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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.