Research & ideas to use [Veritaseum's UltraCoin](http://ultra-coin.com/) **user programmable Bitcoin swaps** to trade exposures to cryptos, forex, equities, bonds & commodities through 45,000+ global tickers & up to 10,000x price leverage - peer-to-peer. Veritaseum's UltraCoin is a software concern that holds no client funds and is not a financial entity, hence presents you with no counterparty or default risk. [Download the client & tutorials](http://ultra-coin.com/index.php/download-beta)
Hello, Short story: - Finished bachelor in business and finance; - Worked 3yrs as salesman; - Got very interested in trading stock indexes, bonds and forex (macro trading); - Have a good understanding of financial events; - Understand simple and multi-factor time series; - Understand Trend- and Seasonality-Enhanced Forecast Models, Exponential Smoothing, Holts and Winters forecast models; - Cannot understand ARIMA model; - Trouble areas – algebra and statistics; - Have no practical knowledge with statistical programs; Work only in Excel; Started learning Excel VBA language; - Need guidance
Long story: 5 years ago I finished my bachelor in business and finance. It was a fairly easy gig plus my priority was to have fun while I was a student, which means i didn’t pay a lot of attention to classes. After studies I worked for 3yrs as salesman. Until 2yrs ago I realized that this is not what I want to do with my life. Started pursuing the dream of investing/trading. I have a good understanding of real economics and financial events. I understand how it works and logic behind it. However after a year of trying I understood that it’s not enough. Started learning about forecast techniques and statistical analysis. As well as algorithmic trading and benefits from it. It would be easy to learn further, but I cannot understand algebra and reality behind the equations. I am only capable of understand equations once its broken down into steps with arithmetic examples. Most preferable in excel. That way I can fully understand how everything comes together. After that I have no problem understand algebra of that particular equation. My problem is that I have no idea how to move forward. I came to realization that the basic math once you brake it down is fairly simple. And all models and statistics start from simple raw data that you got. Then raw data is broken down into seasonality, trends and noise. After that you apply all kinds of different stuff (last sentence sound very impressive and smart). I have searched endlessly in youtube videos, books, blogs for the simple approach, where one takaes raw data and start to apply basic statistics step by step. But everybody start with impossible looking equations, next steps are generated by computers automatically and I am standing there with gaps which I cannot fill. For example ARIMA model.
My questions: - What path would you recommend? Should I start learning everything from the beginning like completely basic algebra etc etc? - How much do you think statistical knowledge is actually usable and how much of it is just a theory? Because I have a fear of putting a lot of effort and learning too much of non-related stuff. That was school and university all about - people teaching stuff that is no applicable in real life. - Could anybody guide me through ARIMA model step by step in excel?
submitted by From the time you heard about forex and started learning to today.
submitted by Its a bit lengthy and I tried to condense it as much as I can. So take everything at a high level as each subject is has a lot more depth but fundamentally if you distill it down its just taking simple things and applying your experience using them to add nuance and better deploy them.
There are exceptions to everything that you will learn with experience or have already learned. If you know something extra or something to add to it to implement it better or more accurately. Then great! However, my intention of this post is just a high level overview. Trading can be far too nuanced to go into in this post and would take forever to type up every exception (not to mention the traders individual personality). If you take the general information as a starting point, hopefully you will learn the edge cases long the way and learn how to use the more effectively if you end up using them. I apologize in advice for any errors or typos.
Introduction After reflecting on my
fun (cough) trading journey that was more akin to rolling around on broken glass and wondering if brown glass will help me predict market direction better than green glass. Buying a $100 indicator at 2 am when I was acting a fool, looking at it and going at and going "This is a piece of lagging crap, I miss out on a large part of the fundamental move and never using it for even one trade". All while struggling with massive over trading and bad habits because I would get bored watching a single well placed trade on fold for the day. Also, I wanted to get rich quick.
On top all of that I had a terminal Stage 4 case of FOMO on every time the price would move up and then down then back up. Just think about all those extra pips I could have trading both directions as it moves across the chart! I can just sell right when it goes down, then buy right before it goes up again. Its so easy right? Well, turns out it was not as easy as I thought and I lost a fair chunk of change and hit my head against the wall a lot until it clicked. Which is how I came up with a mixed bag of things that I now call "Trade the Trade" which helped support how I wanted to trade so I can still trade intra day price action like a rabid money without throwing away all my bananas.
Why Make This Post? - Core Topic of Discussion I wish to share a concept I came up with that helped me become a reliable trader. Support the weakness of how I like to trade. Also, explaining what I do helps reinforce my understanding of the information I share as I have to put words to it and not just use internalized processes. I came up with a method that helped me get my head straight when trading intra day.
I call it "Trade the Trade" as I am making mini trades inside of a trade setup I make from analysis on a higher timeframe that would take multiple days to unfold or longer. I will share information, principles, techniques I used and learned from others I talked to on the internet (mixed bag of folks from armatures to professionals, and random internet people) that helped me form a trading style that worked for me. Even people who are not good at trading can say something that might make it click in your head so I would absorbed all the information I could get.I will share the details of how I approach the methodology and the tools in my trading belt that I picked up by filtering through many tools, indicators strategies and witchcraft. Hopefully you read something that ends up helping you be a better trader. I learned a lot from people who make community posts so I wanted to give back now that I got my ducks in a row.
General Trading Advice If your struggling finding your own trading style, fixing weakness's in it, getting started, being reliably profitable or have no framework to build yourself higher with, hopefully you can use the below advice to help provide some direction or clarity to moving forward to be a better trader.
- KEEP IT SIMPLE. Do not throw a million things on your chart from the get go or over analyzing what the market is doing while trying to learn the basics. Tons of stuff on your chart can actually slow your learning by distracting your focus on all your bells and whistles and not the price action.
