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In my previous article we discussed, what is an EA and their benefits. To read up on their disadvantages please follow the link to an article written by my colleague Daniel Vary here. Today we are going to discuss how you would use a VPS to enhance the use of an EA, especially if you are running various EAs simultaneously.

What is a VPS? A virtual private server (VPS) is a virtual program sold as a service by an Internet hosting service. The virtual dedicated server (VDS) also has a similar meaning.

A virtual private server runs its own copy of an operating system (OS), and customers may have superuser-level access to that operating system instance, so they can install almost any software that runs on that OS. For many purposes it is functionally equivalent to a dedicated physical server and, being software-defined, can be created and configured much more easily. Depending on the resources that you choose, the location of the server, the virtualization technology, and the quality of your service, the price of your VPS will change.

GO Markets provides a VPS to all its clients, it’s a free trading tool we make available which would otherwise come with a monthly fee. Why would traders use a VPS and what advantages do they offer? As a trader who is looking to incorporate an Expert Advisor in their trading strategy, they may well need the use of a VPS, this helps to facilitate a smooth working condition for one or several EAs running simultaneously and to run as effectively as possible.

An Expert Advisor is a tool that is programmed to work 24/7, it is imperative that the running of your trading system and the vessel which it operates in i.e. computer or laptop is not disrupted, go offline or lose power, otherwise you will find that your EA won’t be able to operate, open, close trades or do whatever you intend to do with it. A simple advantage to think about, is purely that a VPS enhances the EAs capabilities and with it, it may improve your trading goals. A VPS facilitates a smooth and quick link to a reliable server, that means it keeps the connection alive for as long as possible to allow the EA to do its job, getting access to a reliable server should be your highest priority, especially given the nature of how fast paced markets like Forex markets can be.

Choosing a VPS provider? There are few important points that you need to look into when choosing the type of VPS you want to acquire. There are some key features to look understand to get a VPS that will fit within your EAs specifications, your trading strategy and style.

We will look at the specific features of the VPS shortly but first you need to consider which Operating System OS you like your VPS to run on, Windows or Linux? Linux is an open-source operating system and is cheaper than windows. The Windows VPS hosting can be preferred if you are developing in.NET or if you have applications that are designed for the Windows platform.

RAM – It stands for random-access memory. It means that your computer RAM is essentially short-term memory where data is stored as the processor needs it. The Ideal RAM for a VPS for this purpose would be 4 GB.

If you are running several EAs, which use up more than the available RAM, then may need to look for a bigger VPS or simply add another VPS on another account. CPU – Central processing unit, is a principal part of any digital computer system, generally composed of the main memory, control unit, and arithmetic-logic unit. They have proved to work smoothly even at peak times depending on the quality and size of the processor.

You need to have 14nm architecture with a multi-core for multitasking but a 6vCPU works in most normal cases. Hard disk HDD – The traditional hard disk storage space will always be bigger and more inexpensive. But a solid-state drive is recommended for a VPS hosting.

They are fast at rebooting; the performance is certainly huge and transfer speeds are more than the traditional disks. The SSDs are resilient during power failures, which makes them a perfect fit for VPS hosting. A faster hard drive is necessary because even if the RAM and CPU are fast you need an equally faster storage drive to service those requests Go Markets VPS As a valuable client of GO Markets, you can get access to a VPS once you have a live account with us.

Simply, by applying for one via your Client Portal. The VPS runs on both MT4 and MT5 systems and allows you to execute trades using EAs, quicker and easier. GO Markets offers free monthly VPS access to clients completing a minimum trade volume of US$1m per calendar month (approx. 5 round turn FX lots).

If this volume is not met, a VPS service fee will be applied per month which will be charged from trading account. Please see below the specifications of our VPS below. Our VPS is a Shared Hosting, managed Cloud based solutions running on Windows 2016.

