Finance: A Diversified Portfolio To Stabilize Your Investment Income

By Adriana Noton

Investing in the stock market is a risk, but it can be managed if it is handled the right way. One of the biggest downfalls of many beginner investors is the fact that they do not spread their money out enough and when one sector of the market gets hit, they end up losing their entire portfolio. A diversified portfolio will protect you against that from ever happening.

Having a diversified portfolio is like having an emergency brake on your investment account. Just when you think that the investment world is speeding out of control, your diversification is there to slam on the breaks and ensure that you are protected against a sure disaster. For every market that goes down, there is one that goes up and if you correctly diversify, your other stocks can recover from the ones that are hurting you.

One of the keys to a diversified portfolio is to have your money spread out over several sectors. The market can shift without warning and while you may have one sector that is in decline, you will have others that will continue to grow and offset those losses. As you are putting together your portfolio, a nice mix of cyclical and countercyclical investments is strongly recommended.

The cyclical stocks are going to be where you will see the greatest fluctuation in income and where you will probably have the most movement in your account. These are the types of investments that pay off during flourishing times. For instance, when the "cash for clunkers" promotion was going on, the auto industry received a quick boost. Ford stock went through the roof compared to its price just a few short weeks prior and this paid off for its investors.

Now just because the market or economy is on a downward trend does not mean that cyclical stocks are bad to have in your portfolio during down times. It is actually quite the contrary. There are still business that flourish when other industries and the market as a whole are spiraling downward. A good example in recent times would be the shipping industry and steel industry as they ramp up for the upcoming push in construction and shipping of goods to suppliers.

However, you still want to mix in countercyclical stocks for stabilization. These are stocks that are going to show moderate gains regardless of what the overall market is doing. Investing in food companies along with energy and health care companies will go a long way to even everything out in good times and more importantly, in bad.

Volatility in a stock is also something to be concerned with. While most of your countercyclical stocks will be higher priced investments, you can take a larger risk with small cap stocks that have a huge payoff on them when you are right. These stocks will usually be associated with smaller companies that show dramatic swings. When the swing is in your favor, you can see upwards of a 500% profit on your investment in a single day.

Having a diversified portfolio is what every investor strives for and what keeps them in the market when other people are still watching from the sideline. Having a good mix allows you to take the slow and steady profits from the big name companies and also allows you to explore some riskier investments with the possibility of a huge payoff. You can spread your money around and hopefully allow yourself to build an investment portfolio that will truly make those retirement years golden. - 23199

About the Author:

Whether you're dealing with finance in Jamaica, money in Trinidad and Tobago, or money in Bahamas, merchant banking operations offers a variety of finance services for Trinidad and Tobago business plan.

Strategies To Earning More Trades In The Currency Market

By Deleon Shaw

A good number of new trade novices are clearly intimidated when it comes to investing money into the foreign exchange market. This is easily understandable. While investing into the forex market can be a profitable venture, too often beginners enter trades blindly not realize what they are doing. Investment companies understand this and often try to sell you on unnecessary products and services that you really don't need.

Since numerous services offered by companies can cost a lot of money, it is your responsibility to thoroughly research any company or services before signing any agreements or contracts. While spending money on access to trade signals can be helpful, the usefulness of these services may be of little value to you as a novice.

Most beginners jump into signals not comprehension how to use them. Too often they end up getting mixed results or data that is sometimes confusing. This does not have to happen to you. This is why you need to question the merits of each service an investment firm offers.

If you feel compelled to jump into forex signals there is a few things you should understand. First, try to get signals from merchants that offer free trials. Most reasonable companies will let you test drive the forex signals before committing to the full cost. Moreover, the merchant should be able to provide you with an audit data to authenticate any claims.

When you are prospecting for a trading broker or an investment firm, be sure to use a company with a great reputation. Most lawful companies will supply you with an audit of their trading signals and results. This is the only sure way to obtain the confidence you need before opening a live foreign currency account.

Traders who are inexperienced should never start with a live account. They should either work with a currency broker or start with a free trial fake account. These accounts allow inexperienced traders to trade without using real money and obtain confidence and feeling.

Demonstration accounts are great for beginners. You don't have to fret about losing a lot of money when you are trading with fake money. This is the safest way to acquire actual-planet feeling doing trades and examining how the practice works before committing actual money.

Should you make a decision to bypass a demo account and invest money into a live account, start with a small deposit first. You do not want to loose a lot of money in your account because of inexperience. This will help you obtain feeling and decrease potential losses. Once you are comfortable, move up to a traditional account with much hefty deposits. - 23199

About the Author:

Learn more about auto forex trading on our website.

Conflicting Mindsets

By Cody Scholberg

This article is about building a business, a financial empire. If you are looking into building a business, it is already assumed that: you have adequate emergency savings, you have adequate precautions against catastrophes such as insurance, you are saving on a regular basis, and you are self-employed or have some part-time job where you work on your own.

If your life resembles the above, you are prepared to build a business. You absolutely must be self-employed, full or part-time. Technically, self-employed people own a business, but forget this notion. For your purposes, self-employed people do not own a business; they own a job. If they owned a business, it would work for them; they would not be working in it.

Being a job owner, however, is not a bad thing at all, but a great thing. In fact, you need to be one in order to start building a business; you cannot build a financial empire through an employer you work for.

Job-building and business-building require different mindsets. Someone who builds jobs might think, "I will do as much work as I can, because the less I spend on labor, the more money I will make. I will only hire what I lack the skills to do or lack the time to do."

The business owner, however, would be thinking, "I will do as little work as I can, because I want to hire out everything. I will need to do work at first to get the job done, but I will continually hire out the work as the business earns money. I will even use my personal money as much as I can. I will not make any money, but that is okay, because I will make a lot of money someday; and, during that someday, I will not be working."