- PRICE ACTION. Learn how to read price action. Not just the common formations, but larger groups of bars that form the market structure. Those formations carry more weight the higher the time frame they form on. If struggle to understand what is going on or what your looking at, move to a higher time frame.
- INDICATORS. If you do use them you should try to understand how every indicator you use calculates its values. Many indicators are lagging indicators, understanding how it calculates the values can help you learn how to identify the market structure before the indicator would trigger a signal . This will help you understand why the signal is a lagged signal. If you understand that you can easily learn to look at the price action right before the signal and learn to watch for that price action on top of it almost trigging a signal so you can get in at a better position and assume less downside risk. I recommend using no more than 1-2 indicators for simplicity, but your free to use as many as you think you think you need or works for your strategy/trading style.
- PSYCOLOGY. First, FOMO is real, don't feed the beast. When you trade you should always have an entry and exit. If you miss your entry do not chase it, wait for a new entry. At its core trading is gambling and your looking for an edge against the house (the other market participants). With that in mind, treat as such. Do not risk more than you can afford to lose. If you are afraid to lose it will negatively effect your trade decisions. Finally, be honest with your self and bad trading happens. No one is going to play trade cop and keep you in line, that's your job.
- TRADE DECISION MARKING: Before you enter any trade you should have an entry and exit area. As you learn price action you will get better entries and better exits. Use a larger zone and stop loss at the start while learning. Then you can tighten it up as you gain experience. If you do not have a area you wish to exit, or you are entering because "the markets looking like its gonna go up". Do not enter the trade. Have a reason for everything you do, if you cannot logically explain why then you probably should not be doing it.
- ROBOTS/ALGOS: Loved by some, hated by many who lost it all to one, and surrounded by scams on the internet. If you make your own, find a legit one that works and paid for it or lost it all on a crappy one, more power to ya. I do not use robots because I do not like having a robot in control of my money. There is too many edge cases for me to be ok with it.However, the best piece of advice about algos was that the guy had a algo/robot for each market condition (trending/ranging) and would make personalized versions of each for currency pairs as each one has its own personality and can make the same type of movement along side another currency pair but the price action can look way different or the move can be lagged or leading. So whenever he does his own analysis and he sees a trend, he turns the trend trading robot on. If the trend stops, and it starts to range he turns the range trading robot on. He uses robots to trade the market types that he is bad at trading. For example, I suck at trend trading because I just suck at sitting on my hands and letting my trade do its thing.
Trade the Trade - The Methodology
Base Principles These are the base principles I use behind "Trade the Trade". Its called that because you are technically trading inside your larger high time frame trade as it hopefully goes as you have analyzed with the trade setup. It allows you to scratch that intraday trading itch, while not being blind to the bigger market at play. It can help make sense of why the price respects, rejects or flat out ignores support/resistance/pivots.
- Trade Setup: Find a trade setup using high level time frames (daily, 4hr, or 1hr time frames). The trade setup will be used as a base for starting to figure out a bias for the markets direction for that day.
- Indicator Data: Check any indicators you use (I use Stochastic RSI and Relative Vigor Index) for any useful information on higher timeframes.
- Support Resistance: See if any support/resistance/pivot points are in currently being tested/resisted by the price. Also check for any that are within reach so they might become in play through out the day throughout the day (which can influence your bias at least until the price reaches it if it was already moving that direction from previous days/weeks price action).
- Currency Strength/Weakness: I use the TradeVision currency strength/weakness dashboard to see if the strength/weakness supports the narrative of my trade and as an early indicator when to keep a closer eye for signs of the price reversing.Without the tool, the same concept can be someone accomplished with fundamentals and checking for higher level trends and checking cross currency pairs for trends as well to indicate strength/weakness, ranging (and where it is in that range) or try to get some general bias from a higher level chart that may help you out. However, it wont help you intra day unless your monitoring the currency's index or a bunch of charts related to the currency.
- Watch For Trading Opportunities: Personally I make a mental short list and alerts on TradingView of currency pairs that are close to key levels and so I get a notification if it reaches there so I can check it out. I am not against trading both directions, I just try to trade my bias before the market tries to commit to a direction. Then if I get out of that trade I will scalp against the trend of the day and hold trades longer that are with it.Then when you see a opportunity assume the directional bias you made up earlier (unless the market solidly confirms with price action the direction while waiting for an entry) by trying to look for additional confirmation via indicators, price action on support/resistances etc on the low level time frame or higher level ones like hourly/4hr as the day goes on when the price reaches key areas or makes new market structures to get a good spot to enter a trade in the direction of your bias.Then enter your trade and use the market structures to determine how much of a stop you need. Once your in the trade just monitor it and watch the price action/indicators/tools you use to see if its at risk of going against you. If you really believe the market wont reach your TP and looks like its going to turn against you, then close the trade. Don't just hold on to it for principle and let it draw down on principle or the hope it does not hit your stop loss.
- Trade Duration Hold your trades as long or little as you want that fits your personality and trading style/trade analysis. Personally I do not hold trades past the end of the day (I do in some cases when a strong trend folds) and I do not hold trades over the weekends. My TP targets are always places I think it can reach within the day. Typically I try to be flat before I sleep and trade intra day price movements only. Just depends on the higher level outlook, I have to get in at really good prices for me to want to hold a trade and it has to be going strong. Then I will set a slightly aggressive stop on it before I leave. I do know several people that swing trade and hold trades for a long period of time. That is just not a trading style that works for me.