Sources: Wikipedia, Babypips, GO Markets, operavps.com, www.websitebuilderexpert.com,

Expert Advisors are programs which are configured to execute trades or read market price movements. When a parameter is met or triggered, it commands the EA to open or close trades on your behalf whilst you are otherwise engaged or sleeping. EAs are compatible to be used on the Metatrader 4 and 5 systems.

Algorithmic trading is a method of executing orders using automated pre-programmed trading instructions accounting for variables such as time, price, and volume. This type of trading attempts to leverage the speed and computational resources of computers relative to human traders. In the twenty-first century, algorithmic trading has been gaining traction with both retail and institutional traders.

It is widely used by investment banks, pension funds, mutual funds, hedge funds that may need to spread out the execution of a larger order or perform trades too fast for human traders to react to. It is now also widely available to retail clients. A study in 2019 showed that around 92% of trading in the Forex market was performed by trading algorithms rather than humans.

What are the advantages of using EA’s? Timesaving – The Forex market is open 24 hours. As a trader you are always looking for an opening in the market for you to execute an order, however, as a human you need to be able to sleep to operate normally, especially if you want to live a healthy life.

With an EA in place, you can time the market, set alerts, watch various markets simultaneously, set open and close trades yourself or allow it to open and close trades on your behalf. For a lot of forex traders who’d like to profit from market movements during a particular trading session but are stuck in a different time zone, using an expert advisor means that they don’t need to worry about trading sleep for pips. Emotionless Trading – The market is wholly affected by emotion, whether the emotion makes you want to buy or sell an asset is down to how you understand the information or how you perceive the charts.

With emotion you can either be gripped in a circle of greed or a loss of confidence which can cloud your thinking and deviate from a trusted strategy. An EA does not suffer from these as it just needs to meet various mathematical parameters to work. Expert advisors are wired to stick to system commands and take valid trade signals, without feeling pain from losses or joy from wins.

Backtesting - Another advantage of having an expert advisor is the ease of conducting backtests, particularly on an MT4 platform. In fact, Babypips have a short tutorial on how to backtest and EA on MT4 and you’d be surprised to know that it just takes a few clicks to see how a system fared over several years. This is mainly used, to make sure that the EA you have acquired, works in the way you want it to work before letting it loose on your live account with real money at stake.

Quick and Flexible – EAs can open and close trades in a blink of an eye; whilst humans tend to second guess these actions by taking price movements and reading indicators, an EA is built to take these decisions with mathematical precision. Depending on the EA you are also able to check multiple markets and have various EAs on one system at the same time. Some of these features are also extremely useful for short term traders who trade on smaller movements of 1 – minute to 5 – minutes charts.

Human Error and Accessibility – Human error have cost many a trader in years past, opening the wrong direction on trades, making the size of the position too big or too small, or opening a trade whilst misreading the technical can all have a negative effect on your trading experience. Having an EA can limit these errors as EAs are programmed to your specifications and they would never deviate from that, unless they are not set properly to begin with, but this is the reason why you would always backtest! EAs are available with a decent variety and with great accessibility to these programs, it is no hard to see why they are becoming the automated popular choice for traders.

In my follow up article on this subject, I will talk about the use of a VPS and popular EAs. If you like to incorporate your MT4/5 systems with EAs, you can talk to one of our Account Managers who will be happy to talk you through the process, feel free to contact us on +61 3 8566 7680 or email me directly on [email protected] Sources: Tradersunion.com, IG, Wikipedia, Babypips.

What is an ETF Most people have heard of ETFs but not everyone knows what they are. An ETF is an Exchange Traded Fund and they are extremely popular amongst retail investors and novice investors. Companies such as Beta shares, Vanguard, Blackrock and others create and manage these holdings on behalf of investors.

An ETF is a collections of stocks that is grouped together to generally replicate the structure and weighting of an index such as the ASX200 or the Nasdaq. Alternatively, an ETF can also be a collections of assets that represents a sector or industry such as an Energy ETF. The market for ETFs has grown substantially with new ETFs being created regularly.

