Using Bollinger Bands For Penny Stocks

Trading penny stocks can be a very lucrative form of trading if certain guidelines are met. One of those guidelines is having the proper tools to evaluate and chose winning penny stocks. Charting software is an important component of a trading system and within the charting software there are various indicators that a person can use when considering a penny stock investment. This article will cover one of those indicators, Bollinger Bands.

Developed by John Bollinger, Bollinger Bands are an indicator that allows traders and investors to compare volatility and relative price levels over a designated time period, a relative high or low in the instrument being traded. Two important factors are derived from the Bollinger Bands which are bandwidth, a relative measure of the width of the bands from each other, and a measure of where the last price is in relation to the bands. Having evolved from the concept of trading bands, Bollinger Bands can be used to measure the low or high of the price relative to previous trades, indicated on the underlying chart.

Since their introduction, few indicators have helped traders as consistently as Bollinger Bands and the use of Bollinger Bands varies distinctly among traders. The use of Bollinger Bands is not confined strictly to stock traders, options traders often sell options when Bollinger Bands are far apart or buy options when the Bollinger Bands are close together, in both instances, expecting volatility to return back to the average volatility level for the stock or option.

Closing prices are the prices that are most often used to calculate Bollinger Bands. In addition to identifying volatility and relative price levels, Bollinger Bands can be combined with price action and other indicators to generate signals helping identify potential significant moves. By themselves, Bollinger Bands have two main functions which are to identify periods of low and high volatility as well as to identify time periods when prices are at unsustainable and extreme levels. Bollinger Bands do not give absolute buy and sell signals, and most traders agree that the bands indicate if price is at a relative high or low.

Many traders utilize Bollinger bands to determine the volatility of a stock movement and identify the time frame when the current trend of a simple moving average may be coming to an end. If the two Bollinger bands violently move apart and start moving in opposite directions, the stock has made a significant move. Of course this depends on what time frame the chart is being used. A one minute chart, for example, would not be considered an extreme move with Bollinger Bands. However, a 15 minute chart or daily chart with wide bands surrounding the candlestick would be considered a significant move. It should also be noted, when price is trading near the lower or upper Bollinger band line, there is a possibility that the current trend may be reversing. In other words, when price reaches these extremes they should be considered overbought and oversold.

Over the past twenty five years, traders have considered Bollinger Bands to be the most important and reliable tool for determining expected price action, with almost all trading software platforms including Bollinger bands as one of the primary indicators. Used in conjunction with other indicators, Bollinger Bands can be a powerful indicator to implement into a system designed for trading penny stocks.

Doug Fisher is a frequent trader in the penny stock markets. For more information about trading penny stocks, please visit his blog.

Reuters - Wall Street may struggle this week to build on its best weekly performance in almost 30 years as investors grapple with a raft of economic data, including the November jobs report, that will likely provide more evidence of a deep economic downturn.

Hedge Fund Trading Assistant
News Americas
Afx Uk Focus 2008 10 02 10 09 Liberty Says July 1 Oct 1 Trading Continues In Line With Expectations Interactive

Essentials of Successful Day Trading

Day trading refers to trading, i.e., buying and selling the stocks within the same trading day in such a way that all trading positions are generally completed before the close of the market on the trading day. Day trading is opposite to after-hours trading which allows the investors to buy and sell shares and keep them for longer periods.

Earlier, the day trading was done exclusively by the large financial companies, banks and professional investors. Of late, it has gained acceptance from the casual investors due to the advancement of trading technologies, changes in legislation and the advent of the computers and the internet.

Day trading is a full time business with possibilities of profits and losses. As a day trader, you need to nurture a right attitude towards profits and losses. An occasional loss should not prove depressive enough to make you lose your heart altogether and deter you from continuing with your trades.

According to Bruce Kovner, if you personalize losses, you cannot trade. As a good trader you should not have any ego. You must learn to swallow your pride and get out of the losses. You must gain the strength to take your losses without wavering in your determination to win. This can be done when you eliminate fear, doubt and hesitation from your mind as these negative thoughts may prevent you from taking a balanced approach. Eliminate the emotions that can vitiate the chances of your success.