Enhance Your Success Rate Below is information I picked up over the years that helped me enhance my success rate with not only guessing intra day market bias (even if it has not broken into the trend for the day yet (aka pre London open when the end of Asia likes to act funny sometimes), but also with trading price action intra day.
People always say "When you enter a trade have an entry and exits. I am of the belief that most people do not have problem with the entry, its the exit. They either hold too long, or don't hold long enough. With the below tools, drawings, or instruments, hopefully you can increase your individual probability of a successful trade.
**P.S.*\* Your mileage will vary depending on your ability to correctly draw, implement and interpret the below items. They take time and practice to implement with a high degree of proficiency. If you have any questions about how to do that with anything listed, comment below and I will reply as I can. I don't want to answer the same question a million times in a pm.
Tools and Methods Used This is just a high level overview of what I use. Each one of the actions I could go way more in-depth on but I would be here for a week typing something up of I did that. So take the information as a base level understanding of how I use the method or tool. There is always nuance and edge cases that you learn from experience.
- Fundamentals
- I keep a general high level Macro outlook for currencies. I dont get too deep into Fundamentals and just keep an eye out for news. If I am already in a trade I will hold it if its far enough away from my entry. However, I wont enter right before/during news as it can invalidate your setup.
- Price Action
- I started with the basics of learning the standard price action formations/patterns and candles. You can find tons of free info on that online, google is your friend. Then I stared at charts and said "why did the price do that or do this etc" then after a while I started to understand what's happening without having to think about it and I can see the market structure without having to look as closely as I did in the past.
- After many many hours of staring at 5 min charts for 15 hours a day 5 days a week I learned how to look at 5 min charts and be like "Oh that's a hammer on the 15 min etc. If you keep track of time you can do the same for hourly candles as well and you will start to see market structure naturally. However I typically trade in a two chart panel window so I have a 15 min and 5 min chart up when trading intra day so I dont have to think too hard about it.
- Support/Resistance Lines
- Draw support resistance lines on Daily/4hr timeframes. I prefer to use body of the candle instead of the wick for support/resistance.
- You can find support/resistance liquidity levels through out the day as well and trade those if the price retraces back through levels its already been through that same day.
- It would be a bit length to explain exactly the best place to draw them. If your unsure there is plenty of free resources on the internet. Just try to use your head and look for price levels where the price was "Supported" or it "Resisted" that price level then slap a line on it. Draw as few or as many lines as you feel helps you and your style. I tend to lean on the side of fewer. I typically do about 6 lines main support/resistances (3 of each).
- Fibonacci Extensions
- Draw two Fibonacci Extensions. One on the daily timeframe, and then one on the 4hr time frame. Then you can trade the Fibonacci levels and use them for TP targets or entry zones if price action respects the level. Also you can use it along with support/resistance and pivots if they happen to line up or are very close.
- I cannot really figure out how to put it into words how to draw a Fib if you dont know how. I will have to make a picture to demonstrate it. If your interested post below and I will draw one up and post a link. Probably the easiest way to understand. Just keep in mind the Fib you draw on the 4hr time frame will be inside the daily timeframe one.
- Currency Strength/Weakness
- The TradeVision2020 dashboard that I use just helps me keep a tab on the current market post plus any swing strength/momentum a currency might have on higher time frames. Helps me look for shifts in the market or confirmation that the bias it already has in momentum is continuing. I have found that often currencies when they get really/weak or strong might continue for several days or even longer like a full week or more. We recently had what felt like 1 week or so of flat out Yen weakness which was making some things wonky. All it does is allow me to look at the dashboard instead of a million other charts.
- Indicators
- I use two that work well for my intra day style. The Stochastic RSI is just like a RSI but its faster. The second is the Relative Vigor Index which I use to detect swings in momentum and divergences in bullish/bearish momentum. I have used many others in the past, but as I have grown and got better as a trader I have found making my analysis simpler has improved my trading.I dont like the whole idea of have 43 different indicators on 32 different time frames light up a dashboard to be green for me to enter a trade. With how I do it now, I have a clear understanding of what I expect to happen and why. That way when it does happen I understand the move and dont get freaked out if the market moves funny after I am in the trade.
Conclusion I use the above tools/indicators/resources/philosophy's to trade intra day price action that sometimes ends up as noise in the grand scheme of the markets movement.use that method until the price action for the day proves the bias assumption wrong. Also you can couple that with things like Stoch RSI + Relative Vigor Index to find divergences which can increase the probability of your targeted guesses.
Trade Example from Yesterday This is an example of a trade I took today and why I took it. I used the following core areas to make my trade decision.
- Fundamental Bias: I already had a bullish fundamental outlook on EUUSD with expecting the markets to price in future similes due a higher an higher chance of Biden winning on paper as the election closed in and a "Blue wave" coming which would lead to a weaker dollar. Also, the Euro Zone is getting hammered with COVID pretty hard plus Brexit drama so I had a strong Euro bias.NOTE: As frame of reference, all the other pairs I trade I traded as if they were ranging and trade a range. Markets are messed up right now.
- Currency Strength/Weakness: I use a tool that gives me a currency strength/weakness dashboard called TradeVision2020. Helps me track individual currency strength/weakness intra day. Took me about a month to get used to it, but helps me keep track of intra day strength/weakness that can add a bias to trade direction as the day unfolds. Like "Will this run have a 2nd or 3rd push higher" or "I should look to TP at the first sign of weakness in the push" type bias data. You still got to use your brain and figure out the best decision. It wont make choices for you, its only a guide.NOTE: I am not trying to adverse the tool (if providing the code is against sub rules let me know), its just a tool I use every day that helps me with directional bias calls. I am sharing the coupon code that was given to me when I found out about the tool in the TradingView forex chatroom and the guy gave me the code to use when I signed up. I dont want someone to read the name and want to try it out then overpay for no reason. The coupon will give you 40% off. Coupon Code: 3F7A0T5T
- Higher Timeframe Analysis: Detected some early signs of Bearish Divergence on the 1hr chart using a on a higher time frame using a Stochastic RSI. Then I saw more confirmation on 5 min charts using Relative Vigor Index to help time my entry mid session.