The value for ETFs in the USA by the end of November 2021 was worth 3 Trillion dollars. The advantages of investing in ETFs is that they are generally well diversified and that they don’t require constant administration or management. In addition, they are seen as being relatively passive as holders of shares of the ETF do not need to manage the buying and selling of the holdings of the ETF.

Many ETFs offer dividend reinvestment plans included many investors will not look at their holdings for a long time. The truth of ‘Passive’ Investing Are ETFs really passive? The reality is ETFs require a great deal of management and administration.

The managers of the ETFs must constantly adjust their holdings accurately to reflect either the rules of the ETF or the weighting of the companies on the index. Therefore instead of the ETFs seemingly operating independently they are actually constantly changing all the time. Some ETFs will adjust by buying or selling shares at the end of the trading day.

As indices rebalance, usually every three month, six months or 12 months, the ETF must reflect those changes. The ‘Flow’ on effect The issue is when an Index rebalances, the ETF is required to buy or sell the stocks that are being removed or added. As ETFs have such large holdings in the individual companies their buying and selling can often have quite a strong effect on the price flow of the shares.

This problem is exacerbated with ETFs that hold small cap companies. These smaller companies are even more at risk of a run by an influx of money coming into an ETF’s buying/selling patterns. This can lead to undesirable outcomes as the managers of the ETF must fight themselves to reach their required buy/sell volume of assets.

Potential Issues Blackrock is one of the companies that creates and hold ETFs in various sectors. One of its ETFs tracks 30 energy stocks. At one stage it held 8% of the shares of one of its holdings of one stock.

The cashflows from investors into the ETF were artificially driving up the price of the stock. Essentially, with so many shares to buy and sell, the ETF is ‘fighting itself ‘to fill its orders. This sees a very sharp increase/decrease in price usually with large volume.

In response to this unique problem the S&P Dow Jones Index in consultation with Blackrock created new rules for holdings to be added to the ETF and improve liquidity. For traders, ETFs create potential trading opportunities because as the old saying says “follow the money”. The ‘liquidity vacuum’ that ETFs create can often be quite aggressive moves to a stock’s price action substantially.

Trading FOREX, equities, commodities, and any other asset can be an emotional rollercoaster. With so many different emotions and external factors difficulties impacting a trade, it is crucial that before any trade is executed a trading plan is produced to minimise the impact of the ‘noise’. Generating the Idea The first step to any plan is to generate a trading idea.

Trade ideas, come from one of three sources. A fundamental source, a technical source, or a mix of both. What does this mean exactly?

Well, when generating ideas from a fundamental perspective, a trader can generate idea based on economic events, monetary policy from a Central bank or company relevant information just to name a few. From a technical perspective, a trader may find that an asset is trading near a potential support or resistance level or developing into a breakout pattern. Alternatively, the price may have touched an important moving average which indicates it may be ready to trade.

Traders can also put these ideas together to come up with even more robust trading ideas. Background economic factors and sector analysis Before entering a trade, a good trader should have at the very least a rudimentary understanding of the relevant sector or economic factors that may influence the trade. For example, a trader decides to trade the AUDUSD currency pair.

The trader has seen that the price is approaching a short-term support point and decides to buy the pair expecting the price to bounce of the level. However, the trader is not aware that the Federal Reserve has just increased interest rates which has increased the value of the USD. Consequently, the price goes against the trader.

Technical breakdown Prior to entering any trade, the trader should analyse the price chart and set up relevant support and resistance levels. This allows the trader to have a clear idea of key supply and demand zones for the asset before the emotions of the actual trade become prevalent. To effectively go about this step, support and resistance levels can be analysed on multiple time frames to gain an even greater edge. [caption id="attachment_272243" align="alignnone" width="2560"] Business Team Investment Entrepreneur Trading discussing and analysis graph stock market trading,stock chart concept[/caption] Entry condition Having a trade idea is one aspect however having a clear entry criterion will help reduce the impact of emotion when watching the trade unfold.

