Fundamentals

This entry is about something that total changed the way I approach the FX market, and it's Fundamentals. Back in May of 2007 I had just finished two books that both caught my attention. The first being "Bird Watching In Lion Country" (second read), and the second being "Way of the Turtle" by Curtis Faith.

To make a long story short there was a phrase in the "Way of the Turtle that really made me think. Faith referred to the currency market as a "Fundamental-driven market", in which the trading is not the primary force behind the movement. Rather larger macroeconomic events and forces drive the price. Faith also stated that this kind of market has the greatest liquidity with the cleanest trends and are the easiest for trend followers to trade.

Now this sounded way to familiar. It was the same information I learned in BWILC, so I started to reread BWILC. However this time i caught onto more things then my previous read. Different mindset I guess.

So I made it a goal to find out who the main players were in the FX market and how they make their trading decisions. Well 41% of their decisions are based on Fundamentals and 26% is based on Technical Analysis. Those statistics told me that I was trading at a disadvantage, because about 90% of my trading decisions were based on Technical Analysis.

So i had to change my game. I started to research these macroeconomic events and I researched what Fundamentals drove the markets. I needed to find out how a particular news event affected the market, not only in the short term, but the larger picture.

This changed everything for me because i realized i didn't know enough about the market I was trading. I was good at my IT job because I knew a lot about it, and I was confident in what I knew. I wanted that same feeling when trading, and that's what I'm continue to improve on in 2008.

Also thought you might find this below link helpful...

http://www.ny.frb.org/education/addpub/usfxm/

Trade Well....
Brent

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Trade Well...
Brent