- Pivot Points: I treat pivot points like support/resistance and trade them as such using price action to give me some idea how its being treated by the market. Pretty straight forward.
It may seem like a lot of stuff to process on the fly while trying to figure out live price action but, for the fundamental bias for a pair should already baked in your mindset for any currency pair you trade. For the currency strength/weakness I stare at the dashboard 12-15 hours a day so I am always trying to keep a pulse on what's going or shifts so that's not really a factor when I want to enter as I would not look to enter if I felt the market was shifting against me. Then the higher timeframe analysis had already happened when I woke up, so it was a game of "Stare at the 5 min chart until the price does something interesting"
Trade Example: Today , I went long EUUSD long bias when I first looked at the chart after waking up around 9-10pm Eastern. Fortunately, the first large drop had already happened so I had a easy baseline price movement to work with. I then used tool for currency strength/weakness monitoring, Pivot Points, and bearish divergence detected using Stochastic RSI and Relative Vigor Index.
I first noticed Bearish Divergence on the 1hr time frame using the
Stochastic RSI and got confirmation intra day on the 5 min time frame with the
Relative Vigor Index. I ended up buying the second mini dip around midnight Eastern because it was already dancing along the pivot point that the price had been dancing along since the big drop below the pivot point and dipped below it and then shortly closed back above it. I put a stop loss below the first large dip. With a TP goal of the middle point pivot line
Then I waited for confirmation or invalidation of my trade. I ended up getting confirmation with
Bearish Divergence from the second large dip so I tightened up my stop to below that smaller drip and waited for the London open. Not only was it not a lower low, I could see the divergence with the
Relative Vigor Index.
It then ran into London and kept going with tons of momentum. Blew past my TP target so I let it run to see where the momentum stopped. Ended up TP'ing at the Pivot Point support/resistance above the middle pivot line.
Random Note: The Asian session has its own unique price action characteristics that happen regularly enough that you can easily trade them when they happen with high degrees of success. It takes time to learn them all and confidently trade them as its happening. If you trade Asia you should learn to recognize them as they can fake you out if you do not understand what's going on.
TL;DR At the end of the day there is no magic solution that just works. You have to find out what works for you and then what people say works for them. Test it out and see if it works for you or if you can adapt it to work for you. If it does not work or your just not interested then ignore it.
At the end of the day, you have to use your brain to make correct trading decisions. Blindly following indicators may work sometimes in certain market conditions, but trading with information you don't understand can burn you just as easily as help you. Its like playing with fire. So, get out there and grind it out. It will either click or it wont. Not everyone has the mindset or is capable of changing to be a successful trader. Trading is gambling, you do all this work to get a edge on the house. Trading without the edge or an edge you understand how to use will only leave your broker happy in the end.
When I stopped looking at intraday time-frames (1m-1hr) my trading greatly improved. Daily and weekly for trends, 4hr for entry. That is all. Trying to be on the right side of a trade is significantly easier on a macro perspective. And it's great for risk management. You can use much Smaller positions, because you'll hold a trade for days or weeks. And if you do hit your SL, you know you were wrong, because it will generally take a few days to hit. Trading forex intraday is hard because you may be right in your trade idea, but wrong in that 1hour it took to hit you stop. Share ideas!
submitted by In all industries there are people credited to being the simplest .
In design, the late Steve Jobs is credited to being the simplest in his industry. In boxing, Muhammad Ali was credited to being the simplest boxer of all time.
In U.S. politics, there's a consensus that Lincoln was the nation’s greatest President by every measure applied.
In the trading world, a variety of traders are known worldwide for his or her skills. From Jesse Livermore to George Soros, we are sharing these tales of past and present traders who had to claw their thanks to the highest .
Here, we'll check out the five most famous traders of all time and canopy a touch bit about each trader and why they became so famous.
Jesse Livermore
Jesse Livermore jumped into the stock exchange with incredible calculations at the age of 15, amassed huge profits, then lost all of them , then mastered two massive crises and came out the opposite side while following his own rules, earning him the nickname “The Great Bear of Wall Street.”
Livermore was born in 1877 in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts.
Visit
شركة اكويتي السعودية He is remembered for his incredible risk taking, his gregarious method of reading the potential moves within the stock exchange , derivatives and commodities, and for sustaining vast losses also as rising to fortune.
He began his career having run far away from home by carriage to flee a lifetime of farming that his father had planned for him, instead choosing city life and finding work posting stock quotes at Paine Webber, a Boston stockbroker.
Livermore bought his first share at 15 and earned a profit of $3.12 from $5 after teaching himself about trends.
George Soros
George Soros has a fantastic backstory.
Born in Hungary in 1930 to Jewish parents, Soros survived the Holocaust and later fled the country when the Communists took power. He went on to become one among the richest men and one among the foremost famous philanthropists within the world.
Most day traders know him for his long and prolific career as a trader who famously “broke the Bank of England” in 1992. Soros made an enormous bet against British Pound, which earned him $1 billion in profit in only 24 hours.
Along with other currency speculators, he placed a bet against the bank’s ability to carry the road on the pound. He borrowed pounds, then sold them, helping to down the worth of the currency on forex markets and ultimately forcing the united kingdom to crash out of the ecu rate of exchange Mechanism.
It was perhaps the quickest billion dollars anyone has ever made and one among the foremost famous trades ever taken, which later became referred to as “breaking the Bank of England”.