Some examples of potential entries conditions can be related to a break and retest of a certain level for an entry or waiting for a specific candlestick pattern. Furthermore, an entry may also be defined by a disproportionate increase in volume supporting a breakout. Exit Conditions Like determining entry conditions having pre planned exit points can improve the management of emotions during also trade whilst also enhancing risk management.

Setting take profit targets/stop loss areas will help ensure that a trade is well structured even before initiating the trade. Having pre-determined exit points can also help determine if a trade is worth entering in the first place as it allows for a determination of the potential risk reward before execution. Risk management No matter whether the trade is a scalp, swing trade or longer-term investment, each should have clear risk management guidelines.

Good risk management involves the use of stop losses and correct sizing of a trade. One method that can be effective is to have a maximum amount of the total account that you are willing to lose per trade. This could be a percentage figure or a fixed amount.

For example, if the total account size is $10,000 and you decide that the maximum loss per trade is 1%. This means that the maximum loss per trade would be $100. The next step is to then set stop loss.

The stop loss in many cases should be independent of the actual maximum risk amount. The stop loss level should be calculated before the sizing. Once the stop loss is set the size of the trade can be determined.

Risk management is perhaps the most crucial element of the trading plan because minimising losses is crucial to any long-term success in trading. Whilst having a clear trading plan will not guarantee success it will help remove many behavioral biases that can impact on a trade.

Imagine having access to technical analysis across all the major markets, updated around the clock in real-time and of the same calibre that investment banks around the world receive daily. Then consider having all your favourite Forex and Commodity markets analysed with a trade entry, exit, profit taking levels and a price projection. And what if you could have the analysis running live on your MT4 charts providing trading opportunities throughout your trading day, allowing you to focus on your position sizing?

It may sound like a pipedream, but in fact, this is what you have sitting at your fingertips for those who qualify (don’t worry, qualification is quite simple). What we are talking about is the technical analysis service provided by the research house, Trading Central, and they have been helping traders with their service since 1999. So who are Trading Central and how can they help me?

Trading Central is an independent and leading provider of financial research and technical analysis of financial products. Their approach is simple yet very affective – they combine a technical analysis approach to determine price targets using a range of trading indicators. They now provide their services to more than 100 global financial institutions in 30 countries around the globe.

We are proud to say we have partnered with Trading Central as a result of their proven track record in delivering high-quality analysis of the financial markets and in particular, they extensively cover the Forex and Commodity markets for qualified GO Markets clients. Top 3 ways you can benefit from their research 1. Daily Newsletters with trade alerts Delivered twice a day, the daily Forex technical analysis e­mail service provides you with visual and technical analysis newsletters that detail trading strategies, predictions, commentaries as well as key levels (support, resistance, target, stop pivots) on multiple time frames.

The newsletter provides short to medium term analysis on the following products: AUDUSD, EURJPY, EURUSD, GBPUSD, USDJPY, HANG SENG, SPI 200, & SPOT GOLD. We regularly get feedback on how handy it is to have the key pivot points outlined clearly on each of the instruments they analyse. 2. Web Portal / Research Platform Access Trading Central’s global research directly through the Trading Central web portal.

Receive up-to-the-minute technical analysis on forex, indices and precious metals as Trading Central provides updates throughout the trading day. If you’re a regular technical analysis user who knows what you are looking for, the web portal is a quick and easy way to search for intra-day, short and mid-term updates. There’s a ‘search box’ for instant access, or you can select a report on individual asset classes (Indices, Forex and Commodities).

