Monday, January 5, 2009

Online Trading Systems - How To Find A Profitable One

Trading online is now so much easier and far cheaper than using a broker, that is why there are some many people electing to trade online rather than having to go through the hassle of phoning a broker directly every time they want to place a trade.

However the major draw back of trading online is that you are trading on your own. And as any seasoned trader, whether they are trading online or offline will tell you the biggest challenge is having a reliable trading system that you can use in your online trading.

An online trading system means you enter into a trading position when all the trading signals are met through your online trading system using a check list.

The only way you are going to be able to succeed as an online trader is if you have a strict set of guidelines you can follow in a trading system and having the discipline to stick to them

Having and using a predetermined system of trading will enable you to take the emotion out of the trading decisions you make thereby greatly increasing your chances of success in trading online.

There are many online trading systems available on the internet and in book stores, and most of them do work to a certain degree. But picking an online trading systems depends on your style of trading, which is possibly hard to do if you have not been trading for any considerable length of time.

All you can do when you find an online trading system that you think may be profitable is to back test it. What is back testing? It is simply taking the chart of a stock currency or indices and going back in time and then advancing the chart bar by bar and making a decision on what you would do...(either go long or go short) with the information you have at hand.

To do this back testing properly for online trading you have to make sure you do not cheat by seeing what happens further on in the chart. What I do is put my cursor on the slide button on the chart, shut my eyes and basically go back in time. That way your decisions can not be coloured by what you have seen prior on the chart.

To find out about a trading system that uses the time and price concept visit: http://www.tradingslingshot.com

Hil Smith is the author of http://www.tradingslingshot.com which is a website with free educational material for online trading.

The Federal Reserve Building in Washington while the Fed is inside meeting, October 29, 2008. (Larry Downing/Reuters)Reuters - Officials from the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank on Sunday vowed to fight the damaging effects of deflation as the global economy suffers a deep and lengthy recession.

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