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Forex Videos

Beginners – Analysis Feature of MT4 Helps You Fund A Trading Strategy!


Beginners: analysis feature of MT4 to help find a trading strategy

Thank you for joining this forex academy educational video. 

In this session, we will be looking at an analysis feature of the MT4 platform, which helps traders to find a winning trading strategy.

The Metatrader mt4 platform is one of the widest the most available trading platforms on earth.  It is fully customisable….

And there are a host of technical analysis tools available in the Navigator section, which are freely available from most brokers, and which can be added to, either freely found ones on the internet or paid tools, which can be mostly found on the mql5 website.

On this one-hour chart of the US dollar CAD pair, we have selected three widely used and popular technical analysis tools from the navigator section, which are Bollinger bands, moving average convergence divergence commonly known as the MACD, and the stochastic oscillator indicator.

 Although as a new trader, we must consider many factors when trading, such as fundamental analysis, the time of day while trading, whether or not economic data is due to be released, whether or not political or policymaker decisions, which might affect the particular currency pair we are interested in, are about to make an announcement, which could affect our trade, without doubt, the most critical aspect to trading, and which has the most influence on the movement of a currency exchange rate, is technical analysis.  Technical analysis often overrides fundamental analysis and even economic data releases.

While we cannot be in control, as traders, of fundamental reasons for why a particular currency pair is moving in any particular direction, and nor can we control political events, we can become masters of technical analysis, and where we can study our charts and seek out regular and consistent screen trading patterns which can stack the odds in our favour with regard to consistent winning trades, and with regard to knowing where to place tight stop losses to maintain the health of our account balance.

Now chart patterns have a habit of reoccurring, and technical analysis traders know this.  Therefore, as new traders, we must find regular and consistent winning setups, and this takes a lot of time as a new trader, and this requires a lot of patience and a whole lot of studying.

Only when we have found regular setups, which consistently work, can we then build a successful trading methodology, which should be adhered to.

Because these chart patterns are always changing, we can take advantage of the drawing tools such as the ‘’draw text label’’ as highlighted, and where we can make notes on the chart, and because of the flexibility of the MetaTrader platform…..

 

If we right-click on the chart, we have the option to save the chart as a picture for further analysis at a later time.  

As we see here, to save the chart as a picture, we can set the desired parameters, including the size, and then click ok….

You will then be asked where to save it on your computer, select your destination folder, and save it.

This saves an awful lot of time and alleviates the need to scroll back through hours and hours of charts just to find the setup which you may have been interested in. 

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Forex Videos

Beginners How to save a profile in Metatrader MT4!


Beginners: How to save a profile in Metatrader MT4

Thank you for joining this forex academy educational video.

In this session, we will show you how to save a profile in the Metatrader MT4 platform.

The MetaTrader mt4 platform is one of the most widely used technical analysis platforms in the world.  Some traders use it for technical analysis only, and will trade on a different type of platform. And some prefer to use it for both analysis and direct trading.

It is used the world over and is extremely reliable and robust.  The platform comes with the widest range of technical analysis tools than any other platform available, and most brokers will offer the platform free of charge. The reason it is so widely used is because of its ease of customization and the huge range of technical analysis tools available both free of charge and to purchase on the MQL5 market place. 

This is a 1-hour chart of the US dollar to the Canadian dollar, and the technical chart setup is

……called the Williams, and it is a custom setup, which is free with the platform download by most brokers.

Let’s say we have an interest in the Canadian dollar, and we want to see what the general directional bias is for the currency, and where here we can see that the Canadian dollar is currently losing ground against the US dollar…..

And here where we have added a couple of other Canadian dollar cross currencies pairs, including the CAD / Swiss and CAD / JPY on 1-hour charts, and we can tell that the general bias is for a weaker Canadian dollar across all three currency pairs.

The cool thing about the MetaTrader platform is that we can save this as a profile and come back to it later if we want to trade another currency pair.

First, we click on the profiles tab at the top of the platform.

 Then highlight the save profile tab and click on it.

 And then enter a new profile name. Here we have called it the Canadian dollar analysis.

 And finally, click on the ok tab, and the profile will be saved.

 

 

Finally, to find all of your profiles, simply highlight the profiles tab at the top of the MetaTrader platform, and then scroll down to find the one you want. Here at the bottom, as highlighted,  is the Canadian dollar analysis profile, which we have just saved. 

You can see a whole host of similar profiles that we have already saved, including all of the major currency pairs, and where it is very simple and quick to move in and out various saved profiles to maximize opportunities of finding trading opportunities quickly, rather than building profiles each time you have an interest in a particular currency pair.

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Crypto Videos

Craig Wright (Claims To Be Satoshi Nakamoto) Threatens Legal Action Take my Bitcoin Whitepaper Down!


Craig Wright Threatens Legal Action: “Take my Bitcoin Whitepaper Down!”

Craig Wright, the self-proclaimed Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto, has threatened legal action against the owners of two Bitcoin websites he accused of stealing his whitepaper and his other intellectual property.

As announced on Jan 21, Bitcoin.org and Bitcoincore.org had received allegations of copyright infringement coming from none other than Craig Wright and his lawyers. The counsel reportedly claimed that Wright, as the inventor of Bitcoin, was the legal copyright holder of the official Bitcoin whitepaper, owned the Bitcoin name and trademark, and the two aforementioned websites.

While the owner of Bitcoin.org, a developer known only as Cobra, has stated that he refuses to be intimidated by the threat of “false allegations,” the owner of Bitcoincore.org has already adhered to the request.

Cobra then stated: “Unfortunately, without consulting with us, Bitcoin Core developers removed the Bitcoin whitepaper from bitcoincore.org, in response to the allegations of copyright infringement, lending credence to these completely false claims.”

He then added: “The Bitcoin Core website was modified to remove all references to the whitepaper, the local copy of the whitepaper PDF was deleted, and with under 2 hours of public review, the change was merged.”

Things got heated when the owner of Bitcoincore.org, as well as the current maintainer of Bitcoin’s code, Wladimir J. van der Laan, responded quickly, telling his Twitter followers that this issue was not something he cares deeply about. 

He stated: “So let this be clear: I’m happy to maintain Bitcoin core’s code, but I will not personally be a martyr for BTC. It’s completely up to you as Bitcoiners to protect it.”


Van der Laan added: “This thing is all about decentralization and distributed systems, rather than personal macho posturing. I have no interest in it and am definitely not paid enough to take a stance.”

As the two Bitcoin core websites decided to take vastly different approaches, we will see which one was better and why. In the meantime, the Bitcoin whitepaper will continue to be hosted on Bitcoin.org, which hopes that other websites would follow them in resisting Craig Wright’s attempts at intimidation.

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Crypto

Holding Bitcoin Now Is As Safe As Gold & Bonds!


Holding Bitcoin is as Safe as Owning Gold and Bonds – Anthony Scaramucci

Anthony Scaramucci, the head of SkyBridge Capital as well as former White House communications director, believes that Bitcoin’s value proposition has strengthened ever since governments have addressed many of the risks that are associated with the digital asset. 

In an opinion article published by CNN, Scaramucci and his fellow SkyBridge executive Brett Messing argued that Bitcoin had become a viable option for long-term investors seeking refuge from inflation. The authors also stated that holding Bitcoin is far less risky today than it was just a couple of years ago when regulations and infrastructure were underdeveloped.

Bitcoin’s growth has “caused government, as well as institutions, to step in and address many of the risks that are often associated with the digital currency,” the authors wrote, pointing to the Office of the Comptroller of Currency’s decision to enable all banks to provide cryptocurrency services.

They added: “Increased regulations, improved infrastructure, as well as access to financial institutions such as Fidelity, have made Bitcoin investments just as safe as owning bonds and commodities such as gold, which are used to balance portfolios.”

SkyBridge Capital made a big splash in the news last month when it applied with the US SEC to launch a Bitcoin hedge fund. Its SkyBridge Bitcoin Fund LP launched just a few weeks later, with Fidelity serving as custodian, while Ernst & Young were chosen to handle the auditing.

SkyBridge reportedly invested in Bitcoin during Nov and Dec 2020, allowing it to accumulate a substantial position in the cryptocurrency prior to its parabolic spike. By the time the fund was launched, on Jan 4 of this year, SkyBridge had claimed its BTC exposure was worth around $310 million.

Institutional capital is considered a major catalyst behind Bitcoin’s 300% rally in 2020, which brought its price to a new all-time high of $42,000 on Jan 8. Smart money investors are beginning to view Bitcoin as digital gold rather than just a speculative asset. 

 

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Crypto Videos

Largest Russian Bank Sberbank Launching its Stablecoin in Spring 2021!


Largest Russian Bank Sberbank Launching its Stablecoin in Spring 2021

Sberbank, the largest Russian state-owned bank, has reportedly filed an application with the Bank of Russia regarding the launch of a blockchain platform for its “Sbercoin” stablecoin.

The director of the transaction business at Sberbank, Sergey Popov, announced the news on Jan 21 at a local financial event.

At the “Digital transformation and prospects for regulating the digital economy” event, Popov stated that Sberbank applied with the Russian central bank in early January, explaining that this kind of registration procedure usually takes no longer than 45 days. If everything goes by plan, the bank may launch its platform by spring 2021, the official said. However, Sberbank is still working on specifics about how to tax Sbercoin:

“There is a high probability of this project being launched in the spring. However, there is still one more issue that has not been fully resolved, and it is connected to the taxation of digital assets. We hope that this question will soon be resolved.”

Popov also added that Sberbank had completed internal testing to see if the solution they propose works, which it apparently did.

Sberbank broke the news on developing its own Sbercoin token at the end of November 2020, following long-running speculation about these plans. Its latest announcement comes shortly after Russia’s official adoption of the crypto law “On Digital Financial Assets” on Jan 1, 2021.


In late 2020, a member of the Russian State Duma, Anatoly Aksakov, said that the Duma’s Committee on Financial Markets expects that Russian crypto issuance will surge after adopting the country’s new crypto law.

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Crypto Videos

Grayscale About To Unveil Chainlink?


Is Grayscale about to unveil a Chainlink (LINK) trust?

Rumors about Grayscale Investments being set to launch a raft of new products, including a Chainlink (LINK) trust, surfaced in the last week.

A statement from the State of Delaware’s Division of Corporations says that someone set up Grayscale Chainlink Trust on Dec 18, 2020. Basic Attention Token (BAT) trust, Livepeer (LPT) trust, Decentraland (MANA) trust, and a Tezos (XTZ) trust were also set up at the same time.


Grayscale Investments didn’t respond to the rumors and has yet to officially confirm it is behind the filings at all. Some reports tried to cast doubt on the legitimacy of this whole ordeal, as the registered agent for the trusts is not listed as Grayscale Investments, but rather as “Delaware Trust Company.” 

However, the Delaware Trust Company is currently listed on Grayscale’s website as one of its official service providers. On top of that, the same details were used when the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust was initially created in 2013.

With that being said, new trusts are far from certain to launch. A Filecoin (FIL) trust was established two months before the aforementioned trusts and still has not been made public.

Adding to all the uncertainty, a few weeks after the inception of numerous trusts, Grayscale founder and CEO Barry Silbert decided to step down from its position. He was then replaced by Michael Sonnenshein. It is unclear if Sonnenshein will continue with Silbert’s strategy or take the firm in a completely new direction.

Grayscale last made an official filing for a Stellar Lumen (XLM) trust in October 2018 — over two years ago. The Stellar trust was made public around six weeks after its inception.

The Chainlink army has been very vocal about the potential filing, showing its support and speculating on the effect this might have on the LINK’s price.

Chainlink recently flipped Bitcoin Cash and became the eighth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, boasting a value of over $9 billion. 

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Crypto Videos

Crypto News – The Davos Agenda!


Cryptocurrency on the World Economic Forum’s Davos Agenda

The World Economic Forum’s five-day Davos Agenda will include two separate sessions covering cryptocurrency, offering yet another compelling sign that digital assets have put themselves at the forefront of the mainstream consciousness. 

The cryptocurrency sessions, titled Resetting Digital Currencies, will be held on Monday and Thursday. The first one will feature five public speakers, including Hikmet Ersek, president and CEO of Western Union, and Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey.

Thursday’s session features four speakers, including Zhu Min, chairman of the Beijing-based National Institute of Financial Research, and Tharman Shanmugaratnam, a senior minister for the government of Singapore.

“COVID-19 has sped up the shift from cash to digital,” reads the prospectus for both sessions. “Meanwhile, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) are emerging, and will potentially transform how people use money worldwide.”

The prospectus continues:

“What policies, practices, and partnerships are currently needed to leverage the opportunities brought by the rise of digital currencies?”

Davos Agenda is a five-day summit that features some of the world’s leading figures in finance, as well as influential people from various governments. The cryptocurrency sessions fall under the summit’s “Fairer Economies” theme. Apart from this one, other themes include “Tech for Good,” “Healthy Futures,” and “How to Save the Planet.” 

The World Economic Forum is devoting more and more resources to understanding blockchain technology as well as cryptocurrency. The Geneva-based organization even created a cryptocurrency working group. This group published its inaugural review that focused on the various use cases for digital assets “beyond price and speculation” last month.

The Forum’s research stated that blockchain technology is a key driver of “sustainable digital finance.” Blockchain technology and its smart contract capability can unlock “hidden values of legacy digital systems.”


The Forum also devoted its resources to researching central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs. In Jan 2020, the Forum made an announcement that it had developed a framework to help banks with “evaluating, designing and potentially deploying CBDC.” The framework was developed in conjunction with over 40 academic researchers, central banks, and financial institutions.

 

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Forex Videos

Forex USD Forecast this week! Will It Drop Again?


Where for the US Dollar this week? 

Thank you for joining this forex academy educational video.

Today we will be looking at the US dollar index, also known as the DXY, which is a  weighted instrument against other major currencies, including the British pound, the euro, the Swiss Franc, the Canadian dollar, and Australian and New Zealand dollars, and which has been on a major downward trajectory since march 2020, when the pandemic began to take a hold in the United States.

In this daily bear channel, which has been widening due to volatility, a recent floor was established at 89.00, however, the price action was not able to reach resistance line, which may be seen as weakness and uncertainty, and is hovering with a potential pullback to retest the 89.00 level, which, if breached, could cause a push down to 85.00.