On the other hand, a good profit from trading should not cause so much euphoria that you lose sight of your focus and take unnecessary investment risks that defy common sense. At the same time you must always be ready to learn from your mistakes and be open to constructive suggestions.

It is also recommended in this context that you should maintain a journal of your important day trading events detailing reasons about profits and losses. You should try to analyze which strategy won you profits and what mistakes led to losses. Mistakes are more likely to occur while making the technical analysis of the charts and graphs. Your own journal can become a handy reference material to guide you through your future day trading problems. It will also help you to avoid mistakes and develop your winning strategies.

It is very important to learn the art of risk management in day trading. Risk management can make a lot of difference between success and failure. You must control your emotions and urges and ensure that you are around to trade tomorrow.

Great day traders are great profit and risk managers. It is always advisable to take small and affordable risks. It is generally recommended that you should risk % to 1% per position. In any case the risk should not exceed 2% of your investment. The idea is that you should be able to trade the next day as well, which would not be possible, if you blow out most part of your capital today. If you do not have any money to trade the next day, how are you going to earn your living or make profits? So your each position should be so small that you can give a damn to your losses. Suppose you are investing a total of $20,000, a loss of, say, % will not amount to too much.

You should develop a winning mindset based on the mental/emotional rules of a winning trader. Develop a detached attitude towards trading and reduce the stress that is usually associated with gains and losses in stock trading. This will enable you to travel your path with confidence.

Stock trading remains unpredictable despite the advancement in research and analysis techniques. It is somewhat like a game of roulette. Each flip is independent of the other. If you bet on black and win, it does not follow that black would win you again. Your next trade has nothing to do with your previous one. Each stock has its own features and has to be analyzed in its own perspective within its own parameters.

The stock trading market is an ever-changing entity. It presents unique challenges in different scenarios. If you want to succeed in day trading you have to develop an intuition in dealing with the unprecedented financial situations every day. You, therefore, must develop an ability to adjust to the changing market circumstances.

Pricing and Features for Sogotrade Investment Packages: online investment

Sogotrade Interest Rates and Fees: trading stock options

Reuters - Goldman Sachs Group Inc said on Sunday its Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein and six other top officials will not get bonuses for 2008.

Learn Forex Trading Online
Peter Preston Why Equality Is Not A State But An Everlasting Argument Guardian
Car Lease Swapping

Day Trading - Getting Ahead Early

When you turn on your computer in preparation for the trading day, the one and only thing you should care about is finishing up on the day. I personally do not subscribe to the idea of only trade the charts and everything will take care of themselves. You have to make a conscious decision of whether you want to finish up or down for the day. You are the only person that controls if this becomes a thought or a reality.

10-Run Rule
My mom recently sent me an article from my high school baseball games from my senior year when we won our conference championship. In the clipping it described how we ran through our division dishing out 3 10-run rule spankings. I thought to myself, every day trader needs a 10 run rule. This 10-run rule is the point you set per day that tells you that the game is over. If you do not know your 10-run rule, a ugly day will turn into a debacle and you are not ready to trade on a professional level.

Take the first pitch
My coach Paul Bernstorf would tell me to work my count. Don't just go out there hacking at every pitch. In day trading, one needs to exercise this same sort of patience. Depending on how actively you trade the market, you will be presented with more than enough trading opportunities. So, take the first pitch, wait to see how the market is trading and how well your system is fairing in the current market environment.

Swing for singles
Whenever you start trading, the first thing you want to do is swing for small gains. Depending on your investment style and timeframe, you need to decide what small gains means to you. For me it is anywhere between .5% and 1.5%. My goal is for every $10,000 I use per trade, to get a minimum of $250 dollars in the bank before 2pm. From this point on I will not risk more than .75% per trade, thus allowing me to make three blunders and still walk away a winner for the day.

