Friday, January 8, 2010

Forex Signal Providers - What To Consider

By Tk Kearns

The popularity and easy accessibility of the ForEx, or foreign exchange market, makes many people choose it as their financial stepping stone. Together with its indisputable popularity come some extras. The extras include computer programs, trading systems, videos, books and most of all, third party signal providers. Now, I will discuss some points when searching for a good third party signal provider.

In order to choose the proper third signal provider, we should have a nice understanding of what a third party signal provider really is. A third signal party provider is an analyst or another trader that facilitates trades that are placed on your account. You can choose to have several signal providers or just one.

Like anything else, all third party signal providers are not created equal. At first glance a trader may look like a home run. That same trader may well end up completely torpedoing your entire account in one afternoon. To help make sure this doesn't happen we'll set down a few guidelines. These guidelines will give us something to look for when choosing our third party signal provider.

1. The first thing I look at is whether the trader is a winner or a loser. This may seem obvious to nearly everyone, but I often see losing signal providers with 50-100 people trading their signals.

2. The next thing I look at is how long they have been a winner. If a trader has been winning for a week, this means nothing to me. I recommend that you don't trade any signal provider with less than a few months of results to show you. Any one can place a few good trades one week and get lucky. If you are going to be trading this trader's signals they need to be established.

3. Have a look at the amount of draw down the account has generated in the past. This is the furthest that their equity has dropped from their high water mark. Some traders cannot stand to book a loser. This means that they will hold onto trades indefinitely when they are in the red. They often close out trades for a very small profit but tend to accumulate massive draw downs. These are not traders that you want trading your account.

4. The first few are fairly easy to keep an eye out for. They should all be displayed on the main screen and you may even be able to sort by each of them. Once you find several signal providers that you are considering, you should think about looking a little closer.

a. Look at their actual trades. Do they have a good win rate because they have opened a ton of trades all at the same time on the same currency pair? They may have 20 winners in a row. This looks great, but if you look a bit deeper you will see that its really only 1 winning trade places 20 times. Not as impressive is it?

b. Look at their draw down on individual trades. Do they let a trade go 300 pips against them and then close it out when it hits 5 pips of profit? This is a trader who lets their losses run out of control and cuts their winning trades short. It's not a trader that you want in control of your money.

c. Do they add to losing positions? A trader who constantly adds to losing positions hoping it will turn for them is not someone you want trading your account.

5. The most important thing is to choose a signal provider that you can live with. If you are risk adverse than an aggressive trader will probably more than your stomach can take. Its OK to let your account grow at a more modest pace if it helps you sleep at night.

These are just a few things to look for when choosing a third party signal provider to trade your forex account. You should always trade a demo account before opening a live account with real money. Remember it's your account. In the end you choose the signal providers, and you are responsible for what happens. - 23210

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