Much of this will depend on the slew of economic data coming out of the United States during the forthcoming week, from durable goods and the all-important federal reserve announcement regarding their interest rate policy decision on Wednesday, and the fourth quarter results of the USA gross domestic product, due to be released on Thursday, which will show whether or not there was a continual expansion in the recovery for the ailing American economy during the last quarter of 2020.

Not least forgetting that banks and institutions will be readjusting their investment portfolios for the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021, and also trying to factor how the newly elected president Joe Biden and the change in government, with the democrats back in control, will influence the financial markets.

Certainly, the markets will be cautiously awaiting the US economic calendar which as shown is loaded with high-risk events and we may see some subdued price action until fed meeting on Wednesday where many analysts are predicting no change in policy decision.

 The largest components of the DXY EUR/USD finishing the week up at 1.2170 which added +0.79% last week, 

And the GBP/USD pair which climbed steadily to 1.368 or +0.71%

Therefore, a cautious approach to trading the currency markets this week is a must, as we can expect high volatility and rapid and unexpected changes in in trend direction.

 

 

 

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Forex Videos

FOREX MT4 (meta trader 4) saving Templates!


Beginners – How to save a screen template in Metatrader 4


Thank you for joining this Forex Academy educational video.

 

The Metatrader MT4 platform is one of the most widely used platforms in the world and is fully customisable. 

A great feature that is incredibly time-saving is the ability to save screen templates, which can quickly be added to different asset pairs. This extremely versatile platform comes with its own templates, but most people prefer to adjust them to their own preferences, and this quick tutorial will show you how to do that on a step-by-step basis. 

Here is a standard MT4 1 hour screen chart for the GBPUSD pair.

Firstly, you will need to open your Navigator section to find a wealth of indicators. This can be accessed by pressing Ctrl+ N on your keyboard. 

Then simply drag the indicators you prefer onto your chart, and adjust the parameters and click OK, 

Such as here for the Stochastic, which will then populate your chart. 

By right-clicking on the chart, 

The chart properties will open, and can be able to tweak the parameters to suit. 

Such as the colour of the background or the colours of the bars or candlesticks.

When you have finished building your chart, you can save the changes as a template, in which you will need to right-click on your chart, hover over the Template tab, select save the template, when the second box pops up,

Then give your template a name, and save it. 

The next time you want to use the template for another pair, just open a new chart, such as the EURUSD pair as shown here, and right-click, highlight Template, then click on load template from the pop-up box, 

 

Then simply highlight your saved template and press Open.

And the new chart will automatically be updated with your saved template, thus saving you time.

The templates file is located on your computer by clicking on the File tab on the top left of the platform, then Open data folder.

And you will find it in the templates file folder, as highlighted here.

 

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Forex Videos

Forex Trading Algorithms Part 8 Elements Of Computer Languages For EA Design!


Trading Algorithms VIII – Two RSI algorithms

 

The Relative Strength Index (RSI) was created by Welles Wilder as a momentum oscillator that measures price movements’ speed. The RSI is bounded between zero and 100. According to its author, an overbought condition occurs when the RSI is above 70, whereas an oversold condition is the RSI below 30.  RSI is one of the most popular indicators because of its simplicity and is included in all charting packages.

 

How to compute  the N-period RSI

1.-  go back N bars and compare the Close of that bar with the prior bar’s Close. If positive, add this value to a UP summation variable. If negative, add it to a Dwn summation variable. Do this for every bar in the period.

2.- After all summations have been performed, divide the results by N, the period. This will create an average of up and down changes: avgUp and avgDwn.

3.- The RS is the ratio of avgUP to avgDwn.

RS = avgUP/avgDwn

4.- Finally, the RSI can be calculated by a normalization operation to bounded it between zero and 100:

RSI = 100 – 100/(1-RS)

 

Spotting market tops and bottoms

Welles Wilder designed the RSI with a standard 14-bar period, so it was meant for short-term asset analysis. This indicator works at its best on mean-reverting market states. According to Mr. Wilder’s research, the RSI usually tops/bottoms ahead of the actual market top/bottom.

The basic form of RSI trading is shown in the RSI flowchart below.

RSI Flowchart

 

The basic rules of the System are:

if   RSI(14-period) is below 30:
    Buy on Close
If RSI (14-period) is above 70:
    Sell-short on Close
If position = long:
    If Close > Entry_Price + 3xATR:
        Sell the open position on Close
    if Close < Entry_Price -1 ATR:
        Sell the position on Close
If Position= Short:
    If Close < entry-Price - 3xATR:
        Buy-to-cover the position on Close.
    if Close > Entry_Price - 1 ATR:
        Buy-to-cover the position on Close

And below the code in EasyLanguage,  for Tradestation and Multicharts platforms, with input parameters to allow for optimization of the length, overbought/oversold levels, as well as take-profit and stop-loss levels in the form of ATR multiples.

This algorithm works fine as long as it is applied to a non-trending, mean-reverting asset but fails when a trend has been established.   Please, bear in mind that the strategy as-is will not work.

An optimized version, tested in the EURUSD pair from 2014 till 2020, showed the following equity curve and values:

Equity Curve

The results are a bit disappointing, as we see. After the optimization, the strategy shows only 52.55% profitable trades with a meager 1.02 reward/risk ratio. The RSI is very close to a coin-toss in performance, meaning the results are mostly due to chance.  Furthermore, the average trade of $6.82 before commissions means a trader working using the classic RSI entries is really profiting his broker.

In our next video, we will cover a new way of using the RSI on trending securities.

 

APPENDIX: The RSI code for Easylanguage

inputs:  Price( Close ), Length( 14 ), OverSold( 30 ), 
         Overbought( 70 ), takeprofit( 3 ), Stoploss( 1 ) ;
variables:  var0( 0 ), over_sold (False ), over_bought (False) ;

var0 = RSI( Price, Length ) ;

{***** ATR buy and sell signals *****} 

over_sold = Currentbar > 1 and var0 crosses under OverSold ;
if over_sold then                                                                    
    Buy ( "RsiLE" ) next bar at market ;

over_bought = Currentbar > 1 and var0 crosses over OverBought ;
if over_bought then                                                                    
    Sell Short ( "RsiSE" ) next bar at market ;

{***** ATR Stop Loss and Take-profit *****} 

if marketposition > 0  then begin 
    sell Next Bar at L[1]- Stoploss * averagetruerange(10) Stop ; 
    sell Next Bar at L[1] + takeprofit * averagetruerange(10) Stop;
    end;     

if marketposition < 0 then begin
     buytocover  Next Bar at H[1] + Stoploss * averagetruerange(10)Stop ; 
     buytocover  Next Bar at H[1] - takeprofit *averagetruerange(10)Stop ; 
     end;

 

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Forex Videos

Forex Fear of Missing Out! (FOMO) Don’t Make This Basic Mistake!


Fear of Missing Out (FOMO). What is it? 

Thank you for joining this forex academy educational video.

In this session, we will be looking at the fear of missing out or f o m o.  What is it, and how does it affect trading?

The fear of missing out is a psychological aspect of trading any financial asset.  In fact, it is so deeply rooted in our psyche that it affects the way humans think about many aspects of our lives, and sometimes it’s so powerful that it blinds us to all reasonable thinking and can end up causing us to make rash decisions, which are ill-thought out, and untimely.

The fear of missing out has been with us for centuries, but it was only in 1996 that a research paper written by a marketing strategist, Dr. Dan Herman, entitled the piece ‘the fear of missing out.’

Although people can deal with the fear of missing out on social events, such as parties, or perhaps a sale where they missed a good bargain, when it encroaches into one’s financial trading ability and adversely affects decision-making, it can then become extremely expensive if not recognised and handled correctly.

A good example of FOMO is the recent bull run on bitcoin, especially bitcoin to the USD, and other crypto assets, with one broker, EToro, reporting 380,000 new accounts opened since the beginning of January 2021, and where much of the exponential growth in bitcoin / US dollar trading can be attributed to retail traders jumping on the bandwagon during the timeframe of this incredible rise in bitcoin value and where this is down to the fear of missing out.

While bitcoin was trading at 42,000 dollars and whereby institutional and professional traders were focusing on technical analysis, where analysis suggested that price was peaking, the fear of missing out traders were still piling in and buying bitcoin on CFD’s and physical exchanges at levels shown here at position A, and where the subsequent tanking to $30K wiped out accounts and where billions were lost to retail FOMO investors who bought close to or at the top of the market. 

Traders should always ask themselves if they are making their trading decisions based on sound technical and fundamental analysis, including market sentiment, or are they looking blindly, trading under FOMO pressure, looking to ride a trend wave which may be peaking or bottoming out and about to reverse? 

Here is an example of a bull run from September 2020 to January 2021 for cable, which has risen 10,000 pips and where many traders will have been buying at the top of the market because they thought there would be a continuation perhaps to 1.400 or higher, now that the United Kingdom has left the European Union with a free trade deal in place

 

 

…and many traders who thought that the EU and UK would never reach an agreement would have sold at the bottom of the bear run, which topped out at 1.3475 and gone short at 1.2700 for fear of missing out on the bear run.

Trends do not have to be in their hundreds or thousands of pips or points before a trader is worried they are missing out and jump onto one. It could be just a dozen or so pips or points. The important thing is to remember that one’s decision-making must be based on strong technical analysis while factoring in market sentiment and fundamental analysis, which may be lagging behind the market move. They should factor in the possibility of price action stalling at any point or consolidating and use relevant stops in order not to blow their accounts on a single trade. And where traders must realise that f o m o has no place in their trading armoury, which must also consist of a trading style which has consistently been providing winning trades.

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Crypto Videos

Crypto Ban Petition Attempt! Is He Just Serving His Own Interests?


British Financial Advisor Creates a Crypto Ban Petition

 

Neil Liversidge, a veteran financial advisor and the owner of the independent financial advisory firm West Liversidge, has called on the government of the United Kingdom to fully ban transactions in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.

Liversidge’s strong opinion on the topic goes as far as him starting a petition urging the local financial authorities to stop cryptocurrency transactions in the UK. The petition has the goal to:

“Legislate to prohibit the payment by or any form of acceptance of cryptocurrencies by UK resident businesses or individuals, and to require UK regulators (the FCA and PRA) to prohibit any transactions by UK financial institutions in cryptocurrencies.”

Liversidge cited an anti-crypto narrative common amongst crypto disbelievers, arguing that cryptos such as Bitcoin have no intrinsic value and that they “can be a destabilizing influence on society, and mostly used for criminal activity.” The financial advisor also thinks that cryptocurrency proof-of-work mining is “harmful to the environment.”

The aforementioned petition’s deadline is July 7, 2021, according to the UK Government and Parliament website. At the moment, the petition has collected 108 signatures.

In an interview with finance-focused publication Professional Adviser on Jan 13, Liversidge noted that a blanket ban on cryptocurrency transactions in the UK would help the enforcement reduce the power of criminals using cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin for illicit activity. “Law enforcement will never catch all of the people that use crypto for illicit activities; it won’t even catch most of them. However, destroying their financial base reduces their power.”

Liversidge acknowledged that a crypto ban would immediately trigger a market crash: “If the UK government takes the lead and bans transactions on cryptos as my petition requests, that will surely set off a chain reaction, crashing cryptocurrencies overnight,” he said.

The IFA’s verdict is that all cryptocurrency investors should immediately sell their holdings: “If you’re holding cryptos now, my advice to you would be to find a bigger fool than you and dump it all quickly.” Liversidge also stated that he has “never owned any and never would own any” cryptocurrency, even if he knew it would net him hundreds of percent of returns.

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Crypto Videos

Bitcoin is a Possible Reserve Currency – Former Canadian Prime Minister Says!


Bitcoin is a Possible Reserve Currency – Former Canadian Prime Minister 

Stephen Harper, a former prime minister of Canada, says there may be a place for Bitcoin as well as central bank digital currencies as part of a basket of reserve currencies that may replace the dollar.

In an interview with the investment service, Cambridge House’s Jay Martin Harper stated the possibility of the US dollar being completely replaced could only come from a large currency such as the Euro or Chinese Yuan. He expressed his doubts when it comes to either of them being a viable alternative currency given the uncertainty over the value of the Euro in the long term and the “arbitrary measures” that the Chinese government would take when it comes to guiding the value of the Yuan:

“It’s very hard to see what the alternative is to the US dollar as the world’s major reserve currency. Other than possible candidates such as gold, Bitcoin, a whole basket of things… I think you’ll see the sheer number of things that people use as reserves will certainly expand, but the US dollar will still be the bulk of it.”

The former prime minister then added that he thought central bank digital currencies were to some degree “inevitable,” but that they would likely be subject to monetary policy around the world. Harper stated his concern about central banks becoming “some kind of a general banker” rather than just a financial monitor that they currently are:

“Ultimately, if you have a digital currency that will be used by the central bank to control inflation and create a stable currency as well as priceability, then this digital currency is just a straightforward evolution of the marketplace,” Harper stated. “But if it is part of a series of what I consider as wild experiments as to the role of central banking… Well, then it worries me a lot.”

Stephen Harper served as the prime minister of Canada for nine years, from 2006 until 2015. Cryptocurrency and blockchain adoption in Canada has started expanding significantly since his departure, with the country getting its first regulated crypto exchange in Sept. 

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Crypto Videos

Canada’s First Public BTC Fund Grows 900% Passing 1 Billion Dollars!


Canada’s first public BTC fund grows 900% as it passes the $1 billion milestone

Canadian regulated digital asset manager 3iQ has passed another massive milestone of its public Bitcoin fund. 

On Jan 14, 3iQ’s Bitcoin Fund hit the $1 billion mark, as the company announced the news on Twitter. The new milestone shows QBTC’s parabolic growth after 3iQ originally launched the fund in April 2020. QBTC is up 900% from its previous milestone of $100 million recorded in Oct 2020.

As previously reported, 3iQ’s BTC fund is the first public Bitcoin fund in Canada that got listed on a major stock exchange, the Toronto Stock Exchange. Gemini, a firm owned by the Winklevoss brothers, provides custody services for 3iQ’s QBTC fund.

QBTC.U is currently trading at $48.63, up 330% from the $11 price it was trading for when it got listed in April.

3iQ is one of the largest cryptocurrency firms in Canada. In Jan 2018, 3iQ reportedly became the first cryptocurrency fund regulated by the Ontario Securities Commission as well as the Canadian Securities Administrators. Two years after that, in Feb 2020, 3iQ partnered with the blockchain startup Mavennet to launch a stablecoin that would be pegged to the Canadian dollar. This stablecoin would be regulated by the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC).