So, try not to think about how much money you could be making if you did more of the work yourself. You should be excited to spend the earnings from the business and as much of your own personal money as possible on the business! If the business was providing you with a lot of money, it would be alarming, because it should be spent on hiring people to do the work.

As you can see, the two mindsets are very opposite of each other. One seeks work, and one gets rid of work. But, they both earn money. Which would you rather be, a money-earner who works or a money-earner who does not? - 23199

About the Author:

Cody Scholberg, a recognized expert on business building, is an author at Rapidly Make Money, your source of information that will get you rich. Check out these books about making money.

Trading Multiple Timeframes

By Ahmad Hassam

Have you ever traded multiple timeframes? No, then let me explain what multiple timeframe trading is. In multiple timeframe trading, a trader first looks at a longer timeframe like a monthly or weekly chart to determine the overall direction of the trend. Multiple time frame trading is a trading method used extensively by forex traders. It involves the use of multiple timeframes.

If the trader finds a decisive long term trend on this timeframe, he/she then decides to drill down to a shorter timeframe like the daily or 4 hourly chart to look for dips or pullbacks in the trend.

First identify the main trend on the long term chart. A minor downward retracement would represent a potentially high probability entry to get in the trend at a reasonably good price in a strong long term uptrend. Finally the trader may drill down to an even shorter timeframe like the 30 minutes or 15 minutes charts to pinpoint and time the exact entry.

Suppose, you are interested in trading multiple timeframes! You identify the retracement in an uptrend on a 4 hourly chart. What you need to do is to wait for a resistance breakout on a 15 minute chart in the direction of the trend before entering into a long position.

Multiple timeframe trading can be very powerful if used correctly. What make multiple timeframe trading so powerful is that it puts the traders on the right side of the market while also identifying the highest probability entries available.

One of the multiple timeframe trading strategies is known as Triple Screen. A triple screen resolves the contradiction between the technical indicators and timeframes. The first screen is the long term charts and strategic decisions on long term charts are made using the trend following indicators.

The second screen is used to make technical decisions about entries and exits using oscillators. The second screen is the intermediate charts. The third screen can be an intermediate chart or a short term chart. The third screen is used to place buy and sell orders.

How do you decide what is intermediate and what is long term? Begin by looking at your favorite chart, the one that you use the most. Call it intermediate chart. Multiply its length by five to find the long term chart. Now use trend following indicators on the long term charts.

Use these trend following indicators in the long term charts to make your strategic decision to go long, short or stay out of the trade. Staying out of the trade is a legitimate position.

If the long term chart is bearish or bullish, return to the intermediate chart. Use oscillators to look for entry or exit points in the direction of the long term trend. Set stops and profit targets before you switch to short term charts to fine tune entries and exits.

On the short term chart look for the support/resistance breakout in the direction of the long term trend to pinpoint the trade entry! Use it on your demo account to get familiar with it before you trade live with the triple screen method. Triple screen is a simple but ingenious multiple timeframe approach to forex trading. - 23199

About the Author:

Mr. Ahmad Hassam has done Masters from Harvard University. Try This Cash Printing Forex Signal Service From Heaven! First practice on your Forex Demo Account!

Trading And Seasonality In The Markets

By Ahmad Hassam

The next best holiday bets are the Labor Day and the Memorial Day because they fall before the first day of trading in September and June respectively. The day before the Presidents day is the worst day and the day after the Easter is the worst day after. However, you should keep in mind that a lot of other factors also come into play and you have a lot of room for error.

Children love Santa Claus. Do the markets love Santa Claus? You must have heard about the Santa Claus Rally? Most of the folks usually feel fairly good about themselves around this time of the year. The best time of the year to own stocks is the Santa Claus rally which for all practical purposes is the 17 day stretch from December 21 to January 7. This is the best time of the year. People are happy and the markets are happy.

There is a low trading volume which tends to exaggerate the trend. If the economy is not doing good and is slowing down, FED tends to lower interest rates during holidays in order to go into the new year with less of a worry. However, when you are dealing with seasonality, you should keep these facts in your mind:

1) The market is not longer static. The seasonal effect may get interrupted by other events. More and more people have real time access to information and larger amounts of capital than at any time in the past.

2) End of the year is special. Companies want to show good performance at the end of the year. At the end of the year, institutional investors want to make their results look as good as possible to their shareholders and tend to buy the stocks and so on. Institutional investors like mutual funds, hedge funds and insurance companies have become important players in the markets. So in case of an event free environment, seasonal tendencies may hold up fairly well.

3) People want quick profits. Many people make a living from investing and trading. These are the times for day traders and swing traders. With fewer people willing to hold stocks for longer periods, it is very difficult to predict seasonality. The days of long term investing or what you call buy and hold are dead! Frequent market crashes have taught the investing public that investing for the long term is fairly risky. So there is more short term trading going on. Value investing is gone and speculation is in.

4) The recent market crash was the result of CMO and Default Swaps bringing down the banks and Insurance companies in ways that had not been anticipated or foreseen by the analysts. Many had assumed that derivate securities are safe. Infact they have highly unpredictable tendencies. Derivates and outside the market trading activities can result in highly unpredictable patterns.

Then there is a change in demographics also taking place. With the aging of the population, the overall trend will be towards more income producing investments. So with everyone talking about the seasonal tendencies in the market, it reliability becomes less diminished. - 23199

About the Author:

Mr. Ahmad Hassam has done Masters from Harvard University. Try This 1500 Pips A Day Forex Signal Service! Know These Candlestick Patterns!