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How much are you worth per hour?

In this video:
01:55    Income benefits from trading FOREX
05:00    2.2% gain without any extra work
07:11    NZD – big mover of the week!

How much are you worth in your job per hour?

It’s something that as FOREX traders luckily we don’t really need to worry about and I’ll share more with you right now.

Hi traders it’s Andrew Mitchem here, the FOREX Trading Coach – and today, is Friday the 11th of July.

And I want to talk about the differences between most people – having a job where you get paid so much per hour and FOREX traders. Because we’re a little bit more like self-employed people where the hourly rate is not such a big issue. When you have a normal let’s say 9:00 – 5:00 job, you get paid so much per hour and that hourly rate can depend on certain things like what type of job you do, how far up let’s say the corporate ladder you are or whether you’re doing a technical job or a manual job, how much experience you have. It could be to do with what part of the country you live and what part of the world you live as there are different hourly rates for the same job but in different parts and so it’s very much dependent on that.

The good thing as I suppose you know, you work X number of hours, you get X number of dollars or pounds or Yen or whatever currency you’re paid in. The downside is of course and that with most jobs is that if you want to increase your wages and have more money, if that is what your goal is, then you generally have to work either more hours to get more money per hour or over the course of a week or you have to work yourself up through to a higher paying job which can very often mean more stress, more time away from your home and your family and that type of thing. And so having a high paying job is not always the very best thing in terms of a high hourly rate.

The beauty that I’ve always been attracted to the FOREX market:

In terms of the benefits of the income side of things from trading FOREX is that the quality of the trades that you take are the thing that really makes the difference. It’s not so much how many hours you spend staring at screens and charts, reading through forums or anything like that. That really doesn’t have very much of a bearing at all once you understand how to trade. You know it’s not to do with, “Oh, I’ve spent 10 hours today staring at charts therefore I’m likely to make X number of dollars or percent.” That doesn’t have any relevance.

I’ll give you some examples from a webinar that I held for my clients yesterday.

  • It was almost about a 2 ½ hour webinar. It was a very long webinar. Really good one with a lot of great questions asked and some trades taken. There are just brilliant ways to learn to trade in real time. It’s the live webinar where I trade on my charts here behind me in front of my clients on a live account and take trades in real time.

  •  I had a client who took a trade on the 30-minute charts. It lasted for 3 bars, that’s 1 ½ hours and he made a 4.4 reward to risk trade on a 30-minute chart. So that if you let’s say you’re risking 0.5 of 1% per trade – that’s a 2.2% return. Now it lasted 3 bars which is an 1½. It doesn’t mean to say he was sat there watching it for 3 bars or 1½ hour. But you know it’s just put the trade on potentially leave it. You might want to monitor it but even if he sat there for the whole 1½ hour which he didn’t. But even if he did it, you know that’s a 2.2% account return just in that time. Now there maybe a number of hours or it could be several days between a quality setup like that again. Who knows?  It just depends on the current market conditions.

  • I had a trader on a one-minute chart say to me, “Hey Andrew I’m taking a setup. It was a sell trade on the British Pound/US Dollar (GBP/USD) on the one-minute chart.” He made a 1.75 to 1 reward to risk trade in 7 minutes. So with 0.5% risk on that trade – that’s almost 0.9% account gain (almost a 1% account gain) in 7 minutes just by identifying the correct chart setup and taking the trade.

At the other end of the extreme I had a trade that I shared with my clients that was taken on the weekly charts and it took a number of weeks to actually come through and to hit full profit. It was a sell trade on the Euro/Canadian Dollar (EUR/CAD) from a number of weeks ago.

But that trade, even though it was on the weekly chart and it took a number of weeks to fulfill in terms of get through to its full profit, it didn’t take me anymore time to place that trade. It wasn’t harder, I didn’t have to go to work anymore. I didn’t have to stay late at the job (you know work weekends!) or whatever it might be to take that trade.

A number of weeks ago, I placed a sell limit on the Euro/Canadian Dollar (EUR/CAD), put it on there with an expiry of one week so if it didn’t fill as a limit order within one week it got expired. It did fill and it’s taken a number of weeks to actually come through and hit full profit on a sell trade. It didn’t take any extra work but I still made a 2.2% gain on my account from that one trade and being a sell trade also in Euro/Canadian Dollar (EUR/CAD). It paid swap as well so it was actually getting paid extra for each day that the trade remained in the market. But it was a 2.2% account gain for just maybe a couple of minutes of work back when I identified the trade setup and placed the trade.

So it just goes to show what can be achieved and by placing high quality trades – not the number of trades. Taking 20 trades a day doesn’t really mean a lot (unless of course you’re getting most of them right) but it’s all to do with taking the quality of the trades – the high return trades, the high probability trades. When you get that right and the returns can just be fantastic.

You know let’s say you made a 1% gain on average per week even without compounding it’s pretty much a 50% gain throughout the whole year (assuming you’re trading 45 or 50 weeks of the year) but even without compounding it’s 50% gain per year. It’s a pretty phenomenal amount of a return when you consider other options that you have out there as an investor. Yet if you can do that on a $1,000 account, you can do that on a $10,000 account or a $20,000 or $50,000 or a $100,000 or a million dollar account if you had a million dollars or you’ve traded a million dollars in a fund. So, of course it’s slightly different in terms of the whole mental approach of the higher figures in an account but in theory the actual placing the trade doesn’t take you ten or a hundred or a thousand times longer. It doesn’t make it a thousand times harder. It’s the actual placing of the quality setup trade that’s the vital thing.

So that’s one of the many, many benefits to us as FOREX traders.

Lastly I just need to mention the big mover of the week yet again is the New Zealand dollar (NZD) against the US it’s now gone over the 0.88 level. It’s just stalling a bit yesterday potentially today Friday might just come back slightly but overall it’s still in a huge uptrend. It’s now broken through the 2011 swing high and it’s now currently at around 0.8820 I think when I last looked a few minutes ago.

And so a very, very strong movements up in the New Zealand dollar as I’ve been predicting for a long, long time now but you will see that in my daily strength and weakness analysis I’ve been looking for strength in the NZD/USD and NZD/CAD for a lot of the times over the last few weeks. And it’s just gone from strength to strength based on the quality of the economy here – high interest rates here which for us borrowing is not always a great thing but in terms of the quality of the environment as a Country to live there; political stability, the safety, the employment.

Everything about New Zealand right now is on a high and it’s going extremely well so that is related and reflected I should say in the economy and therefore in the New Zealand dollar (NZD) as a currency. So whether it carries on through that 0.88 level and up to 0.89 and 0.90 against the US, it probably will. It may not initially; it may just have a bit of a pullback but it’s candle patterns that we need to see in order to give ourselves a new entry looking for any potential long trades there.

Just wanted to put up a bit of a plug-in for this great Country but it’s all reflected in the prices.

So have yourself a fantastic weekend and I look forward to bringing more information to you this time next week. Bye for now.

This is Andrew Mitchem from The FOREX Trading Coach.