3iQ’s former senior executive Shaun Cumby is currently the CEO of Arxnovum, a company that filed an application with OSC for a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund on Jan 11, 2021. Winklevoss’ Gemini will also provide its custody for the Arxnovum’s Bitcoin ETF.

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Crypto Videos

Grayscale GBTC Faces Competition!


GBTC Faces Competition in the OTC Bitcoin Trust Market

Osprey Funds has just entered the crypto sector and is trying to become Grayscale’s competitor. The firm is offering an over-the-counter Bitcoin trust under the ticker symbol OBTC. The trust Osprey offer is similar to Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust, also known as GBTC.

“The Osprey Bitcoin Trust provides an easy access to Bitcoin,” the firm’s website says. They charge a 0.49% management fee, which is the lowest cost solution currently on the market. As they stated, Osprey is an entity that “builds digital asset solutions for intelligent investors,” with the OBTC trust considered its “flagship offering.”

“OBTC began operating and being quoted in the OTC market on Friday, Jan 15,” Osprey Funds’ CEO, Greg King, said, adding:

“As of Jan 14, the product met all the requirements to become quoted under the OBTC ticker in the OTC market. In the next 30 days, the fund will attempt to become DTC eligible, and after Feb 14, all additional market makers will be allowed to quote it. 

Osprey’s launch in the BTC trust market is a direct poke at the largest Bitcoin trust, Grayscale. Grayscale has become one of the largest BTC holders in the world, currently possessing over 500,000 BTC.

GBTC stepped into the market with the idea to provide the public with easier access to Bitcoin through more traditional avenues, all while not even requiring them to custody their own funds. GBTC comes with a yearly 2% management fee, which is where Osprey wants to step in and beat the competition. Osprey’s recently unveiled BTC trust announced a management fee of only 0.49%. 

“We are always happy to see cryptocurrency access products enter the market, especially here in the US,” CEO of Grayscale Michael Sonnenshein told Bloomberg.

Accredited investors will require a $25,000 minimum to buy directly into the trust. Additionally, OBTC shares have a lock-up period of one year before they can be sold in the secondary market. As a comparison, Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust requires a six-month lock-up. However, based on King’s comments to Bloomberg, the public may expect Osprey’s lock-up period to be cut in half in the near future.

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Crypto Videos

JPMorgan Chase Executives Talk About Stablecoins!


JPMorgan Chase Executives Talk About Stablecoins

During a JP Morgan Chase’s Q4 2020 earnings call, the firm’s CEO Jamie Dimon and CFO Jennifer Piepszak discussed the OCC’s recent approval of banks being able to use stablecoins for payments, as well as whether or not this approval will have any significant impact on the development of JPM Coin, the company’s private digital currency. 

During the Q&A portion of the call, Portales Partners analyst Charles Peabody asked the executives about the OCC approval for banks to use various public blockchain networks for payments.

“That guidance enables an offering of stablecoins going on a public blockchain. That doesn’t impact the JPM coin. You should think about JPM coin as the tokenization of our customer deposits,” stated JP Morgan CFO Jennifer Piepszak, according to the call transcript.

However, she did not completely rule out the possibility of a stablecoin backed by JPM if customers showed interest.

“It’s obviously very early. We will assess the use cases and customers’ demands. But, it is still too early to see where everything goes for us.”

JPM CEO Jamie Dimon was quick to jump in and mention that the bank is currently “using blockchain for sharing data with banks,” and adding that their bank is at the forefront of development.

Debuted in Oct 2020, JPM Coin is used on the backend of JPM’s payments systems, helping the firm settle nearly $6 trillion in payments on a daily basis. 

Ultimately, Dimon seemingly implied that crypto payments settlement wouldn’t greatly change how JP Morgan operates.

“I do expect that stuff is coming soon, and it may not change our world all that much.”

However, Dimon may be underestimating the impact that crypto will have on the payments landscape. Paypal is one of the Fintech giants that Dimon mentioned by name as a direct competitor, confirmed that crypto payments would be available in 2021. The CEO — a former skeptic of cryptocurrencies — made it very clear that payments will become an increasingly crowded field over the next decade:

“I expect it to be a very, very tough competition in the next ten years. However, I expect to win. So help me, God.”

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Forex Videos

The DOW Jones Is Getting Ready To Drop!


Dow Jones 30 Industrial index pulls from historic highs. Where next?

 Thank you for joining this forex academy educational video.

In this session, we will be looking at the potential directional bias for the United States Dow Jones 30 industrial index, which has recently hit a historic high.

On the 6th of January 2021, the United States capitol riot shocked the world. The United States Congress insurrection was carried out by a mob of Donald Trump’s supporters in an attempt to overturn his defeat of the 2020 presidential election.

While the world’s media focused on the attack of the most advanced political system in the world, which was viewed by billions of people across the globe in utter shock and disbelief, and where 5 souls, including a police officer, lost their lives in the riot, the Dow Jones 30 industrial index, in a somewhat unexpected move, aggressively turned bid, and subsequently went on to reach an all-time record high around the 31,200 level.

The bull run has largely been a continuation of the 18,000 low reversal in March when the pandemic began to bite the US economy and caused the shock collapse from its recent 29,500 record-breaking pre-pandemic high.

Much of the pre-pandemic record-breaking high on us stock indices, including the Dow Jones 30, can be attributed to the Trump administration’s policies of low taxation for corporations and less red tape for them. Indeed, had it not been for the pandemic, President Trump may well have gone down as one of the best presidents ever in terms of revitalising the United States economy, where it also so reached a record number of US citizens in employment.

However, with Trump and the republican party on the way out, and with Biden and democratic about to take office on the 20th of January, 2021, the incredible amounts of money which have been thrown at the US economy to prop it up during the pandemic from the coffers of the United States treasury department,  must be repaid,  and where president-elect, Joe Biden has made it quite clear, during his campaigning, that he intends to raise corporate taxation in order to find some of the money, and where he will also reverse policies of the previous government,  such as low red tape requirements for businesses.

In which case, there is an obvious conflict, whereby one government’s policies caused Dow Jones to be at a record high and where the incoming party is about to reverse the policies which caused the record run, which will likely cause pressure on those businesses, which will have less profit due to higher taxation, in which case the stock market should reverse its winning streak? So why the continued bull run on stocks?

This can largely be put down to positioning.  Where hedge funds, banks, investors, and other financial institutions are preparing themselves for a potential future shock by driving stock indices higher before any such new legislation will cause a likely negative impact on stocks.

Quite often, investors will position themselves for future shocks by driving an asset higher, in anticipation of a future correction lower, – or the other way – which on a fundamental economic basis, in this scenario, should be the way forward if such policies of higher taxation were introduced. More tax equals less profit, equals lower dividends for investors, and lower corporate valuation.

We still have a few days to go and until the inauguration, and then there is the Donald Trump impeachment, which may cause a delay in the democratic party’s policy implementation, and, as shown here on the daily chart for the Dow Jones 30 index, it is still in a confirmed bull trend, in which case traders will be looking for breaches of the support and resistance lines as shown here, while eagerly waiting for any new policy changes by the incoming Democratic administration.

One thing is certain, there will be continued volatility in the financial markets as the fallout from the pandemic continues to cause turbulence and where recent data confirms higher unemployment and less consumer spending in the USA, which are more possible reasons for the fall in the index from its recent high, and worries about the change in government and policies. 

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Forex Videos

Biden Shows His Cards – This Is How The Market Is Preparing To React!


Biden shows his cards, markets are rattled! – where next for the US Dollar?

Thank you for joining this forex academy educational video.

On Thursday the 14th of January, president-elect Joe Biden addressed the US nation and said that ‘’the $600 already appropriated is simply not enough’’. 

He carried on by saying that the new democrat government would issue another round of $1,400, on top of.the $600 payments, thus showing his hand with regard to the 15 million adult dependants relying on these stimulus checks.  This segment of the Covid relief package runs to 1.9 trillion dollars. 

With yet many more millions of Americans, including migrants, who have slipped the net with regard to relief packages, the wranglers about entitlement will go on as long as the pandemic continues to run rife throughout the United States.  With some young adults purchasing new cars with the extra cash, and others boasting of savings of $13,000 from the relief payments, it is hardly surprising that there will be continued frictions between the two parties, let alone the public and pressure groups, which will only go to show that this is not a one-size-fits-all policy.

Markets saw volatility following the comments with the dollar index shown here on the daily time frame, recovering from its low of 89.15, in the dollar-weighted average against the pound, the Euro, the yen, Swiss franc Canadian dollar, and Australian and New Zealand dollars. 

Although the rot stopped on the 6th of January, dollar strength has been conforming to this support line, on the 1-hour chart, which was bolstered by Joe Biden’s comments on the 14th , to the point where we have a high of 90.80 at the time of writing.

While the bull run on the US dollar may be partially down to Joe Biden’s covid relief policy,  there are other factors to consider, including the buy the rumour sell the fact trading phenomenon, where market participants were largely expecting the incoming President to instigate a larger relief package and especially now that the democrats are in control in Congress, thus making it more easily to be able to get through new policies.

Other things to consider, as shown here on the daily cable chart, where the pound to US Dollar pair remains in a bull run, although it has topped out at the 1.37 exchange rate, having achieved the high due to the success of the UK and EU signing a post Brexit free trade deal,  which has been giving the pair a lift, but where the United Kingdom is currently in a tier 4 lockdown due to the increasing covid transmission rate.

 

 Here we can see a daily chart of the euro US dollar pair,  which is by volume the largest traded component  on a weighted basis of the dollar index,  and where we can see CIA Here. 

This is a daily chart of the euro US dollar pair, which by weighted volume is the largest component of the US dollar index. Therefore, it is more likely to be a larger contributing factor to the directional bias of the dollar index.  

Here we have a classic bull run, followed by a period of consolidation, with a continuation bull run, to a high of 1.23, during the beginning of 2021, and where price action has breached the bull run’s resistance line as highlighted and is falling back to just below 1.21 at the time of writing. This is lending itself to the general strength of the US dollar when simultaneously combined with the actions of cable.

And so, although Joe Biden’s covid relief stimulus package would appear to be a pivotal point in the acceleration in the US dollar strength, there are other things to consider, such as multi-month highs, as shown with cable and the Eurodollar pair.  

We also have to factor in the fact that the dollar index failed to breach the 89.00 key level, where the previous high going back to the beginning of the pandemic was 103.00, a hefty grabbing for the dollar, and where traders will always be eying the tops and bottoms of huge moves while looking for turning points.

Traders always expect volatility when there is a change of president, and even more so when there is a change in party, such as in this case where are the outgoing republicans will be replaced by the Democratic party’s polities. The next stage will be waiting to see if the outgoing party’s policies are replaced and, if so, what this might mean for the financial markets.  

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Forex Videos

Forex Tips For Newbie Traders!


cool tips for newbie traders

Thank you for joining this forex academy educational video. 

In this session, we will be looking at how to stack the odds in the favour of consistent winning trades with a cool tip for newbie traders.

The number of retail traders who lose all of their deposited trading funds within the first 6 months is scary.

In the United Kingdom, retail brokers are required to have a financial health warning on the front page of their website.  This is one that we picked at random from a well-known UK retail broker. 

CFD’s are complex instruments and come with a high risk of losing money rapidly due to leverage. 75% of retail investors’ accounts lose money when trading CFDs with this provider.  You should consider how CFDs work and whether you can afford to take the high risk of losing your money.

Some brokers put the figure at over 80% but let’s not split hairs. This is still a worrying trend.  It must be worrying because governments have forced brokers to put the warning on these sites.

One of the biggest areas that new traders full down is because of a lack of knowledge about how the money markets, and where they lack consistency regarding the setting up and implementation of trades, and most of all; a total disregard for stop losses and their correct implementation and the setup of leverage which falls under risk management, perhaps the most important aspects of trading. 

One of the best ways to mitigate the risk of losing trades is to use a trading criteria checklist.

Here are some ideas about what you might put on that checklist.  The idea is that it is an assistant to help you in the early days on a trade by trade basis to make sure that you have everything in place to help to stack the odds of winning trades in your favor.

Before you do anything, you want to have adopted a trading style or plan and where you have consistently made money on a demo account before trying it with real money.

 

Is the market trending?

Does it have support and resistance?

Are all of your indicators confirming your trade entry?

Consider using a scrolling vertical line, which might help you cast your eyes down to all of the indicators rather than just focusing on price action and potentially missing something.

Set a tight stop loss for each trade, and don’t risk blowing your account balance on one single.  Trade spread the risk over several trades to give yourself a chance of making more money than you lose.

 You should aim for a minimum of a 2 to 1 risk to reward ratio.  That is to say, you want to win twice the amount that you are prepared to lose on each trade.  This will help to keep your account balance in a healthy state.

Decide your preferred time of day to trade.  Try not to trade at the end of a 1-hour time frame if you are an intraday trader.  These can often be the impetus or a change in the direction of trends, and you need to ascertain if this is the case on a trade by trade basis.  Try not to trade at the end of a one-time zone and the beginning of a new one because, often, you will find the different time zone traders have different sentiment with regard to a particular currency pair, and this may be the impetus for a change in direction.

Don’t tread over economic data releases, especially if these are marked as hi-impact, which can often cause extreme market volatility.  Wait until a trend has been identified after the release.

These are just a few ideas which you could put onto your trading criteria checklist.  Print one-off and keep it beside you and meticulously go through it every time before you pull the trigger on a trade.  Eventually, these things will become like second nature, but until they do treat the checklist like a friendly assistant.

 One of the biggest barriers to successful trading in the currency markets is a lack of consistency in one’s approach.  Something like this will go a long way to helping new traders to consistently make the right decisions on a trade by trade basis, and this will stack the odds in their favor.

 

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Forex Videos

Market volatility continues into 2021, where next for Cable?

 


Market volatility continues into 2021, where next for Cable?

 

Thank you for joining this forex academy educational video.

In this session, we will be taking a look at how the pound is faring against the United States dollar as the UK leaves the European Union to go on its own way as an independent trading nation once again.

In this daily chart for cable, we can see a general trend higher from the 12th of May 2020, which culminated in a peak of 1.3700 at position A, which coincides with a future free trade agreement being announced between the United Kingdom and the European Union, which was generally seen by the market as going to happen, and which fuelled the bull rally as played out on the chart.

