Cash is a business’ lifeblood. CASH, if managed well, a company will remain healthy and strong. Managed poorly, a company will go into some cardiac arrest.
When cash management hasn’t been considered an important issue, then the company’s short-term stability and it’s long-term survival might be in danger.
Today i have just found out that a poorly managed cash flows between branch offices might harm a business severely.
Will fix the issue immediately.
A first priority now.
Forming a centralized treasury system might be the answer. Some internet banking bridge between branch offices might need to be tapped. Klik BCA is the first choice but will study what the other banks might offer in this particular problem.
And some fresh cash injection might be needed too.
A very important lesson learned today.
‘Doohhhhh!!
(*)
Have been looking for several alternatives of charting or trading platform for Indonesia Stock Market (BEI). There must be some securities who have their own online trading platform, such as the Etrading (www.etrading.co.id), havent found another yet. And some non-broker data providers are the RTI and IMQ.
Havent tried any of them, tho. It’d be nice if theres some trading platform with an integrated charting module where some realtime simulation can be done. Metastock could be the one. Need to ask around about that one.
Have also found this ChartNexus free platform, with free 3 years historical data for Indonesian stocks, but unfortunately there’s no intraday, and can not be used to do some demo or trading simulation. But it can be used to backtest some end-of-day strategy by using their paid expert module.
(*)
According to this latest press release regarding the case in CFTC’s website (January 10), the hearing would be at January 28, 2008.
…the CFTC filed an ex parte motion seeking an order imposing a blanket freeze on FXLQ’s assets, ensuring access to FXLQ’s books and records by representatives of the Commission, and appointing a temporary receiver to marshal FXLQ’s assets. The Court granted this motion and entered a statutory restraining order (SRO). The Court then scheduled a hearing for January 4, 2008 to allow the Defendant to show cause why the SRO should not remain in place and why a preliminary injunction should not be entered finding that FXLQ violated the CEA, and ordering FXLQ not to violate the CEA. Recently, the show cause hearing was rescheduled to January 28, 2008.
It would be next week. In the meantime, the court has orderd that the assets to be under the control of the Court-appointed Receiver Robb Evans & Associates LLC. The Receiver will post the most current information at http://www.robbevans.com/html/forexlq.html.
(*)
It’s been always interesting to find another FX broker, especially the ones those are located in UK, where FSA watchdogging the brokerage business there.
Moreover, this ActivTrades® broker (www.activtrades.com) use Mt4 as their FX trading platform.
Here are some info from their website:
ActivTrades® is located in London and registered with the Financial Service Authority under ref nr 434413. We offer direct access brokerage on all major financial markets combined with the latest and best integrated platforms/solutions for trading Futures, Options, CFDs and Forex instruments.
Direct access to the market.
ActivTrades® provides quick and reliable access for trading the following instruments:
- Futures and Options on all major markets like CME, CBOT, NYMEX, COMEX, LIFFE, EUREX, IDEM and Euronext, including open outcry markets.
- CFDs on most traded futures, including CFDs on stock indexes, interest rates and commodities, with guaranteed stops and narrow spreads.
- Forex trading on as many as 28 amongst the most traded currency pairs, plus Gold and Silver, with narrow spreads, competitive swap rates and guaranteed stops.
We allow futures, CFD and Forex trading with extremely low margin requirements. Our platforms display real-time market prices and depth of market screens where provided, using the very latest routing and risk technologies. We pride ourselves on lightning-fast execution and confirmation supported by our dedicated customer service team. Forex and CFDs are traded through MetaTrader4.
(*)
I am going to base the following view with a certain definition of trend following: entering trades when the market start to go in a certain way, maintaining the open trades as long as the market still move in the same direction, and finally exit the trades when the expected trend discontinued. Purely following. The purest form of this strategy can be seen in Curtis’ white paper that was able to be downloaded freely in his website several years ago. Another form of a pure trend following system can be found in Michael Covel’s first book.
So..
In my experience, trading intraday in the FX market by purely following the trend like that, wouldn’t work as good as when we do a pure trend following system in the daily timeframe. The volatility behavior of the intraday price movement would kill the system by producing too many whipsaws. Even if we used some advanced entry technique to exploit a running trend by using multiple entry like what the turtles do, the wild volatility in intraday FX market is a beast can not be tamed with that prescription.
Using a pure trend following system to trade the intraday FX market would be like asking Mr. Bean cleaning your office desk. It would be such a terrible mess. lol.
Intraday market has its own characteristic, thus need to be handled with different approach.
Would elaborate more into that in another posts next time.
(*)
.
After reading my online buddy’s blog entry about MAE/MFE analysis, i thought it’d be worth posting this note about how we calculate stop loss level based on ATR (Average True Range).
Using a fix n pips distance for SL and/or TP is the simplest way a trader would do. But sometimes, the market would perform differently from time to time. Sometimes the market moves wildly with longer candle body, sometimes it moves very calmly with a very low volatility. A fix n pips SL/TP wouldn’t fit into the always changing market’s volatility behavior.
Moreover, we surely want to test a strategy in several different currency pairs. And because each pair would have different volatility behavior, using an ATR-derived SL/TP level would provide us with a system that can literally self-fit into any kind of volatility behavior.
These are some sample lines from our strategy. It calculates ATR first:
atr_SL = iATR(Symbol(), 0, prm_normalization_atr_period, 1) * prm_SL2atr_ratio;
and then this atr_SL value is used to calculate SL distances as follows:
stoploss = NormalizeDouble(Ask + atr_SL, Digits);
so the value of the SL distance would be based on ATR, not a fix n pips.
(*)
We have noticed a significant difference in the performance of our systems in several brokers. We have been wondering what may be the cause of it. When we examined the situation more closely, we found that an exact same algorithm has produced fewer trades in a more-filtered price feed environment.
How can this happen? Well, generally, the OTC FX market is a bilateral market, between the market-maker type broker with the traders. Thus the price quoted by each brokers would not be the exact same price. Some brokers apply some filtering algorithm for their feed, creating a smoother chart that may effect the performance of certain trading systems.
So, we have just added some adjustment into one of our algorithm, by adding/subtracting a certain pips off the trigger level as can be seen in the picture below:
(*)