Soros is believed to have netted a complete of about $44 billion through financial speculation. And he has used his fortune to find thousands of human rights, democracy, health, and education projects.
Richard Dennis
There are only a couple of traders which will take a little amount of cash and switch it into millions and Richard Dennis was one among them.
Known as the “Prince of the Pit”, Dennis is claimed to have borrowed $1,600 when he was around 23 years old and turned it into $200 million in about 10 years trading commodities. Even more interesting to notice , he only traded $400 of the $1,600.
Not only did he achieve great success as a commodities trader, he also went on to launch the famous “Turtle Traders Group”. Using mini contracts, Dennis began to trade his own account at the Mid America commodities exchange .
He made a profit of $100,000 in 1973. The subsequent year, he capitalized on a runway soybean market to earn $500,000 in profits. He became an impressive millionaire at the top of the year.
However, he incurred massive losses within the Black Monday stock exchange crash in 1987 and therefore the dot-com bubble burst in 2000.
While he's famous for creating and losing tons of cash , Dennis is additionally famous for something else – an experiment. He and his friend William Eckhardt recruited and trained traders, a couple of men and ladies, the way to trade futures. These so-called Turtle Traders went on to form profits of $175 million in 4 years, consistent with a former student.
Paul Tudor Jones
Paul Tudor Jones thrust into the limelight within the 80s when he successfully predicted the 1987 stock exchange , as shown within the riveting one hour documentary called “Trader”.
The legendary trader was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1954. His father ran a financial and legal trade newspaper. While he was in college, he want to write articles for the newspaper under the pseudonym, “Eagle Jones”.
Jones began his journey within the finance business by trading cotton. He started trading on his own following 4 years of non-trading experience, made profits from his trades but got bored, and later hired people to trade for him so he would not get bored.
But the trade that shot him to fame came on Black Monday in 1987, when he made an estimated $100 million whilst the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 22%.
He became a pioneer within the area of worldwide macro investing and was an enormous player within the meteoric growth of the hedge fund industry. He's also known for depending on currencies and interest rates.
He founded his hedge fund, Tudor Investment Corp, in 1980. The fund currently has around $21 billion in assets under management and he himself has an estimated net worth of nearly $5.8 Billion.
John Paulson
Super-trader John Paulson built a private fortune worth $4.4 billion from managing other people’s money. Born in 1955, Paulson made his name and far of his money betting a huge amount of money against the U.S. housing market during the worldwide financial crisis of 2007–2008.
Paulson bought insurance against defaults by subprime mortgages before the market collapse in 2007. He netted an estimated $20 billion on the collapse of the subprime mortgage market, dubbed the best trade ever.
However, his diary since that bet has been patchy at the best . Within the years following the financial crisis, Paulson struggled to match this success.
Failed bets on gold, healthcare and pharmaceutical stocks caused investors to escape his hedge fund Paulson & Co, cutting its assets under management to $10 billion as of January 2020 from a high of $36 billion in 2011.
Earlier this year, Paulson announced the fund would stop managing money for outdoor clients and switch it into a family office. He launched the fund in 1994.
Hello, dummies
It's your old pal, Fuzzy.
As I'm sure you've all noticed, a lot of the stuff that gets posted here is - to put it delicately - fucking ridiculous. More backwards-ass shit gets posted to
wallstreetbets than you'd see on a Westboro Baptist community message board. I mean, I had a look at the daily thread yesterday and..... yeesh. I know, I know.
We all make like the divine Laura Dern circa 1992 on the daily and stick our hands deep into this steaming heap of shit to find the nuggets of valuable and/or hilarious information within (thanks for reading, BTW). I agree. I love it just the way it is too. That's what makes WSB great.
What I'm getting at is that a lot of the stuff that gets posted here - notwithstanding it being funny or interesting - is just... wrong. Like, fucking your cousin wrong. And to be clear, I mean the fucking your *first* cousin kinda wrong, before my Southerners in the back get all het up (simmer down, Billy Ray - I know Mabel's twice removed on your grand-sister's side). Truly, I try to let it slide.
I do my bit to try and put you on the right path. Most of the time, I sleep easy no matter how badly I've seen someone explain what a bank liquidity crisis is. But out of all of those tens of thousands of misguided, autistic attempts at understanding the world of high finance, one thing gets so consistently - so *emphatically* - fucked up and misunderstood by you retards that last night I felt obligated at the end of a long work day to pull together this edition of
Finance with Fuzzy just for you. It's so serious I'm not even going to make a
u/pokimane gag. Have you guessed what it is yet? Here's a clue. It's in the title of the post.
That's right, friends. Today in the neighborhood we're going to talk all about
hedging in financial markets - spots, swaps, collars, forwards, CDS, synthetic CDOs, all that fun shit. Don't worry; I'm going to explain what all the scary words mean and how they impact your OTM RH positions along the way.
We're going to break it down like this. (1) "What's a hedge, Fuzzy?" (2) Common Hedging Strategies and (3) All About ISDAs and Credit Default Swaps.
Before we begin. For the nerds and JV traders in the back (and anyone else who needs to hear this up front) - I am simplifying these descriptions for the purposes of this post. I am also obviously not going to try and cover every exotic form of hedge under the sun or give a detailed summation of what caused the financial crisis. If you are interested in something specific ask a question, but don't try and impress me with your Investopedia skills or technical points I didn't cover; I will just be forced to flex my years of IRL experience on you in the comments and you'll look like a big dummy.
TL;DR? Fuck you. There is no TL;DR. You've come this far already. What's a few more paragraphs? Put down the Cheetos and try to concentrate for the next 5-7 minutes. You'll learn something, and I promise I'll be gentle.