The pullback to the current level at 1.3558, at the time of writing, was to be expected, on the basis many traders work on the principle of buy the rumor and sell the fact, in which case we might naturally expect to see some traders exiting their long trades due to profit-taking, and a fear of a collapse due to this common market practice of buying the rumor and selling the fact. But the sell-off has been fairly muted, only flattening out to the current exchange rate.  

The real test here will be whether there is a move higher from position B to a retest of the 1.3700 line, which would then likely cause a push above it on towards 1.3800 and beyond, or a move lower towards the support line when longer-term institutional traders will be looking for the support line to breach, or price action to bounce higher and perhaps a retest of the 1.3700 figure from there.

Things to factor in are the extremely high rate of covid infections spreading through the United Kingdom and causing further lockdowns and loss of productivity within the UK, where long-term effects of this on the economy are not good.  The markets have been buoyed by the measures put in place by the government to protect businesses and inject money into the system.

We also have to consider a new United States president will be inaugurated in a couple of week’s time, and what effect this has on the United States dollar as he begins to introduce new legislation to raise income tax and increase red tape for businesses as he has pledged to do.

The recent pullback in the pound against the dollar has largely been a result of all of these factors and a slight improvement in US dollar sentiment. 

 Expect extreme volatility as we move in towards the middle part of January, especially around the time of the inauguration on the 20th of January.

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Forex Videos

Trump Leaves Office! What Now For The Forex Space?

 


What to expect in the Forex space when Trump leaves office

Thank you for joining this Forex  Academy educational video.

In this session, we will be looking at the potential key moves in the forex space with Donald Trump leaves office in a few days’ time.

History will look back at Donald Trump’s presidency, and it looks like historians will likely give him a good kicking.

But, if we hark back 12 months, pre-pandemic, unemployment in the United States was at a record low, the gross domestic product was high, US stock markets were at all-time record highs: The United States economy had never been fitter, thanks to having him at the helm.

Donald Trump’s style of presidency will be seen as abrasive and belligerent. But we have to remember he was not a politician to start with. He was a tough businessman with a no-nonsense attitude, and that’s why people voted for him to become president in the first place. It was a poke in the eye for the political elite in an attempt to bring back wealth for ordinary people. It was his lowering of corporate taxation and red tape and policies to bring back manufacturing to the United States that lifted the US economy to retain its rank as the most powerful nation on the planet.

But, when push came to shove, Donald Trump fell on his own sword because of his mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic.  The bottom of his presidential world fell out because he buried his head in the sand and ignored all the warnings about the horrendous covid disease.  His lacklustre attitude, and slowness to respond to the crisis, created friction at every point between the democrats and republican parties instead of trying to pull both sides together for the sake of the nation, which did nothing to help while the economy as it  faltered with mass unemployment and the sharpest decrease in GDP in US history.

Financial traders won’t miss him; his use of Twitter affected the financial markets without warning, creating huge swings in stock indices, bond yields, and the forex space, only for him to reverse many of his Twitter comments later, creating more mayhem while commenting on highly sensitive foreign and economic policy decisions he planned to implement, while he fed such information into the market with no warning or embargo.  Many would say good riddance and be happy to get back to the old style of governance under a lifelong politician, Joe Biden.

Some analysts predict that President Trump will try and upset the apple cart before he leaves office, while the Democrats are threatening to impeach him and have him removed, the timing would suggest this is impossible with just 10 days until he leaves office, at the time of writing.  But it is said that fellow republicans are side-lining him with regard to policy decisions and are trying to keep him at arms-length until he has gone. 

Throw into the mix US stock markets at record highs, due to what they currently see as the new president having more clout due to the democratic party holding more power in Congress after the recent runoffs in Georgia, to be able to bring in more covid stimulus aid packages and roll out vaccines across the United States.

Certainly, the dollar index – seen here – seems to be trying to fight back to the 91.00 level at the time of writing, having almost hit 88.00 in the last few days at position B, having fallen from its high in march at position A of 103.00.  does this mean that the rot has stopped?  Possibly not, but with a president on the way out and a new one on the way in, we can certainly expect the unexpected.  

This might mean that the Eurodollar pair, which has been riding high, will take a breather, having found resistance at 1.2330, shown here on this daily chart at position A

And with cable failing to reach the key 1.3700 on this daily chart at position A,  this might also be a reason why the markets are taking a breather from shorting the US dollar.

In conclusion, expect the unexpected, expect volatility, and expect the fundamentals to take a side-line while the US transition between presidents is over and new policies are implemented by the incoming democratic party.

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Crypto Videos

Is Bitcoin sucking the life out of the Forex market?


Is Bitcoin sucking the life out of the Forex market?

Thank you for joining this forex academy educational video.

In this session, we will be asking if bitcoin is having a negative impact on the forex market by reducing the volume of transactions?

In this daily chart of bitcoin to the US dollar, it was only back in October that we reported that bitcoin had found a support line at 10000, and at the time of writing, we suggested there could be a surge up to and above 12,000 by the end of 2020. A retest of the previous high in 2017 around the 19,500 level, shown here at position B, would have then been on the cards.

Here we can see a somewhat muted pullback to position C, but the 2017 crash to the 3,000 level was not repeated, and the price went on to find support above the key 20K exchange rate.

The acceleration during position d up to 42000 was a purely speculative fuelled bull run,  where most of this move can be put down to companies such as PayPal, the CME  clambering balls, the bitcoin euphoria bandwagon, and countries such as Switzerland  opening its arms too to companies in the bitcoin space.  These factors only go to legitimise bitcoin’s space in the investment market arena and where it has called a modern-day gold Rush with day traders in a spare room buying on the CFDs market, hedge funds, and banks and other institutions clamouring aboard the bull run in fear of missing out.

A potential side effect of this incredible move higher and interest in the bitcoin space may well be the reason why the currency markets seem to be flattening out. Certainly, cable,  seen here with its recent top of 1.3700, since leaving the European Union with an eagerly anticipated free trade agreements in place,  has flatlined since the beginning of January.  And while some of this might be attributed to the increased rates of Covid spreading through the United Kingdom, one has to wonder if some traders in the forex space are throwing caution to the wind to buy bitcoins while side-lining currencies.

The flatlining of the cable exchange rate also coincides with the most volatile period of buying activity for bitcoin, and this period is also reflected in this one-hour chart of the US dollar to Japanese yen, which is also trading within a fairly narrow range of just 146 pips during a similar timeline.

Again, this is repeated with the euro US dollar pair over the same timeline price is relatively flat and consolidating within a fairly narrow 145 pip range.

The similarity between the timelines of activity and flattening with the forex pairs while exponential growth in bitcoin to the upside cannot be ignored.  However, is this trend, if based on our hypostasis correct, likely to continue?

It is completely natural for professional traders to bail out of one asset class a jump into another if they see potential to make money.  This is what training is all about recognising opportunities and jumping aboard.

Before we consider if this is likely to continue, let’s go back to our bitcoin US dollar daily chart, where we have highlighted the most recent candlestick.

This one single daily candlestick on the 7th of January shows a range between 42,000 at the top and 36,500 at the bottom, which is a huge 5,500 dollar move in a single date.

If institutional or retail traders get it wrong, the consequences can be grave, with enormous losses piling up. The problem at these levels is that traders will be wondering if this incredible bull run has reached the top of the market and is due for a crash, with memories going back to 2017 where bitcoin to the dollar crashed from 19,500 to just above 3000 in a short space of time.  Here we are seeing swings of over 5,000 points in a single day,  which is unnerving,  making it dangerous to trade. 

And this is why many investors in bitcoin will be dubious about buying at the current levels, which might see some inflows back into the forex currency space, with other investors In digital currencies looking for more opportunities with potential for long-term growth.

PLEASE LINK https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEtlPyBDU3g

A few months ago, we reported on a new digital coin with its own ecosystem: the AXIA Coin, which might be a front runner for alternative investments in digital currencies.  We understand that the company is close to launching, so please watch out for updates, which we will bring you soon. Meanwhile, you can find more details about the AXIA coin at www.axiacoin.org.  

 Meanwhile, watch out for extra volume creeping into the forex space, causing currencies to break from their current consolidation trends, as we have demonstrated here.

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Crypto Videos

Bitcoin Price Dump Shakes Investors!

Bitcoin price dump! was the writing on the wall?

Thank you for joining this Forex Academy educational video.

In this session, we will be looking at the recent bitcoin US dollar price dump and what might have been the possible contributing factors.

In this daily chart of bitcoin to the US dollar, we can see a steady bull run, as highlighted in section A, with a critical area of support on the $10 k line, which lends itself nicely for a price action move up to the resistance line, which was breached in section B, which coincides with the all-time high of around $19.5K from 2017, and where eventually price reaches the key $20K figure, and from there on over the Christmas period and into the new year, we see exponential growth, where bitcoin skyrockets to $42k.
With market analysts and investors talking up the value of bitcoin from anywhere in the region of $30 to 40K and even 140k, it’s hardly surprising that euphoria crept in and where everybody was buying, especially in the CFDs market.
This was a gold rush in all but name. And one has to ask oneself a question; when assets are being talked up by investors, or even talked down, what are the real motives behind this? Are they simply looking for a market reaction in favour of their own investment strategy, for example? This is a question for another day.
Getting back to the issue, was the writing on the wall all for a price collapse? Yes, it was, and for a number of reasons:
Firstly, when a market is moving steadily as in a trend, it is less likely to see extreme volatility unless there are fundamental reasons behind it. And because bitcoin is essentially a speculative instrument, fundamentals can be set aside in favour of a trending market.

The problem with this, as highlighted here, is that this is unchartered territory. We are looking at a $20,000 price increase in just a few days, which is almost unheard of. Technical analysis becomes difficult to gauge, and professional traders don’t know where to get in on the trend or place stops. Many are forced into buying for fear of missing out, and this is extremely dangerous.

Certainly, the writing was on the wall when on the 4th of January, we see a $6K price range move on this bearish daily candlestick. However, volatility continued with the bulls regaining control taking bitcoin to a record high of around $42,000.
Professional traders will know from history that a correction was on the cards, and with the UK FCA warning retail traders about the potential of losing all of their money trading bitcoin assets, it very likely contributed to price action hitting a brick wall all and to the collapsed….

Of around $12K in 24 hours. Many investors and retail traders were still buying well above $40,000, while the price was tanking, causing billions of dollars to be wiped off of the price, and where billions were lost in margin calls, with accounts being liquidated, because of the massive move lower.
Bitcoin should have a health warning on it, buyer beware, and with more and more weekend traders getting involved in this market, which operates 7 days a week, and where these part-time traders in there are spare rooms have a punt, with many losing their cash deposits, it is not a surprise that the FCA have banned retail traders from trading cryptocurrencies in the UK from the 6th of January this year, and where the EU are now calling for tighter regulation in this space.
Weekend bitcoin traders will be licking their wounds. But let’s not forget that a lot of people are still in the money and sitting back waiting to see if the price steadies itself and then continues to move higher, or if it will continue to slide.
Advice on this one would be too to look at trends on lower time frames…..

Such as this one-hour chart, while looking for support and resistance lines, and pick out trends that are set by big money investors, such as institutional traders, where they typically operate Monday to Friday. Be ultra-cautious when going long during aggressive rallies and around huge candlesticks, especially the bearish ones, as highlighted, which represents an overall move of $4000 dollars. They spell out danger. And set tight stop losses.

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Crypto Daily Topic Crypto Videos

Pension Funds Are Investing In Bitcoin!


“Pension Funds are Investing in Bitcoin” – Grayscale

 

Grayscale’s newly-appointed CEO, Michael Sonnenshein, told Bloomberg that pension funds and endowments are actively investing in the Grayscale family of funds. Sonnenshein’s interview with Bloomberg came on Jan 7.

He further explained the statement: “We have started to see participation not just from the hedge funds, which we’ve seen participation from for a long time now, but now it’s recently coming from other institutions, pensions, and endowments. The sizes of allocations that they are making are also growing rapidly.”

Grayscale has been at the forefront of the recent Bitcoin buying spree, and its holdings now account for roughly 3% of the circulating Bitcoin. The fund manager continues to increase its position by buying even more cryptocurrencies as more institutional investors seek exposure to Bitcoin and other digital assets. 

Grayscale’s total assets under management, or AUM for short, have eclipsed $27 billion across ten different investment products. The Grayscale Bitcoin Trust remains its most popular product by far, with over $23 billion in AUM. Its Ethereum trust is the second most popular product, and it is currently valued at around $3.7 billion, while its Digital Large Cap Fund holds somewhere in the ballpark of $340 million.

Pension funds are starting to follow a hoard of institutional buyers that started to enter the Bitcoin and crypto market in 2020. A survey conducted by Fidelity Investments in late 2020 found that 36% of financial institutions across both the United States and Europe said they own cryptocurrencies or derivatives. Over 25% of the respondents reported holding Bitcoin, while 11% said they own Ether.

According to Grayscale Investments, the institutional interest for cryptocurrency and Bitcoin is intensifying at an alarming rate, with pension funds and endowments being the most recent entrants into the space.

The company’s aggressive Bitcoin buying is likely contributing to the digital currency’s rapid price increase. With more Bitcoin taken out of circulation and miners not being able to produce as much Bitcoin as it is requested, the already scarce asset is becoming even more difficult to get at current prices. Sonnenshein stated:

“This is a verifiable scarce asset, so when there are mechanisms that are removing Bitcoin from circulation, that’s inherently making it an even more scarce asset.”

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Crypto Videos

Crypto User Recovers Lost Private Keys to Over $4M in Bitcoin! $$$


Crypto User Recovers Lost Private Keys to Over $4M in Bitcoin

A student has claimed to have found their long-lost private keys that accidentally HODLed Bitcoin starting as early as 2011. By finding the keys, he will be able to unlock more than $4 million in Bitcoin.

According to a Reddit throwaway account from BitcoinHolderThankU, they were able to cash out roughly $4.2 million in Bitcoin after finding the lost keys to 127 BTC on Dec 22, 2020. At that time, the price of the crypto asset was in the $23,000s. The user stated that they later liquidated the coins somewhere in the bull run.

“I spent the next week just trying to figure out how to safely and securely liquidate such a large Bitcoin position for the lowest price possible,” stated the Redditor. “I went back and forth between different OTC principal desks and ultimately ended up selling every single one of my 127 Bitcoin for a price of $33,439.02 per coin. The net was roughly $4.24 million.”

