When it comes to investing goals, setting them is the easy part; its reaching them that can get a bit complicated and challenging. What looks feasible on paper can seem insurmountable in real life when obstacles present themselves. Overcoming these obstacles and keeping your goals at the forefront of every investing decision that you make is key to moving up the real estate investing ladder and building residual income.

The number one thing that can distract you from your goals is discouragement. In the world of investments, particularly those involving real estate, nothing goes quite as planned and there is always some element of risk. A miscalculation of costs or an unplanned emergency repair can set you back thousands of dollars. If you allow setbacks like these to discourage you, your project will likely hum along on a sour note making it even harder for you to recoup your original losses. If you remain optimistic, though, you will be able to bounce back from setbacks and stay on track ultimately reaching your goal.

In addition to remaining optimistic, there are several things that you can do to ensure that you meet all of your real estate investing goals.

Here are a few tips that you can try for yourself: Break large, long term goals up into smaller, short term goals. Short term goals don’t seem as impossible or as overwhelming as long term goals and are easier to attain. Meeting short term goals also motivates you to keep moving forward as you can track your progress with each milestone met.

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An email in response to my article prompted me to consider the significance of taking responsibility in trading. There is a natural tendency for most people, in any area of life, to not take responsibility for results and behaviours that appear negative. We want to see ourselves in a good light and it is tempting to try to avoid responsibility for acts that we consider bad.

I have noticed for example, that liars (I mean here people who habitually lie) do not see themselves as liars. For every lie that they are conscious of, they have their justifications. In their mind the lie would have been to save someone else’s embarrassment or disappointment; something that allows the liar to feel that not only are they not acting deceitfully, but they are actually doing a good and kind act.
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I received an email from a prospective buyer of my online trading course. His question (below) caused me to think about the wisdom of pursuing trading as a worthy venture. I know that a lot of readers are investors rather than traders, but regardless of your trading horizons, the skills and concerns of active short-term trading are relevant to us all.

Question: There are a lot of people who say that day trading is for ‘fools’ and that it is very difficult to make a living from Day Trading.
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Here’s is where we start to have some fun. Regardless of how you want to trade the markets you need an approach. It might be spinning a bottle, asking your Aunt Jenny what she thinks or just gut feel.

However you do it, even though you may not think so, you have an approach.
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Here’s is where we start to have some fun. Regardless of how you want to trade the markets you need an approach. It might be spinning a bottle, asking your Aunt Jenny what she thinks or just gut feel.

However you do it, even though you may not think so, you have an approach.
Read the rest of this entry »

Moving Average Convergence-Divergence (MACD) was originally constructed by Gerald Appel an analyst in New York. Originally designed for analysis of stock trends, it is now widely used in many markets. MACD is constructed by making an average of the difference between two moving averages. The difference of the original two moving averages and the moving average of the difference can be plotted as two lines, one fast and one slow.
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Japanese candlesticks offer a “mathematical expression of psychological market sentiment” to trader Gary Wagner, who utilizes these Eastern technical indicators in conjunction with Western tools to actively trade for himself.

It took Wagner several years into the commodity business before he began utilizing Japanese candlesticks in his interpretation of the markets. After college, he entered the industry as a broker and around “1989-1990, FutureSource began displaying price movements over time with candlesticks. It looked interesting, but I didn’t know much about what they meant. I started doing a lot of research,” Wagner said.
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According to independent trader Joe Stowell, persistence and courage are two key characteristics necessary for success in trading. Persistence certainly has paid off for Stowell, who traded part time off and on for 20 years, before leaving his job as a school teacher to trade full time.
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While many traders focus either on technicals or fundamentals as they develop their trading strategies, trader Ben Warwick focuses on a market’s reaction to news. Warwick has developed his own method of trading, which he calls it “event trading.”

Warwick first gained exposure to the financial markets during his days as a student at the University of North Carolina, where he earned an M.B.A.

In the course of his studies, he learned about the “earnings surprise studies” done back in the 1970s regarding the stock market. The basic thrust behind these studies is that “when a stock’s earnings came out and it was much greater than anticipated, the stock had a tendency to trend for 60 days,” Warwick explained.
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There is a lot of talk in the retail forex trading world about “The Holy Grail” of online currency trading. What this means exactly is that a lot of people spend a lot of time, money, effort and energy trying to find some kind of absolute best forex trading system but without success because there just is not a single best forex trading system.

It would probably be wise to assume that one of the best forex trading systems or strategies would be those used by the bank and other institutional investors because it is these who can be termed perpetrators of the forex market.
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