Ready? Let's get started.
1. The Tao of Risk: Hedging as a Way of Life The simplest way to characterize what a hedge 'is' is to imagine every action having a binary outcome. One is bad, one is good. Red lines, green lines; uppie, downie. With me so far? Good. A 'hedge' is simply the employment of a strategy to mitigate the effect of your action having the
wrong binary outcome. You wanted X, but you got Z! Frowny face. A hedge strategy introduces a
third outcome. If you hedged against the
possibility of Z happening, then you can wind up with Y instead. Not as good as X, but not as bad as Z. The technical definition I like to give my idiot juniors is as follows:
Utilization of a defensive strategy to mitigate risk, at a fraction of the cost to capital of the risk itself.
Congratulations. You just finished Hedging 101. "But Fuzzy, that's easy! I just sold a naked call against my 95% OTM put! I'm adequately hedged!". Spoiler alert: you're not (although good work on executing a collar, which I describe below). What I'm talking about here is what would be referred to as a 'perfect hedge'; a binary outcome where downside is totally mitigated by a risk management strategy. That's not how it works IRL. Pay attention; this is the tricky part.
You can't take a single position and conclude that you're adequately hedged because risks are fluid, not static. So you need to constantly adjust your position in order to maximize the value of the hedge and insure your position. You also need to consider exposure to more than one category of risk. There are micro (specific exposure) risks, and macro (trend exposure) risks, and both need to factor into the hedge calculus.
That's why, in the real world, the value of hedging depends entirely on the design of the hedging strategy itself. Here, when we say "value" of the hedge, we're not talking about cash money - we're talking about the intrinsic value of the hedge relative to the the risk profile of your underlying exposure. To achieve this, people hedge
dynamically. In
wallstreetbets terms, this means that as the value of your position changes, you need to change your hedges too. The idea is to efficiently and continuously distribute and rebalance risk across different states and periods, taking value from states in which the marginal cost of the hedge is low and putting it back into states where marginal cost of the hedge is high, until the shadow value of your underlying exposure is equalized across your positions. The punchline, I guess, is that one static position is a hedge in the same way that the finger paintings you make for your wife's boyfriend are art - it's technically correct, but you're only playing yourself by believing it.
Anyway. Obviously doing this as a small potatoes trader is hard but it's worth taking into account. Enough basic shit. So how does this work in markets?
2. A Hedging Taxonomy The best place to start here is a practical question. What does a business need to hedge against? Think about the specific risk that an individual business faces. These are legion, so I'm just going to list a few of the key ones that apply to most corporates. (1) You have commodity risk for the shit you buy or the shit you use. (2) You have currency risk for the money you borrow. (3) You have rate risk on the debt you carry. (4) You have offtake risk for the shit you sell. Complicated, right? To help address the many and varied ways that shit can go wrong in a sophisticated market, smart operators like yours truly have devised a whole bundle of different instruments which can help you manage the risk. I might write about some of the more complicated ones in a later post if people are interested (CDO/CLOs, strip/stack hedges and bond swaps with option toggles come to mind) but let's stick to the basics for now.
(i) Swaps
A swap is one of the most common forms of hedge instrument, and they're used by pretty much everyone that can afford them. The language is complicated but the concept isn't, so pay attention and you'll be fine. This is the most important part of this section so it'll be the longest one.
Swaps are derivative contracts with two counterparties (before you ask, you can't trade 'em on an exchange - they're OTC instruments only). They're used to exchange one cash flow for another cash flow of equal expected value; doing this allows you to take speculative positions on certain financial prices or to alter the cash flows of existing assets or liabilities within a business. "Wait, Fuzz; slow down! What do you mean sets of cash flows?". Fear not, little autist. Ol' Fuzz has you covered.
The cash flows I'm talking about are referred to in swap-land as 'legs'. One leg is fixed - a set payment that's the same every time it gets paid - and the other is variable - it fluctuates (typically indexed off the price of the underlying risk that you are speculating on / protecting against). You set it up at the start so that they're notionally equal and the two legs net off; so at open, the swap is a zero NPV instrument. Here's where the fun starts. If the price that you based the variable leg of the swap on changes, the value of the swap will shift; the party on the wrong side of the move ponies up via the variable payment. It's a zero sum game.
I'll give you an example using the most vanilla swap around; an interest rate trade. Here's how it works. You borrow money from a bank, and they charge you a rate of interest. You lock the rate up front, because you're smart like that. But then -
quelle surprise! - the rate gets
better after you borrow. Now you're bagholding to the tune of, I don't know, 5 bps. Doesn't sound like much but on a billion dollar loan that's a lot of money (a classic example of the kind of 'small, deep hole' that's terrible for profits). Now, if you had a swap contract on the rate before you entered the trade, you're set; if the rate goes down, you get a payment under the swap. If it goes up, whatever payment you're making to the bank is netted off by the fact that you're borrowing at a sub-market rate. Win-win! Or, at least, Lose Less / Lose Less. That's the name of the game in hedging.
There are
many different kinds of swaps, some of which are pretty exotic; but they're all different variations on the same theme. If your business has exposure to something which fluctuates in price, you trade swaps to hedge against the fluctuation. The valuation of swaps is also super interesting but I guarantee you that 99% of you won't understand it so I'm not going to try and explain it here although I encourage you to google it if you're interested.
Because they're OTC, none of them are filed publicly. Someeeeeetimes you see an ISDA (dsicussed below) but the confirms themselves (the individual swaps) are not filed. You can usually read about the hedging strategy in a 10-K, though. For what it's worth, most modern credit agreements ban speculative hedging. Top tip: This is occasionally something worth checking in credit agreements when you invest in businesses that are debt issuers - being able to do this increases the risk profile significantly and is particularly important in times of economic volatility (ctrl+f "non-speculative" in the credit agreement to be sure).