They claim to have earned the aforementioned Bitcoin in 2011 or 2012 through various “surveys, watching videos, as well as completing random tasks” to ultimately use the Bitcoin for purchasing in-game currency for the online game DarkOrbit. The lost private keys were reportedly never really missing, but rather forgotten on an older model Dell computer.

Unfortunately, if the Redditor’s story is true, they missed out on $1 million in additional profit by not just holding for a few more weeks. Since December 2020, the price of Bitcoin has experienced a lot of volatility and even hit $42,000 to reach new all-time highs. BitcoinHolderThankU stated that they “would not have sold all 127 Bitcoin” if the same situation presented again.

“To give myself credit, I did hold it for 8-9 years, which is more than the vast majority of cryptocurrency users,” they said. “I definitely would’ve done things a bit differently if I were given a second chance.”

Despite their sudden fortune, they said that they would avoid “expensive luxuries,” as well as that they intend to put the bulk of the funds into the S&P 500 index, adding:

“I don’t want to end up like one of those people who happen to win the lottery and then blow it all in a matter of months or years. I’m going to continue living my life the same way I was living it on Dec 21 and every day before that.”

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Crypto Videos

Morgan Stanley Bought 10% Stake in Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy!


Morgan Stanley Bought 10% Stake in Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy

MicroStrategy has been in the crypto news for months now – this time regarding a major player joining in on their venture to become a major Bitcoin HODLer. Per a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission released on Jan 8, an investment bank mogul Morgan Stanley had acquired 792,627 shares in the business intelligence firm MicroStrategy. This massive investment represents a 10.9% stake in the company that has recently made astonishing investments in Bitcoin. 

While the purchase itself mostly likely happened on Dec 31, the news was released to the public nine days after that. The Morgan Stanley investment into MicroStrategy came after Michael Saylor’s company performing incredibly and its shares moving from $289 on Dec 8 to a whopping $545 as of Jan 8.

In August 2020, MicroStrategy took some very bold steps by investing crypto, making Bitcoin its primary reserve asset. At the time of investing, CEO Michael Saylor talked about why his company decided to invest so much into Bitcoin:

“This is not a speculation, nor just a hedge. It is a deliberate strategy to adopt the Bitcoin Standard.”

Just a couple of weeks ago, MicroStrategy announced a whopping $400 million securities offering, stating that the purpose of raising funds is to buy even more Bitcoin. As of Dec 21, 2020, the firm had managed to stockpile 70,470 Bitcoin. 

At current prices, MicroStrategy’s Bitcoin holdings came up to a worth of over $2.8 billion. 


Institutional investors such as Morgan Stanley have warmed up to cryptocurrencies considerably over the past year. Many analysts have attributed Bitcoin’s recent bull market to this institutional uptick, compared to the FOMO coming almost strictly from the retail market that was so critical to Bitcoin’s 2017 highs, which subsequently fell apart. 

 

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Crypto Videos

Biden’s $3T Stimulus Bill Could Make Bitcoin Explode!

 

Biden’s $3T Stimulus Could Create Another Bitcoin Skyrocket Scenario


The incoming Biden administration’s plan to print almost an infinite amount of money into the US economy and supply it with trillions of dollars could likely ignite the next leg of the Bitcoin bull market, as more investors seek refuge from the United States dollar.
Aan Arlington-based news outlet Axios reported that Joe Biden had asked Congress to provide Americans with a stimulus check of $2,000 to help offset the economic devastation caused by Covid-19. The incoming president has also proposed a tax and infrastructure package as part of his “Build Back Better” program. The package would be worth $3 trillion.

Biden also doubled down on his call for more direct relief to American citizens after Jan 8 disappointing jobs report showing a loss of over 140,000 positions in the last month of 2020.
He stated: “Economic research confirms that, with the current conditions such as the crisis today, especially with such low-interest rates, taking action immediately– even with deficit financing – is certainly going to help the economy overall.”
If 2020 is anything to go by, the new wave of stimulus could be another catalyst for Bitcoin’s rise as more money floods the market and makes prices into assets.

Even the current president Donald Trump, a Republican, has played a role in vast government outlays. Under his leadership, the US passed a historic $2 trillion stimulus package bill in March. Trump also signed a relief package worth $900 billion in December. This document would then pave the way for $600 stimulus checks coming to every American citizen.
The federal government’s inflation-increasing policies have coincided with interventionism coming from the Federal Reserve, which deployed trillions of dollars in 2020 to combat a liquidity crisis and keep overnight rates somewhat under control.

Although the aforementioned policies provided a strong backstop for risk-on assets – a category that has previously included Bitcoin – the emerging narrative surrounding Bitcoin is that it’s a hedge against inflation.
Institutions are currently buying Bitcoin with a clear purpose and are hoping to one day become the industry’s whales.


Bitcoin’s digital gold narrative has recently been one of the biggest catalysts for Bitcoin’s price increase, as well as the institutional shift towards it. This narrative helped fuel BTC’s 300% rally in the previous year, as well as it more than doubling in price in this year alone. This trend could increase in intensity in 2021 as the purchasing power of the US dollar continues to erode.
Even a giant such as JPMorgan Chase publicly acknowledged that Bitcoin is taking market share from gold.

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Crypto Videos

Experts State Investors Are Dumping Gold For BITCOIN!


Experts State – Gold outflows “ALL Going into Bitcoin”

According to multiple experts in the crypto sector, one possible reason for Bitcoin’s incredible recent price rise is massive investor outflows coming from another popular hedge from inflation: gold. 

Spot gold dipped heavily over the past week, losing 4.62% of its value, bringing it to $1,857. The asset has previously been surging in unison with Bitcoin, which managed to increase its price by 40% from $28,000 lows.

In a Tweet that came out on Friday, Jan 8, Charlie Morris, founder and CIO at ByteTree Asset Management, stated that the pullback in gold might be attributable to investors moving from it and into Bitcoin:

Likewise, earlier that week, CNBC’s Mad Money host Jim Cramer stated that the massive outflows coming from gold ETFs are “all going to crypto.” If we track inflows and outflows from Grayscale’s Bitcoin investment trust and gold ETFs back this assertion, as Grayscale has eclipsed gold: 

The moves could possibly be a sign of Bitcoin’s status as a legitimate asset class is on the rise. Gold and Bitcoin have been linked for a long time as both are seen as a way to hedge against inflation and macroeconomic uncertainty. However, if the price movements in the previous period are any indication, Bitcoin may be winning the narrative race due to its unprecedented gains. 

In an interview with Bloomberg, chief revenue officer at Coinshares, Frank Spiteri, said that the narrative surrounding Bitcoin being an inflation hedge is quickly gaining legs “in the face of an environment with highly unconventional monetary policies.”

“It seems like we are in the middle of an awakening among institutions to Bitcoin as a fairly uncorrelated store of value,” he said.

The observations from experts come after a very unique flippening that happened a while ago: as of Friday, Jan 8, a single Bitcoin is worth more than a 20-ounce gold bar.

With that being said, for all the bearish price action and Bitcoin’s skyrocketing, certain high-profile gold bugs still refuse to budge on their positions. In a tweet coming from a longtime Bitcoin skeptic and gold investor Peter Schiff, he claimed that once investors “understand” the risk of inflation, they’ll return to bullion.

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Crypto Daily Topic Forex Daily Topic Forex Videos

Forex Trading Algorithms Part 7 Elements Of Computer Languages For EA Design!


Trading Algorithms VII – Liberal sequences and exact sequences

Translating ideas into a trading algorithm is not always easy. When examining a particular trade idea, we could find two cases: 

  • the signal can be described precisely in a consecutive sequence of trading facts, or 
  • Several conditions with variable steps among each condition need to be spotted.

The first class is easier to program. To this class belong any kind of crossovers: 

  • price to MA: 

  • MA to MA :

Similar conditions can be created with indicator crossovers and level breakouts.

 

Trading Signals Using Pivots

But what if the idea is more complex?. Let’s consider we want to catch pivot points in the direction of the trend. Let’s say we want to open a buy trade in the second pivot reversal. Let’s follow Pruitt’s example:

Buy on the second pivot pullback if

1.- The second pivot high is higher than the first pivot

2.- The pullback is larger than 2%

3.- The sequence takes less than 30 bars

 

The Flag Model

Since these conditions happen with variable price-action sequences programming, this kind of entry is much more difficult if we employ just If-then-else statements. The employment of flags to signal that a specific condition was met helps in the logic but is not the best solution.


As we see, the flag model is awkward and not too flexible. Also, this method is prone to errors.

 

The Finite State Machine

The second method to this kind of problem is the Finite State Machine (FSM). Basically, we want to detect certain states following others, defining a state when the needed condition is met. An FSM is a machine with finite states. The machine moves from state zero or START through several states until a final one, which defines the ACCEPT state. 

We can imagine a state machine as a combination lock. We need to supply the lock with a combination of numbers until its final digit, which triggers its opening.

The first step is to create the states needed. Next, we create the conditions for the change from one state to other states. Once satisfied with the diagram, we can easily write the pseudo-code, or, even, the actual code directly.

As we can see here, the code is precisely subdivided into states, each state with the precise instructions to move to the next state or back to the start state. We can see also that this algorithm is executed from top to bottom on each new bar. We hope that this example will help you better understand how an entry algorithm can be created.

Stay tuned for more interesting videos on trading algos!

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Forex Videos

Forex Trading Algorithms Part 6 Elements Of Computer Languages For EA Design!


Trading Algorithms VI –  The Stages of a trading algorithm

In this video, we will discover the different parts needed for a complete trading system. 

One of the most common systems involves the crossover of two moving averages, a short- and a long-term SMA. Let’s do a system based on this idea.

Creating a trading algorithm involves at least two stages: the entry logic and the trade management logic, and the position sizing logic. 

The Entry Logic

The entry logic sets the rules for entries. The logic can be subdivided into two sections: the entry signal and the Filter or Trade setup

The entry signal  

An entry signal is a moment in time when something happens in the asset. Entries can be MA crossovers, level breakouts, bullish or bearish candlestick formations, and so forth.

The Filter

A filter is a condition imposed for the entry signal to be valid. For instance, you can allow a MA crossover to the long side only if the main trend is up. Then, you can programmatically define the primary trend, and this is the filter. For instance, we could describe an upward direction when the price is higher than the +1 SD line of a Bollinger Band ( in which we set the bands to 1 SD instead of the standard 2SD). We could also say that the upward trend is the price above its 200-period MA, or when there are higher highs and higher lows. A down-trend can be defined using the opposite logic.

On mean-reverting assets, an interesting filter might be overbought/oversold indicators such as RSI, Percent R, or Stochastics curving against the current move, allowing then use of candlestick reversal signals.

We can also add a filter that excludes trades whose projected reward/risk ratio is below one.

As a caveat, the higher the number of conditions, the higher the probability of over-optimizing it. The best designs are those with a few parameters. Also, the higher the number of filters, the less the system will trade. Thus, not always a filter improves a raw signal.

When building your trading system, a sound methodology starts with raw entry signals and a time stop at a determined number of bars. If the entry has an edge, it will be proved by higher than 50% profitable signals after 5-10 bars.

The trade management Logic

Trade management logic takes care of open trades. It is constituted of at least a stop-loss logic and a take-profit logic.  It may include other decision steps, such as break-even logic and trail stops.

The Stop-loss 

We have already published several articles on stop-losses. There are several ways to set a stop-loss level. We can do it using a multiple of the Average True Range of the asset, using the last swing low (or high in the case of a short-trade), or by statistically optimizing the distance using John Sweeney’s Maximum Adverse Excursion (MAE) concept.

Trail stops are also a recurrent idea in trading, although the developer should test them and assess if they really improve the results.  The same is valid for the break-even logic. Both concepts seem logical and mind relieving, but I have yet to find their utility to improve a trading system.

In some trading systems, a time stop can be handy. A time stop closes if the trade is not profitable after a certain period or a specific number of bars.

The Take-profit.

Take profit logic can also be varied, from dollar-based stops to stops based on key levels, supports, and resistances or pivots. A take-profit condition may be set, too, when a signal opposite to the current trade happens, such as an MA crossover against the trade, the price below the -1SD Bollinger line on longs or over +1SD line on short positions.

Take profit code can be added for scaling out the trade, letting a percent of the original position open to ride the wave and improve profits when your trade is right.

Position Sizing logic

The position size logic is a final step that involves setting up the right trade size for the trader’s objectives. This step should be used only in real-time trading, not during the definition, optimization, and evaluation of a new trading system.

During the definition step, a trading system must be used with one trade unit, and its results normalized to its risk, so instead of dollar profits, it should produce a stream of multiples of R, a standard one-dollar risk.

Position sizing logic is key to maximizing the returns of a system and limiting the max drawdown to the levels desired by the trader.

We will further develop these concepts in the coming videos, with specific algorithms demonstrating how to create them properly.

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Crypto Videos

IRS Will Start Enforcing Crypto Trading Laws Starting Now!


IRS Will Start Enforcing Crypto Trading Laws – Says Former Division Chief

A former top investigator has sent out a warning, claiming that “a high-stakes game of chicken” that’s currently happening between the Internal Revenue Service and cryptocurrency holders who fail to properly report their earnings will soon be entering a new phase. The warning stated that 2021 would be the year when the tax collection agency will begin to focus on pursuing “civil and, even criminal penalties.”

In an article co-authored by Don Fort, the former chief of the Internal Revenue Service’s criminal investigation division said that while the agency was focusing its resources on informing the public of proper reporting guidelines until now, it will now be turning to more stringent “enforcement.”

As he stated, “The IRS has been not-so-quietly positioning itself for a transition from education to enforcement in 2021.”

The article notes that the IRS will certainly enforce the law, starting with Coinbase. Coinbase answered a “John Doe” summons back in 2018 and handed over account information on close to 13,000 users, which could soon lead to crackdowns. 

The focus on crypto holders is partly due to a widening “tax gap,” meaning that the rift between the total income the Treasury gets from crypto taxes versus what the Treasury actually receives is larger and larger.

Ultimately, the article concludes that major trends, such as the addition of a question regarding cryptocurrency holdings now being prominently placed at the top of form 1040, only indicate that the IRS is slowly but surely gearing up for widespread efforts to root out tax underpayment.

“Even though the IRS has not yet made an announcement regarding mainstream tax evasion or money laundering cases involving digital currency, that trend should change in 2021.”