Swing for the fences
Once I have my $250 per $10,000 invested safely in the bank, I can now swing for the fences. This does not mean that I let my stops go, but rather when I'm in a winning trade, I look for larger price targets and are willing to give back more of my gains. The power of this is that I'm now allowing my gains from earlier in the day to compound while still ensuring I walk away a winner.

Final Box Score
Day traders make the mistake of always looking to hit the big one, or rather putting on too many trades in one day. Because you are day trading does not mean you can just toss aside common sense rules of how to make money. If you are down $100 dollars and you are in a trade that's up $210, take the money. Get in the black for the day. The worst thing you can do is to not get ahead. What will happen over the course of a month is losing days will make up 20% of the days, winning days 60%, and homerun days another 20%.

Al Hill is the co-founder of mysmp.com (My Stock Market Power) which provides education on all topics finance; including stocks, bonds, options, futures, forex, technical analysis, and more! Please visit http://www.mysmp.com for more free financial educational content.

Reuters - Roche Holding AG is sticking by its $43.7 billion offer to buy out the rest of Genentech Inc it does not already own, its pharmaceuticals chief said in an interview published on Sunday.

Online Forex Trading Business
Rated Stock Trading Software
Forex Traders Signal British Pound Rallies Against Us Dollar Daily Fx Via Yahoo

How to Use Japanese Candlesticks in Forex Trading

In the 1700s a Japanese man named Homma, a trader in the futures market, developed a method of technical analysis to analyze the price of rice contracts known as candlestick charting. Candlestick charts display the high, low, open, and close for a commodity each day over a specified period of time, in a format similar to a bar chart, but in a manner that maximizes the relationship between the opening and closing prices.

A narrow line shows the day's price range. A wider body marks the area between the open and the close, referred to as real body. If the close is above the open, the body is white or green (not filled); if the close is below the open, the body is black or red (filled). Steve Nison is normally credited with popularizing candlestick charting in the west and is recognized as a leading expert on how a trader might interpret the readings.

Candlesticks provide specific visual cues that make understanding price movement easier. Trading with Japanese Candle Charts allow speculators to better comprehend market feelings. Offering a wider range of information than traditional bar charts candlesticks give emphasis to the relationship between close price and open price.

Traders who use candlesticks are likely to more quickly identify different types of price action that tend to predict reversals or continuations in trends. Furthermore, combined with other technical analysis tools, candlestick pattern analysis can be a very useful way to select entry and exit points.

Candlestick charts are much more appealing and understandable than a standard two-dimensional bar chart. There are four elements necessary to construct a candlestick chart, the OPEN, HIGH, LOW and CLOSING price for a given time period.

There are multiple forms of candlestick chart patterns:

White candlestick - signals uptrend movement

Black candlestick - signals downtrend movement

Long lower shadow - bullish signal

Long upper shadow - bearish signal

Hammer - a bullish pattern during a downtrend; Shaven head - a bullish pattern during a downtrend;

Hanging man - bearish pattern during an uptrend

Inverted hammer - signals bottom reversal, however confirmation must be obtained from next trade;

Shaven bottom - signaling bottom reversal, however confirmation must be obtained from next trade;

Shooting star - a bearish pattern during an uptrend

Spinning top white - neutral pattern, meaningful in combination with other candlestick patterns

Spinning top black - neutral pattern, meaningful in combination with other candlestick patterns

Doji - neutral pattern, meaningful in combination with other candlestick patterns

Long legged doji - signals a top reversal

Dragonfly doji - signals trend reversal

Gravestone doji - signals trend reversal

Marubozu white - dominant bullish trades, continued bullish trend

Marubozu black - dominant bearish trades, continued bearish trend

Candlestick charts are a visual aid for decision making in stock, forex, commodity, and options trading.

This is a very simplified primer on Japanese Candlesticks.

If you are not interested in this much detail I suggest that you research automatic Forex Trading systems.

