Forex Yellow Pages

Light years ago, in a galaxy far, far away…. financial institutions, banks and international monetary funds were the only participants in the trading of foreign exchange instruments.

Thats a fancy way of saying forex!

Forex brokers at the retail level did not exist because these institutions monopolized the foreign exchange due to their abilities to have access to information and data that allowed them to hedge their interests and profit from the monetary policy that the average investor could not get to very easily. This, combined with government regulations and the huge volume required in trades to maintain adequate liquidity,  prohibited the small speculator from participating.

Read more…

Forex broker is an intermediary between a trader and a currency market. Retail trading isn’t possible with Forex brokerage. Finding the right Forex broker among hundreds of the online firms isn’t an easy task. That’s why you need to inform yourself on the specific broker that you will want to work with and collect important information on certain aspects.

The first question you have to ask yourself is: is the broker I want to use regulated? There must be no doubt about this first point. All regulated brokers must submit financial reports to regulatory authorities, and when they fail to do it, authorities have the right to fine them or terminate their membership. This enforces Forex brokers to keep transparent financial reports.

The brokers must be regulated by their local regulatory authorities, for instance, for brokers based in the US, they must be regulated by the NFA (National Futures Association) and CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission), Swiss based brokers must be regulated by the FDF (Swiss Federal Department of Finance) and so on.

Read more…

The online forex trading industry is one of the most dynamic online industries. Most online forex traders are US citizens so the recent events regarding the top poker rooms active on US market also affected the forex market. The events on the Black Friday were totally unexpected and no one saw it coming.  This unprecedented event raised the level of uncertainty in the online environment as the forex industry was already in a tough situation after the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) imposed new regulations.

These  CFTC regulations led to the limitation of the number of forex brokers that accept US traders and most of the brokers available on the US market have low leverages and unfavorable trading conditions. Under these circumstances more and more US traders look for offshore forex brokers with higher leverages and better trading conditions. Read more…

Stemming the Malaysian Exodus

Recently, YB Teresa Kok asked me “Why are Malaysians so keen to leave this country? Life overseas is not necessarily easier!” I agree that life overseas is not necessarily. In fact my cousins living in Hong Kong, Singapore and London tell me regularly that they miss the food and that things are much cheaper at home. They complain about the weather, high cost of living and their long working hours. Despite this, when the possibility of coming back home is raised, they give me a smile and a shake of their heads.

Is living in Malaysia really so bad? What is it that other countries have that we don’t? Lim Kit Siang posted on his blog in December 2009 that more than 630 Malaysians are migrating overseas everyday, and that number is increasing year on year. Read more…

Aside from the standard meat-and-potatoes equity and fixed-income investments that should make up the portfolios of most people, several alternative asset classes are available to individual investors.

Alternative assets are a good diversification tool because they’re generally not correlated to the stock market. This means when the market goes down, alternative assets may go up or stay the same and vice versa.

Large investors such as pension and endowment funds have been attracted to hedge funds because of their reputation for producing high returns. But it’s difficult to tell how successful hedge funds are because the historical data leaves much to be desired. Read more…

It was a tenuous week; but the dollar was able to ultimately hold its own through the close. However, just because momentum behind the earnings-driven rally in risk appetite has stalled does not mean that the world’s most liquid currency has avoided a collapse all together.

Fundamental Outlook for US Dollar: Bearish

- Fundamentals support a recovery in US and global growth, but how does risk appetite factor in?
- Bernanke sees signs of stabilization, calls focus on the deficit
- Do technicals call for a dollar collapse or recovery.

Read more…

Hedge fund manager Jeff Matthews, who wrote “A Pilgrimage to Warren Buffett’s Omaha,” actually made the pilgrimage last weekend, along with 35,000 other Berkshire Hathaway investors.

In Matthews’ opinion, the most disconcerting news from the weekend was that the external managers Buffett has hired to manage Berkshire’s money are doing a lousy job. Specifically, Matthews says, they all lost more than 37% on the year — worse than the stock-market average.

The only reason to hire a money manager is to try to beat the market, because otherwise you should just buy an index fund. The fact that Berkshire’s external managers lost money isn’t surprising — everyone got hammered last year. The amount they lost, however, is. Read more…