He ended the report by saying that “History has shown that underestimating the government is a fool’s game.”

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Crypto Videos

Dash Is Selling Out It’s Privacy Focus In The Hope It Won’t get Culled!


Is Dash a Privacy Coin?

A recent tweet coming from Dash’s official Twitter account has invited much criticism. The outlash from Dash’s supporters is directed towards the fact that the cryptocurrency, which was once advertised as a privacy coin, is now wilting in the face of possible regulatory scrutiny and trying to pivot to non-privacy-focused crypto waters. 

On Jan 1, the US-based exchange Bittrex announced in a tweet that it would be delisting top privacy coins, including Monero, Zcash, and Dash.

The delistings of the top private coins follow a similar Dec 29, 2020 announcement that Bittrex would be delisting XRP as a result of an SEC lawsuit against Ripple, prompting further speculation that the exchange preemptively delisted the aforementioned privacy coins in anticipation of a wider regulatory crackdown. 

In response to the delisting, Dash announced in a tweet that they had immediately “reached out to Bittrex Exchange to request a meeting,” and that referring to the DASH cryptocurrency as a “privacy coin” is not exactly right. They added:


Taking a look back at 2017, on the other hand, archived screenshots from the Dash Foundation website show that the company advertised DASH as “the world’s first privacy-centric cryptocurrency.” The current Dash Foundation website has changed since and now says that Dash is “the leading payments cryptocurrency,” and doesn’t mention its privacy functionality anywhere.

In a recent tweet regarding the delisting CEO of DashPay, Ryan Taylor also minimized the cryptocurrency’s privacy features:

While the whole situation regarding Dash’s stance has prompted criticism on Twitter, proponents have noted that the cryptocurrency has released guidance on its privacy features in August. Official Dash website blog post shows that Taylor wrote that “regulators are concerned with exchanges possibly being unable to comply with KYC/AML regulations when transacting coins that offer privacy features,” because Dash is “often found on lists of cryptocurrencies with privacy enhancements.”

However, Taylor also wrote that Dash has been very successful in convincing exchanges as well as regulators that Dash is not a privacy coin.

The clarifications about Dash’s core focus come as a follow-up to an announced upgrade to Dash entering the testnet phase. This upgrade will include DashPay, a “social crypto-payments wallet.” 

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Forex Videos

Brexit Is Done – How To Profit Trading Forex GBPUSD


Brexit done – where now for Cable?

Thank you for joining this forex academy educational video.  in this section, we will be looking at the aftermath of the Brexit future trade deal agreement negotiations, which have finally concluded.  And what this might mean for the GBPUSD pair.

After 4 years of wrangling over a future trading arrangement between the European Union and the United Kingdom, which left EU membership back in June 2016, by way of a national referendum, a free trade deal has been agreed between the UK and EU on Christmas Eve 2020. 

The markets will be grateful for a breather in the now finalised divorce, which has finally been settled after years of; will they, or won’t they get a future treading deal completed in time before the UK was forced to end the transition period on wt20 trading regulations, which was seen as potentially very bad for the British economy.  As many had predicted, the negotiations went down to the wire, and an agreement was set in place with hardly any time to spare.

The referendum, which took place on the 23rd of June 2016, and where the British people voted to leave the EU, caused the pound against the dollar to crash from 1.47 to a low of 1.21 during the following year, as the markets tried to decipher how this may play out for the British economy.

The pear rallied up to 1.42 in April 2018 as hopes were raised of a negotiated trade free trade deal, which was dashed. 

And we had the crash to 1.16 in march 2020 as the pandemic gripped the United Kingdom.

The pair has been rallying up to its current position at 1.36 – at the time of writing – based on the market anticipation that a free trade agreement would be reached.  This extremely bumpy road has been smoothed by the free trade agreement, but what now for the British economy and the pound, as it finally goes its own way as an independent nation?

There is no doubt that the bulls are in control of the pair at the moment, and some institutional traders will be looking for the previous highs, as shown here on the chart of 1.42 and 1.47.

However, things to consider are that the free trade agreement only takes up 20% of the British economy, with the remaining 80% of the gross domestic product being attributed to financial services, which does not form part of the agreement, and which still has to be negotiated between the EU and UK.  It is unlikely that issues in this sector will cause a major upset; however, there is potential for a spanner in the works should the two sides diverge from current alignments in trading standards.

The other critical component, which will affect the pound, is the United States dollar currency index, or DXY, which measures the dollar against the most commonly traded currencies known as the majors and which includes the British pound and Euro.

The dollar index has fallen from a high of 103.00 in march 2020 to its current level at just under 90.00 at the time of writing, as the federal reserve and United States’ government implement stimulus measures by pumping more and more dollars into the system to shore up the failing US economy, which is still in the grips of the pandemic.

While traders wonder if Cable has run out of steam at 1.36, traders will also be wondering if there is further room for a continued slide in the dollar index, perhaps down to 88.00 in the short term, as the market opens to a new year and a first new quarter, with institutions and investors adjusting their portfolios for the new financial year ahead.

On a market sentiment basis, a fundamental basis, and on a technical analysis basis, it would appear that there is scope for a push higher in Cable to reach some of the previous levels mentioned at 1.42 and 1.47, especially while the US dollar index is generally under pressure.

 

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Crypto Videos

Another Boom For BTC As Retail Interest Is Bitcoin on the Rise!


Retail Interest for Bitcoin on the Rise as the Cryptocurrency Reaches New All-Time Highs

Twitter analytics data indicates an increase in interest in Bitcoin. Social media interest in the largest digital currency by market cap sets new records across numerous key metrics as Bitcoin continues to post new all-time highs well into the $30,000s.

In a tweet that came out on Jan 2, the official handle for The TIE, a cryptocurrency data analytics firm, showed that the number of unique Twitter handles tweeting about Bitcoin has hit a new all-time high. The previous number was set during the peak of the 2017 bull run and counted around 64,000 daily tweets at that time. However, the current number eclipsed that.

Joshua Frank, CEO of The TIE, posted additional information indicating that the interest is just starting to grow. It is not limited to Bitcoin but rather extends to most cryptocurrencies.

According to Frank, since The TIE’s post on Twitter that showed the number of unique handles posting about Bitcoin rising above 70,000 in one day for the first time ever, the new total monthly tweet volume has eclipsed the December 2017 tweet count high of 135,000 and reached 140,000. In addition to this, the overall number of tweets about crypto has also hit a new high of nearly 250,000 in a 24-hour period.


The increased volume isn’t limited only to Twitter, however. Google search volume for the term “Bitcoin” is slowly climbing in stride with the cryptocurrency’s price. On top of that, phrases such as “how to buy bitcoin” are soaring as well.

On the other hand, searches for “how to buy Ethereum” remain rather low, despite a 24-hour gain of 20% to as high as $950.

Many have speculated that the increase in interest is due to “FOMO” coming from institutions, which, alongside with a large supply shortage, further pushed the price up. 

 

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Crypto Videos

Miners Can’t Produce Enough BTC – The Reason BTC is Skyrocketing!


Miners Can’t Produce Enough BTC – The Reason BTC is Skyrocketing

Institutional crypto investment company Grayscale now has $20 billion under its control as its consistent Bitcoin buys heavily outstrip production. The ratio of Grayscale Bitcoin buys to BTC production is has now increased to almost three to one.

 

As noted by data analytics firm Coin98, Grayscale bought close to three times more Bitcoin than the amount miners added to the market in December 2020.

Miners can’t produce enough Bitcoin

In Dec, Grayscale added a total of 72,950 BTC to its assets under management (AUM). Over the same period, miners generated just 28,112 BTC, being only 38.5% of Grayscale’s buy-in.

These figures underscore what many currently describe as an ongoing liquidity squeeze in Bitcoin, where large, mostly institutional buyers, suck up any available supply and completely remove it from circulation, sending it to cold storage for long-term holding. This then creates a lack of supply while the retail demand remains constant of increases, causing the price of Bitcoin to rise exponentially, just like it did on Jan 3, where Bitcoin’s price skyrocketed and reached past $33,000.

The phenomenon of institutional investors sweeping the available supply was already visible in Nov 2020, but Dec 2020 saw a clear increase in demand from both Grayscale and other institutional entities.

Grayscale controls over $20 billion in crypto

Grayscale CEO Barry Silbert celebrated the end of 2020 by bringing the company’s total assets under management across its various crypto funds to over $20 billion. Looking back just one year ago, the figure stood at, compared to now, a mere $2 billion.


The company remains the single largest institutional player on the Bitcoin scene, far outstripping any other market participant. Its BTC holdings were coming out to $17.475 billion on the first day of 2021, with this number growing to an even higher dollar value as Bitcoin pumped to over $34,000. Newcomer MicroStrategy, while not an investment-focused company, now controls 70,470 BTC.

Going forward, analysts predict that the increasing demand for the fixed supply of newly mined Bitcoin will only create a bidding war and push the price further up. 

 

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Crypto Videos

Privacy Is Dead – Bittrex to Remove the US Privacy Coin Markets! Withdraw Your Tokens Or Lose Them!


Bittrex to Remove the US Privacy Coin Markets – No More Monero, Zcash, and Dash Trading

Bittrex announced on Dec 29 that its exchange will soon be removing the US markets for the three of the largest privacy coins by market cap. The privacy coin market removal will happen on Jan 15.

In the announcement, Bittrex stated it is giving its users up to 30 days to withdraw their holdings:

“After the markets are removed, Bittrex would seek to provide its users with up to 30 days to withdraw any delisted tokens. However, in certain instances, the withdrawal period may be shortened. Users are advised to withdraw any tokens before the aforementioned withdrawal deadline.”

While a specific reason for the delisting wasn’t announced in the post, The Block’s Director of Research Larry Cermak speculated that the delisting is coming as a response to the latest FATF (Financial Action Task Force) pressure talk regarding AML regulations recommendations.

According to Bloomberg, all “virtual/digital asset service providers” (VASPs) will be obligated to collect information about their customers as well as the recipients of funds, and then send that data to the receiver’s service provider with each transaction.

As FATF recognizes cryptocurrency exchanges as virtual asset service providers, they will essentially be held to the same standards that banks and other financial service providers are held to. The new standards, published on Friday, Jun 21, 2020, are the officialization of FATF’s proposal made earlier in February 2020.

The controversial rule caused turmoil and was not well received by the crypto industry, as many crypto exchanges and wallet providers simply aren’t equipped to collect and send the data that would be required by FATF.

In response to the announcement that Bittrex shared on its official Twitter account, the prices of top privacy coins such as Monero, Zcash, and Dash all dropped in the range of 7 to 15 percent.

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Forex Videos

Forex In The New Year: How To Trade The EURUSD!

 


New year, where next for EURUSD pair?

Thank you for joining this oryx academy educational video.  

In this session, we will be looking at where next for the euro US dollar pair as the new year unfolds.

The pair’s bull run in February and March 2020 lifted it to 1.1400 and was driven by the pandemic beginning to take hold in the United States and weakening the dollar. However, as conditions worsened in Europe, the pair swung back in the other direction, to a low of 1.0700 in the market mayhem and volatility, which ensued as traders tried to decipher which economy was faring better than the other. 

 But as the US dollar index, a weighted indicator of the strength of the dollar against the so-called major currency pairs, including the euro, began to sink……

The Euro, which by volume is the largest traded major currency, moved higher to its current level of 1.22 at the time of writing. 

The reasons are largely twofold; firstly, the European Central Bank took measures to shore up the economies within the eurozone, which were seen to be sensible under the circumstances, and where are the pandemic seemed to be taking a breather in the eurozone area while still growing exponentially within the United States, causing harm to the American economy, and where it was perceived that perhaps the United States government were not being as cautious and sensible as the Europeans with regard to instigating lockdown measures including the wearing of masks and social distancing, and where their policies of stimulus, needed to shore up the US economy against the pandemic caused more dollars to be pumped into the system and thus affecting its value negatively.

 

Traders will be eyeing the 2018 high at 1.2469, as their next target, with the New year opening and traders looking to adopt longer view trading positions for the first quarter of 2021.

Potential for the continued upside momentum will be buoyed by the fact that the European Union will be rolling out vaccines to the population and where a free trade deal between the EU and UK was agreed on the 24th of December 2020, which will help give a lift to the euro because the worry of a negative economic impact of the UK leaving on WTO trading rules will have now abated.

Traders will also factor in that the relentless slide of the US dollar index below the key 90.00 level could cause further downside potential to 88.00 and even lower, again causing markets to buy Euros against the dollar.

 

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Forex Videos

This Is Whats Going To Kill The Dow Jones – Upcoming US Political Event!


Upcoming US political event could spell trouble for the Dow Jones Industrial Average Index

Thank you for joining this forex academy educational video.

On January the 5th, the Georgia runoff elections for the United States Senate could prove to be a turbulent affair for US stocks and, in particular, the Dow Jones industrial 30 average.

The Dow Jones industrial average index has had quite an incredible year from it’s high, shown here, of 29,500 in February to its crash of 18,500 during the initial wave of the pandemic to hit the USA in March, and on to a record-breaking high of 30,600 at the time of writing.  Most of the move higher can be attributed to the amount of stimulus which has been put into the US economy and where those dollars are finding their way into the stock market, and where investors are looking beyond the pandemic, where vaccines will help get the US economy back pre-pandemic levels of growth. This is also somewhat buoyed by the federal reserve’s stance on lower interest rates for longer, which also serves to inflate stock markets because corporations can access low-interest rate loans.

The Georgia runoffs are essentially on a knife-edge because they hold the potential to swing the balance of power in the 100 member US senate between the radical difference democrats and republicans. The November election left the republicans holding 50 senate seats and the democrats controlling 48. Only the two remaining seats in Georgia are undecided, and if Joe Biden’s party wins these seats, the balance of power will tilt towards the democrats.

While the US stock markets have largely ignored political events since the pandemic began, the upcoming Georgia elections cannot be ignored for the following reason:  Joe Biden has promised to reverse corporate tax cuts, which were introduced by the Trump administration in 2017.  This puts company earnings at risk.  And while the old style of earnings to share price ratio has largely been ignored by stock market investors during what can only be described as a shift in fundamental analysis concerning how the markets perceive corporate valuations, should Joe Biden win control of both chambers of Congress, he would be in a position to reverse these tax cuts and send a shudder through wall Street.