If you would like to read about an amazing automatic Forex Trading System: Go here http://forexprofitswhileyousleep.blogspot.com/

Reuters - Richard Fuld, the chief executive of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc, will step down by year's end, and not receive any bonus or severance when he leaves, a company spokesman said on Wednesday.

Forex Trading Courses And The Strategies Learned Need To Have
Toronto Stock Market Sharply Lower On Plunging Commodity Stocks Canadian
Risks Of Day Trading

12 - Steps to Good Trading - Step 2 - Using Your Imagination

Not long ago I was reading the book Imagine That by Dewey Friedel. It was a timely read as it coincided with my plan to lay out these 12-steps to good trading and especially the second step, which is Using Your Imagination. In the book he describes an event in the French Revolution where an experiment in a prison showed the power of imagination and suggestion. A prisoner sentenced to death was told that he would not be guillotined as was the custom then Instead he was told that one night the guards would come in and put a sack over his head and he they would slit his wrists and he would just fall asleep and die. I guess they left this thought for him to stew on a while and finally the night came where they came to him and stuck a bag over his head then proceeded to run ice over his wrists. He felt the cold wetness and laid down and went to sleep and within 20-minutes he was dead.

Now I don't know if this is a true story or not. I am guessing if it is true that it was winter or something because I just cant picture how else they come up with ice back then. Regardless of whether the story is true or not it illustrates a truth about the power of our imagination over our lives and also in our trading. A lot of people die a death like this with every trade by focusing on the bad that can happen. It is my belief that we get what we focus on....good and bad. This is a Biblical law written plain as day in the Bible so as a Christian it is easy to believe but even before becoming a Christian this truth was playing out in my life. Modern marketing is catching up with some of those laws in the form of books like The Secret and techniques like NLP and we cant ignore them as a factor in our trading.

I am including this topic early in the 12-steps because it is a foundational one that will be used in every aspect of our learning period. It is vital that we learn to use our active imagination to reflect on the things we want to accomplish and to master our methods and understanding of the market. I say active imagination because this is a step in which you have to redirect your thoughts to those things you need to focus on and meditate and imagine those things playing out. If you don't your own emotions and outside forces will drive your thoughts and that will not end up well for you or your trading. We are always in thought and imagining on some level. Lets choose our own topics.

At this point we don't have a trading method to talk about with examples, nor should we because we are building from the ground up and the entry method is the last part you need to worry about, but I am going to make some suggestions now to start building this mental muscle of imagination and when we do get a method to work with we will just apply that muscle to learning and becoming one with the method.

Lets start with something really easy and useful. Each day during the next two weeks before the next step is released I want you to start each day by doing your breathing exercise as you learned in step number one. Do this on your knees or sitting down so you don't fall right back asleep. After you have reached your calm place your mind should be clear. What you want to do is to actively imagine your day. See it played out the way you want it to go. If you are already actively trading with some method you can include some of that but see the whole day through and don't get bogged down on individual trades or anything too specific. See the outcomes not all the details at this point. When I say "see" I mean see it in your mind and feel those feelings. If it makes you smile while doing it then smile. The whole thing should only take a minute or so. You are not running through the day in detailed real-time speed but just breezing through it like a to-do list almost with pictures and feeling. Feel, see and hear as much as you can without stopping in on any one thing too much. Focus on the results or outcomes.

This may be very difficult for some of you at the start if you have not done it before. So would bench pressing 300-pounds or running a marathon. We are building a muscle. If what I described seems like too much then just imagine your morning or the next hour or two. It's the concept not the specifics. We want to build this muscle so when we get into charts and visual stuff you can have something to work with. We are also building upon the step we already learned, which was to control our breathing. After you do this morning exercises take 2-minutes to write out what you imagined your day would be like in a journal. It doesn't have to be too detailed at this point. You just want to get it down on paper. As the day moves forward and you feel under pressure from outside forces and you catch yourself imagining or focusing on what the world throws at you then return to your journal so you can see what you wanted for your day and get back on track.