(ii) Forwards
A forward is a contract made today for the future delivery of an asset at a pre-agreed price. That's it. "But Fuzzy! That sounds just like a futures contract!". I know. Confusing, right? Just like a futures trade, forwards are generally used in commodity or forex land to protect against price fluctuations. The differences between forwards and futures are small but significant. I'm not going to go into
super boring detail because I don't think many of you are commodities traders but it is still an important thing to understand even if you're just an RH jockey, so stick with me.
Just like swaps, forwards are OTC contracts - they're not publicly traded. This is distinct from futures, which are traded on exchanges (see
The Ballad Of Big Dick Vick for some more color on this). In a forward, no money changes hands until the maturity date of the contract when delivery and receipt are carried out; price and quantity are locked in from day 1. As you now know having read about BDV, futures are marked to market daily, and normally people close them out with synthetic settlement using an inverse position. They're also liquid, and that makes them easier to unwind or close out in case shit goes sideways.
People use forwards when they absolutely have to get rid of the thing they made (or take delivery of the thing they need). If you're a miner, or a farmer, you use this shit to make sure that at the end of the production cycle, you can get rid of the shit you made (and you won't get fucked by someone taking cash settlement over delivery). If you're a buyer, you use them to guarantee that you'll get whatever the shit is that you'll need at a price agreed in advance. Because they're OTC, you can also exactly tailor them to the requirements of your particular circumstances.
These contracts are incredibly byzantine (and there are even crazier synthetic forwards you can see in money markets for the true degenerate fund managers). In my experience, only Texan oilfield magnates, commodities traders, and the weirdo forex crowd fuck with them. I (i) do not own a 10 gallon hat or a novelty size belt buckle (ii) do not wake up in the middle of the night freaking out about the price of pork fat and (iii) love greenbacks too much to care about other countries' monopoly money, so I don't fuck with them.
(iii) Collars
No, not the kind your wife is encouraging you to wear try out to 'spice things up' in the bedroom during quarantine. Collars are actually the hedging strategy
most applicable to WSB. Collars deal with options! Hooray!
To execute a basic collar (also called a wrapper by tea-drinking Brits and people from the Antipodes), you buy an out of the money put while simultaneously writing a covered call on the same equity. The put protects your position against price drops and writing the call produces income that offsets the put premium. Doing this limits your tendies (you can only profit up to the strike price of the call) but also writes down your risk. If you screen large volume trades with a VOL/OI of more than 3 or 4x (and they're not bullshit biotech stocks), you can sometimes see these being constructed in real time as hedge funds protect themselves on their shorts.
(3) All About ISDAs, CDS and Synthetic CDOs You may have heard about the mythical
ISDA. Much like an indenture (discussed in my post on $F), it's a magic legal machine that lets you build swaps via trade confirms with a willing counterparty. They are
very complicated legal documents and you need to be a true expert to fuck with them. Fortunately, I am, so I do. They're made of two parts; a Master (which is a form agreement that's always the same) and a Schedule (which amends the Master to include your specific terms). They are also the engine behind just about every major credit crunch of the last 10+ years.
First - a brief explainer. An ISDA is a not in and of itself a hedge - it's an umbrella contract that governs the terms of your swaps, which you use to construct your hedge position. You can trade commodities, forex, rates, whatever, all under the same ISDA.
Let me explain. Remember when we talked about swaps? Right. So. You can trade swaps on just about anything. In the late 90s and early 2000s, people had the smart idea of using other people's debt and or credit ratings as the variable leg of swap documentation. These are called
credit default swaps. I was actually starting out at a bank during this time and, I gotta tell you, the only thing I can compare people's enthusiasm for this shit to was that moment in your early teens when you discover jerking off. Except, unlike your bathroom bound shame sessions to Mom's Sears catalogue, every single person you know felt that way too; and they're all doing it at once. It was a fiscal circlejerk of epic proportions, and the financial crisis was the inevitable bukkake finish. WSB autism is absolutely no comparison for the enthusiasm people had during this time for lighting each other's money on fire.
Here's how it works. You pick a company. Any company. Maybe even your own! And then you write a swap. In the swap, you define "Credit Event" with respect to that company's debt as the variable leg . And you write in... whatever you want. A ratings downgrade, default under the docs, failure to meet a leverage ratio or FCCR for a certain testing period... whatever. Now, this started out as a hedge position, just like we discussed above. The purest of intentions, of course. But then people realized - if bad shit happens,
you make money. And banks... don't like calling in loans or forcing bankruptcies. Can you smell what the moral hazard is cooking?
Enter synthetic CDOs. CDOs are basically pools of asset backed securities that invest in debt (loans or bonds). They've been around for a minute but they got famous in the 2000s because a shitload of them containing subprime mortgage debt went belly up in 2008. This got a lot of publicity because a lot of sad looking rednecks got foreclosed on and were interviewed on CNBC. "OH!", the people cried. "Look at those big bad bankers buying up subprime loans! They caused this!". Wrong answer, America. The debt wasn't the problem. What a lot of people don't realize is that the real meat of the problem was not in regular way CDOs investing in bundles of shit mortgage debts in
synthetic CDOs investing in CDS predicated on that debt. They're
synthetic because they don't have a stake in the actual underlying debt; just the instruments riding on the coattails. The reason these are so popular (and remain so) is that smart structured attorneys and bankers like your faithful correspondent realized that an even
more profitable and efficient way of building high yield products with limited downside was investing in instruments that profit from failure of debt
and in instruments that rely on that debt and then hedging
that exposure with other CDS instruments in paired trades, and on and on up the chain. The problem with doing this was that everyone wound up exposed to everybody else's books as a result, and when one went tits up, everybody did. Hence, recession, Basel III, etc. Thanks, Obama.