Investors will be looking to reposition their portfolios in January, as the new year and first quarter got underway, and there are lots of new data to take into consideration, including the ISM manufacturing and services for December, and weekly jobless benefit claims, to consider, plus the November trade deficit and of course the unemployment report for December, which all come out in the first week of January, with the possibility of causing turbulence in US stock markets.

With this political uncertainty and the fact that the Dow Jones is at an all-time historic high, it lends itself nicely for a pullback, at least until the above are all factored into the market. 

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Crypto Videos

MoneyGram Distances Itself from Ripple!


MoneyGram Distances Itself from Ripple

 

Global money transfer service MoneyGram has updated its stance on its relationship with Ripple by clarifying the nature of their collaboration. The changed stance came as a response to Ripple’s recent lawsuit by the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

MoneyGram issued a press statement on Dec 23, revealing that it has never utilized Ripple’s counterparty services, more specifically its On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) and RippleNet, for forex transactions. They stated: 

“As a reminder, MoneyGram doesn’t utilize the ODL platform or RippleNet for any form of direct transfers of consumer funds – digital or other. Furthermore, MoneyGram is not a party to the Securities and Exchange Commission action.”

The company also added: 

“We have continued to use other traditional trading counterparties even throughout the term of the agreement with Ripple, and isn’t dependent on the Ripple platform to accomplish any of its FX trading needs.”

Looking back in June 2019, MoneyGram and Ripple entered into a strategic partnership that planned to tackle MoneyGram’s cross-border payments. As part of this collaboration, Ripple was obliged to invest up to $50 million in exchange for the MoneyGram stock.

In February 2020, MoneyGram also revealed an additional $11.3 million investment from Ripple on top of the agreed $50 million. However, Ripple has now sold about $15 million of its stake in MoneyGram.

MoneyGram’s current statement of not being dependent on Ripple’s services corresponds to the narrative that previous events have set. Earlier in the year, the company debuted a real-time remittance service based on Visa rather than its blockchain partner.

Another Ripple partner Intermex also revealed back in March of this year that it wasn’t using the Ripple’s platform for remittance in its “core market.”

MoneyGram’s press release is just the latest in a series of actions taken by companies regarding either Ripple or XRP, with all of them backing out from the company due to the SEC lawsuit. On Dec 23, investment fund Bitwise Asset Management liquidated its position in XRP, while several cryptocurrency exchanges have also started to delist the XRP token. The fallout that came from the SEC lawsuit has also exerted strong negative pressure on the XRP price action, where the cryptocurrency dipped over 30% on Dec 23.

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Crypto Videos

Binance Enables SegWit Support for BTC Deposits as Adoption Skyrockets!

Binance Enables SegWit Support for BTC Deposits as Adoption Skyrockets

Binance, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges by volume in the world, has incorporated Segregated Witness, better-known as SegWit, support for Bitcoin deposits. 

The SegWit support was finally enabled for incoming deposits on Christmas Eve, Binance said in an official statement. Until this announcement, the protocol upgrade was enabled only for withdrawals. Effective immediately after the announcement, Binance users got the option to transfer funds to a SegWit address by selecting the BTC (SegWit) network. Binance further explained in the statement:

“Please note that SegWit should help reduce fees; however, if you incorrectly send incompatible assets to the desired address, your funds will not be recoverable, and therefore will result in permanent loss.”

SegWit

Implemented back in 2017, SegWit is a Bitcoin protocol upgrade designed to help with network scaling. Besides that, SegWit was implemented to help with fixing several associated bugs. This upgrade is known for the way it updates data on the blockchain, namely, by segregating signatures from transaction data. SegWit upgrade allows more transactions to be stored in a single block, thus doubling Bitcoin’s transaction capacity.

Data from transactionfee.info show that somewhere in the ballpark of two-thirds of Bitcoin payments currently use SegWit. However, even with SegWit implemented, Bitcoin continues to face scalability limitations, which many argue has impeded adoption for everyday use. Exactly those scalability limitations have transformed Bitcoin from a possible means of payment to a store of value. However, developers have not given up on BTC becoming a viable payment protocol.

Light Network

The Lightning Network has been proposed as a viable second-layer scaling solution for Bitcoin as a payment protocol. Unlike SegWit, which got implemented via a soft fork to the Bitcoin protocol, the Lightning Network is a layer that goes on top of Bitcoin, and that could enable instant and almost cost-free transactions.

Despite current limited transaction capacity, Bitcoin remains the uncontested leader of the digital currency market, with its dominance over other crypto assets recently hitting one-year highs and approaching dangerously close to 70% of the total cryptocurrency market cap. 

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Crypto Videos

Turkey Are Already Pilot Testing There CBDC In Mid 2021!


Turkey Announces CBDC Pilot Tests Planned for Mid-2021

Turkey’s Parliament central bank governor Naci Agbal updated the public on the development of its central bank digital currency (CBDC for short), revealing that the “conceptual” research had been completed and that the public can expect practical tests for such a currency in the latter half of 2021. This announcement came at a time where Turkey struggles with soaring consumer prices and an inflation rate currently in the double digits.

“There is a research & development project initiated on digital money,” said Agbal, according to two local news outlets. “Currently, the conceptual phase of the project has been completed. We aim to start the pilot tests in the second half of the next year.”


While this announcement came as a surprise to those that didn’t follow Turkey’s stance on CBDC’s in the past, the country was actually researching the possibility of implementing some form of a digital currency since mid-2019. In addition to that, a 2021 rollout of a digital Lira is not a new concept but rather an already expected but delayed scenario. Turkish president Recep Erdoğan announced in Nov 2019 that tests for a digital Lira would be complete by the end of 2020. The reason for the delays was most likely tied to Turkey changing its central bank head in Nov 2020.

The progress regarding digital Lira comes as the country’s central bank grapples with inflation being as high as 14%. In an official statement to reporters last week, Agbal – who got appointed as the central bank’s governor just last month — that the central bank is “determined” to reduce inflation and meet its year-end target of 9.4%. 


As we have stated before, Turkey is not new in the cryptocurrency sector. In fact, it is considered one of the most active countries in the world for cryptocurrency and digital transformation industry as a whole, with over 20% of its population holding some form of digital money. 

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Forex Videos

What Can Slow Down Forex Momentum & What Are The Best Times To Trade?

 


What can slow down forex trading momentum?

Thank you for joining this forex academy educational video.

 

In this session, we will be looking at the question of what can slow down forex trading momentum.

The forex market reportedly turns over more than 5 trillion dollars every trading day.  It is the most liquid business on the planet.  And it keeps growing, with the retail side of the business maintaining steady growth, with extra brokerages opening up, and more and more ordinary people trading online from home. The growth of the educational side of the market is also helping to attract would-be traders with promises of unknown secrets being opened up to them and quick riches to be made trading Forex.

While these topics are great material for another video, today we need to get back to the point of forex trading momentum, where one moment the market is absolutely flying about with lots of liquidity and volatility, with huge swings on price action, and exchange rates moving over 100 to 200 pips in a session and then suddenly stopping almost in its tracks and flattening out during periods of consolidation.  So, what causes this?

There are several reasons.  But first of all, let’s take a look at the biggest reason.  Here is a timetable of the trading centres where Forex trading goes on 24-hours a day, 5 days a week.

The time zones are based on Greenwich mean time in this example, and we can see that London, including Frankfurt, begins its trading day around 7 AM in the morning, New York follows from 12 noon, Sydney joins the markets shortly after 9 p.m., with Tokyo joining the market at about 11 PM. 

As with many other businesses, typically, you will find a surge of activity when people begin their day’s work. The forex market is no different. Traders start work at the desks and need to make money as quickly as possible because that’s what they get paid to do and because they will have orders from paying clients that need entering into the market for varying reasons, including hedging, closing out winning trades from overnight or longer time frames, closing out losing trades from overnight or longer timeframes or simply fresh speculative orders to be executed.  They also need to manage or correct positions where they may have gone home in the evening, and the later session pushed particular trades in an unexpected trend. Plus, they will need to try and make money with their own bank’s trades. 

And just like most people, energy levels tend to fade off after a couple of hours from starting work, and people need a break.  And that is why shortly after the beginning of the London and European session and the Sydney and Tokyo sessions, we begin to see lulls in the market after a couple of hours of trading. This also happens during the latter stages of the US session. 

However, this does not include the morning of the New York session, and the key reason is there will likely be economic data releases from the United States during their morning, where the US dollar, being the most widely traded currency, has a greater propensity to affect market direction after the release of economic data than any other release.

And so, another reason for lulls in market activity can be attributed to traders waiting for key market economic data to be released, and where the higher the likely impact of the data, the more likelihood of caution before the data release, which can cause flattening in exchange rates, while traders anticipate the release.

Another major reason for quiet times is the ending of the New York session and the beginning of the Asian session and where it is not unusual for the five areas to have varying views about where are forex exchange rates should be, which adds to the ebb and flow of the foreign exchange market and where typically as well as the slow down which is reflected on charts by periods of consolidation, we can often see price reversals and trend changes in trend direction at the end of one session and a beginning of another.

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Forex Videos

Forex – How To Sell At The Top & Buy At The Bottom!


How to sell at the top and buy at the bottom

Thank you for joining this Forex Academy educational video.

In this session, we will be looking at one of the oldest adages in trading: sell at the top and buy at the bottom.  And how can this be implemented in your trading for maximum results?

20 years ago, financial markets, including foreign exchange, were driven by fundamental analysis over technical analysis.  That is to say that professional traders and analysts would base their trading around fundamental economic data, including policy-making decisions, interest rates, GDP, inflation, and political events, including wars. Technical analysis was in its infancy.  In these times, it was much easier to predict where the bottoms and tops of assets were likely to be based on fundamental reasons alone. 

Today, things have completely flipped to the opposite side. Technical analysis is heavily dependent upon where chart patterns dominate price movement and where fundamental reasons for trading often lag behind technical and sometimes seem to defy logic.

You only have to take a look at the Dow Jones 30 industrial average index, which is at an all-time record-breaking high of over 30,000 while the US economy is still struggling because the pandemic still has it in its grips.  Fundamental analysis has gone out of the window on the basis that technical analysis is fuelling the US stock market to the upside, where hopes of a vaccine roll-out outweigh the fact that hospitals are currently at extremely high levels for covid patients, and where a new bleak record was passed this week of over 3000 deaths in a single day in the United States. Similar circumstances, albeit non-pandemic related, perhaps more to do with an overpriced stock market fuelled by the success of the 1920s where share trading on margin was rife probably caused the famous 1929 US stock market crash, which took years to recover from.  

Currently, the US market is also buoyed by hopes of extra stimulus by the federal governments and where this money is finding its way into the stock market. Even so, the market is overbought, does not comply with earnings per share, and yet is still relentlessly bid.

Even so, where is the top? It is difficult to say in this hyped market, which is pulling back from every attempt to short it.

If the market reaction is so extreme and fundamental analysis is second to technical analysis, traders have to be on their guard and look for several signs that the market is topping or bottoming out to find a good entry point to trade in either direction.

In this daily chart of the GBPUSD pair, we can see a huge push lower at position A during the middle of March 2020, where Britain began to fall into the grip of the coronavirus, which plunged the exchange rate to 1.1400.  Buyers were looking for an opportunity to go long because this was seen as the bottom of the bear move.

We have a high in September at position B, where there is a spike outside of the Bollinger band, where the candlestick is an upturned bearish hammer, and where the subsequent candlesticks are bearish, providing the trader with the knowledge that this is potentially a top at 1.3485. A subsequent high at position C, with a bearish hammer spiking out of the bands, provides chartists with a potential top at 1.3535.

Incorporating these simple chart lines at positions, A B, and C helps us visualize trend reversals.  Once we have one or two candlesticks on the daily chart confirming that there is indeed a trend reversal in progress, we can drill down into lower time frames, as intraday traders, to look for opportunities to go short or long.  We must never ignore fundamental reasons for taking a trade on. However, based on what has been set out today, we must conclude that fundamental analysis often lags behind technical analysis and therefore, by looking at swings in price action forming tops and bottoms outside of periods of consolidation,  traders give themselves a better edge while stacking the odds in their favor and trading in line with institutional size traders who typically trade in this manner.

In conclusion, we are in an age where fundamental analysis often has no bearing on an asset price and where technical analysis and fundamental analysis are often out of kilter,  but where eventually with two will catch up with each other.

Traders best opportunities of bagging more pips must be centered around reversals in price action based on longer time-frames such as daily charts, before drilling down into lower time frames such as an hourly chart and trade in the direction of the daily chart trend, to stack the odds in their favor of a successful trades, while never forgetting the importance of the fundamental reasons why a currency pair exchange rate might potentially be changing direction.

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Crypto Videos

Miami To Become The First Crypto-Centric City? Winklevoss Twins Backing The Mayor!


Will Miami Become the First Crypto-Centric City in the US?

Miami mayor Francis Suarez has joined the Bitcoin advocates “club” as he offered more evidence that mainstream adoption is accepting the largest cryptocurrency.  

In a tweet that came out on Dec 24, Suarez stated that Bitcoin is a “stable investment during an incredibly unstable year,” then adding that he has just started learning about the best-known digital asset through figures like the Winklevoss brothers and Anthony Pompliano.

Cameron Winklevoss, left, and his twin brother Tyler leave a federal appeals court in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Tuesday, Jan. 11, 2011. Facebook Inc.’s settlement of claims that its founder Mark Zuckerberg stole the idea for what became the world’s largest social-networking website should be undone, former college classmates of Zuckerberg told an appeals court. Photographer: Noah Berger/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Tyler Winklevoss and Pompliano responded to Suarez’s tweet, with Tyler saying he and his brother Cameron will bring the mayor of Miami a “signed copy of Bitcoin Billionaires,” a book written about the aforementioned twins, while Pompliano called Miami a future Bitcoin city.

Suarez also indicated that his administration is currently exploring the idea of Miami truly becoming the first crypto-centric government in the US. However, he provided no further details on the topic.

Francis Suarez was elected the mayor of Miami in Nov 2017 after running his campaign as a nonpartisan candidate. Before entering politics, he founded a real estate title company, but also worked as an attorney.

Miami has often been described as one of the US cities with the biggest potential of becoming crypto-centric by some news outlets, mostly due to its lax state oversight and a large influx of foreign capital. The North American Bitcoin Conference, which featured figures like Charles Hoskinson, Riccardo Sagni, and Roger Ver, was held in Miami at the start of 2020.

