sterling. Had you been watching how short the big players were getting as per the COT figures you could have at least been alerted to the potential for something like this happening and strategized for it.

Currensee Social Indicators
Now the big drawback to the COT data is that it is reported only weekly as of the previous Tuesday. That means the data is several days old by the time we can view it. We had another tip-off, though. Take a look at what happened in the positioning of Currensee members.

The data at right shows the percentage of position volume held by members in long positions. Notice how they started October 13 (the same day as the COT data reported above) very long and by the end of it had gotten quite short.

In other words, the Currensee membership traded the market exactly wrong on net. October 13 was a bullish reversal day. It made a new low early then turned to finish higher. That means the members were long and wrong early, then got increasingly short as the market moved higher.

The argument against using futures data in the Forex market, and one that will naturally extend to the growing Currensee data, is how it only represents a relatively small portion of the market (the above open interest figures amount to only about 7bln GBP, which is only a fraction of the whole GBP/USD action – daily). Still, you use the tools and information available to you, and no position data should ever be ignored even if it’s just a sample. When the Currensee data on retail trader positions is added to the prior week’s COT figures showing a very short positioning among the Large Specs we have a situation where one could see things lining up for a meaningful turn higher going against the retail folks and riding short stops by the bigger players.

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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.

Author Bio

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.

Author Bio

With this guest post, we welcome Casey Stubbs of Winners Edge Trading.

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Hello, My name is Casey Stubbs I write a Forex Trading blog and I have been a member of Currensee for a month. So far while being a member of this forex traders community I have payed particular interest to the Social Indicators. Currensee gives Forex traders access to exactly what traders positions are and which side of the trade is profitable and which side is losing money and they call that the Social Indicator. This is not a new idea because this indicator has been around for a while and there are brokers that figure this data and give this to their traders. However Currensee gives this data live real time and changing as the trades take place. You can even see if members of your trading team are long or short for a particular pair.
How can this help my trading?
At first I asked myself how can this help my trading and as soon as I asked that I noticed there was a conversation going on about the social indicator in the members hot topic section. I soon discovered two important factors that could impact trading decisions.

1. I noticed that usually the greater number of traders in a certain side of a position that was usually the side that was losing money.
2. I noticed that the side that was losing money was trading against the current trend that the pair was currently trading in.

Look at this picture the there are many more traders going short even though the current trend of the EUR/USD is strongly bullish.
So this became very clear to me that the majority of traders are not trading with the trend but instead are trading against the trend. I have always been taught to trade with the trend and I practice that in my daily trading. What happens is that the price may be changing a trend for a short time and most traders will jump in to get a quick profit but in doing so they will ignore the overall trend. This is my advice to traders on Currensee before making a trade, look at the social indicators see which side is profitable then look at your charts and confirm the overall trend of the pair. This will help you to not just follow your emotions but instead make sound trading decisions based on the current trend.

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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.

Author Bio

Ring the bell…The Currensee trader network is open for all Forex traders to join!

Today, we announced that our Currensee trader network – the first-ever Forex trading social network – is open to the public. For those of you who have been following our journey, you know that we spent eight months in our invitation-only private beta stage. Here in startup land, eight months seems to fly by more like eight weeks, especially when you are building the types of technology and collaboration features that take mere mortals years to build.

As I thought back to where we started, it seems like forever-ago that we invited 25 brave beta testers to try out our new idea for a trader social network. Our founders, Asaf and Avi, had a strong vision – they wanted to build a place where Forex traders could collaborate based on real trades and real data – but it’s hard to cook up a social network with only 25 people.  So we started inviting more, a few hand-picked Forex traders at a time.  And we started adding features and tuning our performance and analytics. We were lucky to have loyal and vocal members who spoke up when things weren’t working they way they expected or when they had a feature idea or suggestion they wanted to share. The product became more and more robust and more and more traders starting requesting invitations.

The Currensee team kept cranking out new features, programs, promotions, controversial videos and other Forex trader goodies. And, in just eight months, things are very different than they were on that chilly day back in February.  We have almost a thousand people trading together. We have an innovative product that combines the fun of a social network with the unique insights of strategies, performance and sentiment data…all based on the trader network. We started with members from two countries and supporting two brokers. In just eight short months, we have members from over 64 countries and support close to 40 brokers.

On behalf of the Currensee team, I want to thank all of our private beta members that joined before there was even a real product. We could not have come this far so quickly without your help and dedication to making Currensee a special place for Forex traders.

Today we leave the invitation-only private beta behind us and throw the doors open to the world.  We invite you to join our unique trader network and see for yourself what makes Currensee the place to trade together.

When my friends ask me about what makes Currensee so great, I always talk about the open collaboration we bring to the world of Forex. That we’re changing the game by giving all types of Forex traders the ability to connect with one another, see live trades and positions and share strategies, ideas, victories and their losses. We call it transparency and Trading Together is how we make it happen.

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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.

Author Bio

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.

Author Bio

We spend a lot of time here at Currensee explaining what we do to other people. Traders, analysts, bloggers, journalists – all somewhat normal people with a common interest in Forex. When we describe Currensee, we talk about being a Forex trading social network. When you say “social network,” it’s hard not to mention the usual suspects like Facebook and Twitter (there I go again). That’s why I find it fascinating that there aren’t any other Forex-specific social networks out there and, believe me, I’ve looked.

Perhaps they are masked as forums like Forex Factory and the many other gathering places for Forex traders to converse. Or maybe they are happening in slices of general-purpose social networks, like the StockTweets Forex stream or certain Forex Facebook pages. But, as an avid social networker, when I look at the forums and online chatrooms, I don’t see a social network. I see a place where people create avatars and usernames and talk at each other, for the most part. The challenge is that you often don’t really know who FXPrincess or N00b2Forex are, the conversation is often very one-way and it’s not helping me grow my network of real Forex people. This brings me back to my question.

If chat rooms, message boards, and forums appear to be relics of the early web, why hasn’t Forex evolved with the rise of social media and social networks? If you’re out there, Forex social networks, please raise your hands.

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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.