Heavy investment in CDS can also have a warping effect on the price of debt (something else that happened during the pre-financial crisis years and is starting to happen again now). This happens in three different ways. (1) Investors who previously were long on the debt hedge their position by
selling CDS protection on the underlying, putting downward pressure on the debt price. (2) Investors who previously shorted the debt switch to
buying CDS protection because the relatively illiquid debt (partic. when its a bond) trades at a discount below par compared to the CDS. The resulting reduction in short selling puts upward pressure on the bond price. (3) The delta in price and actual value of the debt tempts some investors to become NBTs (neg basis traders) who long the debt and purchase CDS protection. If traders can't take leverage, nothing happens to the price of the debt. If basis traders
can take leverage (which is nearly always the case because they're holding a hedged position), they can push up or depress the debt price, goosing swap premiums etc. Anyway. Enough technical details.
I could keep going. This is a fascinating topic that is very poorly understood and explained, mainly because the people that caused it all still work on the street and use the same tactics today (it's also
terribly taught at business schools because none of the teachers were actually around to see how this played out live). But it relates to the topic of today's lesson, so I thought I'd include it here.
Work depending, I'll be back next week with a covenant breakdown. Most upvoted ticker gets the post.
*
EDIT 1\* In a total blowout, $PLAY won. So it's D&B time next week. Post will drop Monday at market open.
Forex Makro Research – Xiang Xu-Trading-Skandal erschüttert Shanghai. Selbst in China scheint Insiderhandel populär zu sein. Kürzlich vorgenommene Festnahmen seitens der chinesischen ... Forex Macro Overview and scam assessment. Read all about the Forex Macro software and why to avoid it. We also provide information on other possible forex scams. Überprüfen Sie, ob forexmacro.com ein Betrug Website oder eine sichere Website ist. Ermitteln Sie, ob forexmacro.com ist ein Betrug, betrügerische oder infiziert mit Malware, Phishing, Betrug und Spam, wenn Sie Aktivität haben The premier destination for modern art in Northern Sweden. Open from 10 AM to 6 PM every day during the summer months. Forex Correlation. The following tables represents the correlation between the various parities of the foreign exchange market. The correlation coefficient highlights the similarity of the movements between two parities. This site, called “forexmacro-Inversiones” contains information about its high yield investment scheme. The message on the E.U. website remind customers of Forex Macro that, by signing a contract, all users of Forex Macro has been informed that investments in the forex market are risk capital. It added that in no case could Forex Macro ensure the capital invested for clients, nor any ... Forex Factory is where professional traders connect to the forex markets, and to each other. FX Empire's Macro Economic Hub provides access to thousands of continuously updated Indicators from over 150 countries. Latest readings, historical charts and supplemental tools to guide you ... Macro memes are likely to eclipse the high-frequency economic data in the coming days. The preliminary PMIs are among the first survey data for the new month, and October's are on tap next week. The key reason that there may be downside risks in the US and Europe, especially in services, is the ... Use Logikfx's award-winning macro currency strength meter to determine the strength and weakness of currencies using real fundamentals. The currency strength indicator works by crawling thousands of economic reports and generates a simple strength or weakness currency score.
Here we look at a bit of an macro scope and follow money flow to find a fair value in the market , allow you to trade the spreads similar to an options trade... In this webinar we go over how to break down the market clearly. We review USD/CHF, taking an analysis on the daily timeframe while we enter on the 15 minute... Entra a la Familia de Forexmacro!!! y cumple tus Sueños y Metas que quieras alcanzar en la vida! Dios te Bendiga Msn: [email protected]. Today, trading on the cryptocurrency market is the fastest way to make money, don't miss your chance! Bitcoin is so cheap right now! Buy and Trade Bitcoin an... Forex Macro http://www.jclyons.com/codes/landing.php?landing=1&type=1&id_account=133&id_tracker=912&lang=en Toda la información sobre Forex Macro la podrás encontrar sin ningún compromiso en: www.jmartos.ws
![http://twitter.com/forex_in_world/status/1169992298664472578#forex #forextrading What is the World macro hedge fund? [here is the answer] »» https://t.co/8qs8ghBhIZ pic.twitter.com/vpu4JGOohb— FOREX IN WORLD (@forex_in_world) September 6, 2019](https://b.thumbs.redditmedia.com/SgnSzntVk1c08SbCcbLPRPvroXZbSYcsJ4KkabhvCbQ.jpg "http://twitter.com/forex_in_world/status/1169992298664472578#forex #forextrading What is the World macro hedge fund? [here is the answer] »» https://t.co/8qs8ghBhIZ pic.twitter.com/vpu4JGOohb— FOREX IN WORLD (@forex_in_world) September 6, 2019")
![http://twitter.com/forex_in_world/status/1157323251271573504#forex #forextrading What is the World macro hedge fund? [here is the answer] »» https://t.co/ATaInKCpQk pic.twitter.com/vhTqHyYbCf— FOREX IN WORLD (@forex_in_world) August 2, 2019](https://b.thumbs.redditmedia.com/gmsLeRJHcb8MtnhWsxDiczYcSdzybv4kwpTRjcWtLhc.jpg "http://twitter.com/forex_in_world/status/1157323251271573504#forex #forextrading What is the World macro hedge fund? [here is the answer] »» https://t.co/ATaInKCpQk pic.twitter.com/vhTqHyYbCf— FOREX IN WORLD (@forex_in_world) August 2, 2019")