Bitcoin’s explosive rally and bull trend, which it is currently in, is certainly driving new conversations about the digital asset to the table. This is especially true as this rally, unlike the one in 2017, was fueled mostly by corporate and institutional adoption, rather than the retail sector. Bitcoin adoption is increasingly viewed not as a speculation, but as a competitive advantage in an economy riddled with financial instability, record central-bank intervention, and significant asset-price inflation. 

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Forex Videos

The US Stock Market Bubble Is About To Burst – Here’s Why You Should GTFO!

US stock market: Are investors walking into a trap?

Thank you for joining this forex academy educational video.

In this session, we will be looking at US stock markets, which have rocketed to historic highs, even though the United States economy is in the grip of the Coronavirus.

On Friday the 4th December, just post the non-farm payroll numbers, the S&P 500 index reached an all-time record high…

….this was also the case for the DOW Jones 30 industrial average…….
….the NASDAQ Composite index followed suit …….
….and so did the Barons 400 index


For all of these indices to simultaneously hit fresh all-time record highs is a very rare occurrence. It shows that investor sentiment is extremely high, potentially buoyed by a forthcoming and greatly anticipated next round for the Covid stimulus bill, if and when the democrats and republicans can reach an agreement on the size, currently estimated at $900 billion. The markets are also confident that the federal reserve is doing a good job in propping up the ailing American economy and sticking to a policy of low-interest rates for at least the next 2 years, which has typically corresponded with higher investment in stocks and shares, historically speaking.
Investors will look at the fed’s response to the crisis as a kind of insurance policy, that behind the scenes, the federal reserve will not allow the stock market to crash.

However, analysts who follow the Buffett indicator, which is the original measure for US market capitalisation, point out that since 1947 earnings per share have grown at around 6.21% annually, while the economy has expanded by 6.47% annually. This premise that the market capitalisation ratio to gross domestic product is based on the economy driven roughly 70% by consumption, where individuals must earn in order to buy products. And that consumption is where corporations earn their revenues, and ultimately this is where their profits come from.

The Buffett indicator shows that the mean average of around 0.7 has been closely adhered to since the 1950s, and the last time it broke away to the upside was in 1999, when speculators were investing heavily in Dot-Com companies, and where this led to the market crash in March 2000, and where we see that around this time the indicator pulls back to the mean average. Analysts at Deutsche Bank also point out that the recent run in US stocks has taken the market shift above the ratio of price to earnings above the level seen just before the 1929 stock market crash.


And here we see that the currents levels on the indicator are again highly inflated to a record high on the graph above the mean average at around 1.7.
…….
……and coincides with being above 2 standard deviations of the average range, which is an extremely rare occurrence.
And yet with the American economy still suffering from the pandemic, American corporations profit ratios are not reflective of consumer consumption, rather this time we have the Federal Reserve and US government stimulation packages which are churning out dollars into the market, and where investors are using much of those funds to push up the level of stocks due to FOMO, or fear of missing out. and where are the traditional corporate valuation matrix simply do not apply to certain stocks anymore.
Fear of a recurrence of the dot-com bubble correction, where investors ignored earnings per share valuations – many of these Dot-com firms were not making any profit at all – is another reason why we might potentially be looking at the top for stocks. Also, a fairly simple one; many of the favourites for investors, such as Amazon, Apple, and Tesla, for example, are not cheap anymore. This means that investors will be looking at cheaper stocks with growth potential, while others which are too expensive and are seen as potentially overbought. And in an economy which may not see growth return to any kind of normality for years, it adds weight to the thorny issue that the Dow Jones 30 industrial average – home to the top 30 most expensive stocks in the USA – and which is considered as a benchmark of the health of the US economy, may find buyers to be thin on the ground now, in which case a correction could be not too far away, based on everything set out in our assessment today.

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Forex Videos

No Bulls**t Guide to Forex! Why You Are Still Blowing Your Account!


Are there Forex trading secrets? 

Thank you for joining this forex academy educational video.

In this session, we will be asking the question, are there forex trading secrets?  And hopefully coming up with some answers.

The internet is awash with firms, including brokers and educational platforms, offering to teach new traders the secrets of trading forex.  Such as ‘’9 secrets to successful forex trading’’ or ‘’seven-day trading secrets exposed’’ or something along the lines of ‘’the five major secrets to apply to make a killing in forex trading.’’

Some Forex educational platforms and Forex brokers will use any gimmick they can to get new traders on board to service the revolving door of new traders coming in, blowing their accounts – where statistics show that will over 75% of new traders lose their money in the first 6 months of trading – while enticing new traders in to maintain their client numbers and keep their businesses afloat.

And so back to the question, are there any secrets in forex trading? Absolutely not!  This is not the Knights Templar, nor the Freemasons, or a secret society.  And it is most certainly not a get rich quick scheme as some people would have you believe. 

In reality, Forex is a business – the largest business on the planet – which turns over trillions of dollars 24/5.  It is complex: the financial markets are interwoven with each other, where a forex exchange rate trend can turn in an instant, with no apparent reason, other than sentiment.

It is heavily correlated with fundamental reasons and political ones, where a rumour from a tweet, or a speech by a policymaker, can cause severe volatility in the markets.  Where trends can change because of a certain time of day, where perhaps one country stops trading for the day and another begins.

If the market isn’t changing because of fundamental reasons, it is constantly changing because of technical ones.  That’s chart patterns.  Technical analysis, or the study of chart patterns, including exchange rate price action, and the implementation of technical analysis tools and indicators is pretty much the backbone of forex trading, with the upmost single important thing being where the price is at any given time, and which is also known as price action.  This, on its own, is of paramount importance because it shows who’s in control of a forex pair, whether it’s the bulls or bears, or whether the market is simply consolidating and no one is effectively driving the market in any particular direction other than sideways.

If somebody offers to sell you the secret to fixing your car engine troubles, you would probably laugh and take your car to a garage. If they offered you the secret to remove your painful appendix, you would cry in horror and run off to see your doctor.  Forex trading is a profession not a secret ridden gimmick.  The best traders learn about fundamental analysis, technical analysis, market sentiment, market correlation, how currency pairs move and why trends are developing, and when and why they stop and reverse.  And this is the real key to making money while trading Forex:  knowledge.  The more you learn, the more you will earn.

So, in conclusion, don’t be seduced by offers of learning secrets, when here at Forex Academy our professional traders, some ex institutional,  offer a totally free educational, informative service, with its reliable signal service, supported by a broker – EagleFX – which doesn’t need gimmicks, with the idea being that if traders make money on a reliable platform, where education is absolutely free, then everyone is a winner.  

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Crypto Videos

WordPress adds official Ethereum ad Plugin – Users Stand To Gain More Than Google Adsense!


WordPress adds official Ethereum ad plugin.

WordPress’s new crypto plugin will enable publishers that use this content management system to receive ad earnings directly into their Ether wallets, according to a Dec 10 plugin description that got posted on the WordPress’ official website.

The plugin known as “EthereumAds” will enable content publishers to auction their advertisement space for ETH using smart contracts. “After publishers insert our widget, their ad space is automatically openly auctioned off by using smart contract every 14 days to the highest bidder,” the official plugin description reads.

According to the EthereumAds website, the newly-announced WordPress plugin plans on competing with Google AdSense, allowing the publishers that use it to earn ETH through banner ads. EthereumAds emphasizes that it will provide publishers with lower commissions, stating: “Google Adsense only pays its publishers 68% of their total ad earnings. We, on the other hand, will pay them a whopping 90%.” This should provide a considerable increase in ad revenue that publishers get for renting their website space for ads.

The new ad plugin can be used to monetize any form and type of content built on WordPress, including websites, blogs, and billboards. They also officially stated that they are limiting publishers to crypto-related content.

As EthereumAds intends to enter the space ruled by a major ad monetization platform such as Google AdSense, it remains yet to be seen how both Google Adsense and other traditional ad platforms deal with the new crypto rival.

WordPress’s introduction of EthereumAds came at a great time, as the world’s largest ad monetization platform, Google Adsense, has had some issues with cryptocurrencies in the past. In April 2020, it has been reported that Google AdSense was running fraudulent cryptocurrency ads while prohibiting some legitimate cryptocurrency firms from using its services. Google Ads also previously blacklisted keywords mentioning Ethereum in Jan 2019, reports say.

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Crypto Videos

Sweden Leading the Way in the CBDC Sector – The First Country To Go Fully Digital?


Sweden Leading the Way in the CBDC

The Swedish government is currently progressing with its central bank digital currency by launching a formal review of a potential digital transformation to the digital currency.

According to a Bloomberg report published Dec 11, the review will explore the feasibility of moving the complete country’s payments infrastructure to a digital currency. Sweden features one of the most cashless economies in the world.

Per Bolund, financial markets minister of Sweden, reportedly said that the government expects to finish its digital currency review by the end of Nov 2022. Anna Kinberg Batra, a former chairwoman of the finance committee at Sweden’s central bank, would lead the initiative.

Bolund emphasized that ensuring that the digital payments system in Sweden functions in a safe way and is “available to everybody” is crucial. “Depending on how a CBDC is designed and which technologies are being used, it can have large consequences for the financial system as a whole,” the minister said.

Sweden has emerged as one of the leaders in the CBDC technology sector, announcing a pilot platform for its own digital currency known as e-krona in late 2019. In order to properly build the platform, Sweden’s central bank partnered with Accenture, a professional services company coming from Ireland. Riksbank launched its first e-krona CBDC pilots in February, claiming that the digital currency testing will be in operation until Feb 2021.

Sector

In Oct, Riksbank Governor Stefan Ingves expressed complete confidence that an e-krona CBDC should be issued by the central bank and fully recognized as legal tender. Last year, Ingves stated that Sweden’s central bank could not be the only institution that decides on the future of an e-krona implementation:

“Considering how important this issue is to the economy, the Riksbank cannot take this decision on its own. The decision on whether the e-krona should be introduced to the public is a decision that must have substantial political support.”

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Crypto Videos

Stimulus Hope Is Driving Up The Dow Jones – Should You Buy Or Short it?


Stimulus hopes drive up the Dow Jones – where next? 

Thank you for joining this Forex Academy educational video

In this session, we will be looking at the Dow Jones 30 Industrial Index and looking for indications of the next likely move.

While the United States economy is still reeling from the ongoing Covid situation, which has as a country in its grip, investors are looking long-term, buoyed on by vaccine news and hopes of a speedy back to normal recovery once it has been rolled out to the general population. 

In reality, of course, this may still take over 12 months to implement. Therefore hopes of the recovery are fuelled by my hopes that the American government will continue to support individuals and companies via a Covid-19 relief aid stimulus to help unemployed and financial relief for other individuals and those who need it.

This has been stifled somewhat by the fact that the discussions between the democrats and republicans have not yet been able to agree on how much money the state should put up. Current estimations are that a $900 billion stimulus bill may include checks for $600 for eligible adults and their independents. 

Some Republicans have asked for hand-outs of $1,200 per individual and $2400 per couple, with $500 going to children, to support families through this critical time.

The plan is that the 900 billion stimulus package will be the first of two parts, with phase one considered as an emergency relief bill, and phase two will kick in during the early part of January 2021, once that has been agreed on.

It is talk of the stimulus package, which has been keeping the Dow Jones at record highs.

This is a daily chart of the Dow Jones 30 industrial index.  We can see that since March 2020, the general trend has been a bull trend to the upside, following on from the earlier crash as the pandemic took hold in early February. The technical line numbered 1 shows the general upward trend as hopes of a V-shaped recovery fuelled investor to buy the index.

More recently, talks of an emergency stimulus package, and especially during November where investors believed a deal was imminent, saw price action move higher from this average and particularly where we see the bullish bounce from the line where we see a steady rise up to the record-breaking 30,000 level at position A. 

Talks of the stimulus package went to and fro between the democrats and republicans, with concerns of the, will they or won’t they agree on a package and where price action moved lower to the trend line at position 2, while talks stalled, and where price action itself bounced this higher trend line, marked as 2, back up at position B C  and D in an overall bias squeeze to the upside, where price continued to flirt with 30,000 and eventually where there was a significant close and open above this key level.

In this 1-hour chart, we can see that price action is seeing resistance at around 30,300.

And by adding this support line, we now have rising wedge formation clearly evident, where price action is fading to the upside, with a potential break above the 30,300 level. Should this immanent covid relief bill be agreed upon, price action could punch higher and continue with potential for the 30,300 level to become a support line and a possible move higher by 200 or 300 points.

There is so much pressure on the American government right now to come up with an agreed amount of stimulus for those who need it that it is almost impossible that nothing will happen. This is what is driving the Dow Jones Index and other US indices higher at the moment.

  

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Crypto Videos

It’s Not To Late To Buy Bitcoin – Follow The money!


Smartest People in the Room are Buying Bitcoin – Winklevoss Brothers Speak Up

Throughout 2020, over a handful of traditional financial giants have picked up stacks of Bitcoin, including the likes of billionaire investor Paul Tudor Jones and business intelligence company MicroStrategy. These investments are a part of a flow of big money that has recently entered BTC, Gemini crypto-exchange co-founders Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss recently stated.

“These are the most sophisticated investors, the smartest people in the room, buying up Bitcoin quietly, so it’s not a fear of missing out thing,” Tyler Winklevoss said in a CNBC interview, published on Dec 11. Major institutions are here now for this bull run, as opposed to Bitcoin’s retail-led bull run of 2017, Tyler explained.

Over the course of 2020, in addition to Tudor Jones and MicroStrategy, ack Dorsey’s Square, Stanley Druckenmiller, J MassMutual, and Guggenheim Partners have all invested substantial amounts of money in Bitcoin. Their crypto plays come as a response to the unstable global economic atmosphere.

Bitcoin is often compared to gold as a store of value as well as an inflation hedge. Both Druckenmiller and Tudor Jones align themselves with this narrative. Tyler Winklevoss added:

“You have publicly-traded companies such as Square and MicroStrategy putting their cash into Bitcoin because they’re worried about the oncoming inflation that would come with all the money printing and the COVID pandemic stimulus packages.”

When asked about Bitcoin’s volatility as an asset used for transactions, the brothers called Bitcoin with its current system a “buy and hold” strategy comparative to gold. “We see Bitcoin as an emergent store of value that will disrupt gold,” Tyler said. “So it actually doesn’t even have to be used as a currency, meaning that the volatility doesn’t matter if it’s actually a store of value.” The billionaire also expects dwindling volatility for the asset as time passes.