For those traders who have specific criteria, the web portal has pre-made filters allowing for a quick search and the ability to customise the screen. In addition, you are able to have instant access to the information that matters to you by creating a customizable watch list. 3. Technical Analysis Plug In The Technical Analysis plug-in in MT4 is a user friendly interface offering actionable content and customizable timeframes, allowing traders to fill in orders and program trades based on levels provided by Trading Central.

The MT4 plugin displays Trading Central’s technical analysis strategies, views and market commentaries, as well as Trading Central’s key levels (support, resistance, targets, stop pivots) directly on your MT4 platform. It also allows you to execute orders directly from your MT4 charts based on the levels provided by Trading Central. So whether you’re a novice or an experienced trader, Trading Central can be used to either provide original trade ideas, or provide a handy second opinion.

All major countries’ economies have one thing in common; they are all subject to a central bank. Here in Australia is no different, we have the RBA Reserve Bank of Australia. Their roles are largely the same everywhere: a key role of central banks is to conduct monetary policy to achieve price stability (low and stable inflation) and to help manage economic fluctuations.

Central banks conduct monetary policy by adjusting the supply of money, generally through open market operations. For instance, a central bank may reduce the amount of money by selling government bonds under a “sale and repurchase” agreement, thereby taking in money from commercial banks. The purpose of such open market operations is to steer short-term interest rates, which in turn influence longer-term rates and overall economic activity.

Another key factor is that they have a hand in influencing Interest Rates. This is used to stimulate economies and keep inflation under control (or at least try to do so). For traders, keeping in touch with what our central banks say is hugely important as this can ultimately help you make a profit, or it can turn trades into losses.

This brings me nicely on to perhaps the biggest, or at least one of the most influential roles of the Central Banks: they directly or indirectly have one of the biggest effects on commerce, business and currency fluctuations all over the word. The FED. Keeping an eye on your Economic Calendar, can be beneficial if you are a trader who likes to keep up with the latest reports on the finance of a country, or in this case The FED.

The 26 th January 2022 Federal Reserve meeting might be the single most critical event in determining the future of the economy (directly in the US and indirectly to the rest of the world), here’s a breakdown into why is so important (and maybe why you should care). 2021 was a year of crazy growth, if you bought Stocks, Crypto or Real Estate in 2020, early 2021, you would have personally seen considerable gains compared to recent years. Economic boom? Sounds great!

Unless it goes too far, and the economy overheats. An economy which overheats, is expanding at a rate that is unsustainable in the long term, a red flag that accompanies that is high inflation. It is no secret that the US (and other major economies) has experience high inflation in last few months.

The FED is now faced with a critical decision: increase interest rates or keep them largely the same. Fed Chair Powell is expected to signal to the markets which way the FED is leaning. Two possible outcomes: Do not raise interest rates – Likely the engine keeps running and keeps overheating.

More record highs for the S&P, Stocks, Crypto, Real Estate. Asset prices keep rising… And inflation keeps rising, food becomes more expensive, fuel becomes more expensive, etc. etc. Raise interest rates – Effective way to slow the economy down.

The “eeek” is, it can deepen the current dip being seen in the markets and potential cause a recession. Economists often talk about a soft landing. It means a slow down of the economy without a crash.

A soft landing is easier when inflation is controlled (see below). However, this has usually successfully been done when inflation is under control and is impossible once inflation hits crazy highs – or once the economy has overheated. (See below) In short, if Powell advises that a series of aggressive hikes is coming, a recession becomes likely and expect movements in the markets whether you are trading a USD pair of the S&P. The FED and its policies drive our economies and understanding their roles, its history and their future plans, can help shape your economic future.

Update: The Federal Reserve concluded Wednesday its January monetary policy meeting, indicating that a potential rate hike could come in March. The major stock market averages initially jumped around 2 p.m. ET, when the Fed released its policy statement.

However, stocks gave up those gains and turned lower as Chairman Jerome Powell answered questions from reporters. Christian Ramos Sources: Wikipedia, Kalshi, CNBC, RBA