I said not to get bogged down on specific details in this exercise. However, if you have big items in your life that day or in the near future that you need to spend more time on then once you finish your daily outline and journal you can go deeper into those items and see them through the way you want them to go. Just don't do it until you get your broad day down in your journal. Using the power of your imagination to visualize those bigger items through completion will help your prepare and find peace. Just actively take control and not let the dialogue or whatever develops take you out of your controlled breathing and calmness. When it does start to do that just actively clear your head by placing your tongue just below and behind your upper teeth and focus again on your breathing.

If you are really struggling with this idea of using your imagination let me make a suggestion that might help. Imagine something you have already done and will likely do again such as going to the grocery store with a list. See yourself get to the store...walk in...glance at the list...grab the cart...flash to the isles...cart is filling...next item...next item...look at the check out....number 8 looks clear...put items on the sliding thing....swipe the card...smile...say bye...go home...etc.

It may take using your memory muscle to develop your look-ahead muscle. The only difference is the timeline. You need to be looking forward in time so make that shift. Work on this for the next two weeks and email me when you have trouble or need help. Actively combine steps 1 and 2. We will be using our imagination when we get more into the market. When you are in control of your own imagination and not letting it run free under the influence of every suggestion the world throws at us then you have real power and learning is accelerated. And just as important, we get in our lives what we actively focus on or imagine.

I promise you that we will be getting to trading specifics but if you don't have this stuff in your arsenal you will be just like every other person who fails so stay with me and we will build it from the ground up.

To learn more about using your imagination for trading or to learn more about my trading method and trader support system please visit http://www.wattstrading.com

Ryan Watts is a full-time technical trader, money manager, and trading coach with over twelve years experience in short-term trading. For more information on his trading system and live trading room visit http://www.wattstrading.com

Reuters - U.S. auto sales plunged near 25-year lows in October, led by a 45 percent drop at General Motors Corp , with no sign the industry's year-long slump had hit bottom and doubts persisting that all the major automakers can survive.

My Share Trading Asx Sharemarket Trading Stocks Investing
Russian Stocks Slump On Higher Loan Rates For Brokers Oil Drop
Trading Services

Quick and Easy Forex Trading Basics

Forex trading is also known as Forex currency trading. Trading Forex involves the buying and selling of currency pairs such as the EUR/USD, etc.

Trading is different than investing as it is typically much shorter term in nature. A Forex trader may enter and exit a trade in as short as a few seconds or is long as several months.

Trading the Forex market has become extremely popular for a number of reasons. One of the biggest reasons is that they are is tremendous liquidity in the Forex market. Liquidity makes it easy for traders to enter and exit trades.

Another big factor in the popularity of the Forex markets as leverage. Whereas the typical amount of leverage we may have in any stock trading margin account is 2:1, leverage can be as high as 200:1and Forex. We can now take a look at a quick example. Buying 100 shares of a $10 stock without margin would cost $1000. If we wanted to use margin we would actually have to have the $1000 in our account and use a 2:1 margin to buy 200 shares of the $10 stock. In Forex trading that same $1000 easily control a contract valued at $100,000.

Another reason for the growing popularity of Forex trading is the growing number of online Forex brokers. This makes it particularly easy for any of us to trade from the comfort of our own home or even on a lunch break at work.

Low relative transaction cost are yet another reason for this increased popularity. The transaction costs in Forex is relatively low compared to the contract value. When this situation occurs it is possible for traders to still maintain good profit profiles while trading frequently. This is, of course, why day trading Forex is extremely popular amongst traders.

Get your copy of our free Online Forex Trading report at http://www.EffectiveForexTrading.com.

Reuters - Lloyds TSB , the British bank which has agreed to take over HBOS , could face competition from the founder of HBOS's internet banking unit who is working on a rival bid, Britain's Sunday Times newspaper reported.

Fears Over Hedge Fund Takeover Hurt Inmarsat Guardian
How To Swing Trade With Options
Registering Your Trade Mark