Forex Trendline Tool And Knowledge To Improve Your Trading System
No matter if you are a new or seasoned currency trader, there is always scope to improve your trading skills. So if you need help at improving your currency trading system, here are a few steps worth knowing.Test strategy across all currency pairsThe first thing to do is to plan a sound strategy, and stick to it while trading. This is why the adage ‘if you fail to plan, you plan to fail’ is so common, and especially important in currency trading. So it is important that traders first understand the traits and characteristics of each of the currency pairs.This is because some of the currency pairs are rather volatile and tend to fluctuate every day. There are also some currency pairs that are rather steady, and move slowly over long time periods. The next step is for the trader to determine which currency pair is best suited to trade with based on their risk parameters and trading strategy. And the only way to perform a test is to do a test run on various currency pairs and select the currency pair that yields the best result with your strategy.Trade DurationTo improve in currency trading, traders have to decide how long they decide to stay in a particular position. This should be decided based on the chosen currency pair and if the position should be held for minutes, hours or a few days. The trade duration may affect the overall profitability due to rollover charges that eat into profits and other characteristics.Trader needs to understand and strike a balance between overall profit and trade duration. Have they observed any relationship between trade duration and profitability? Is there a trend where the longer a trade duration, the greater the overall trading profits? Is there any obvious and clear relationship between these two components? You get the idea; so a trader needs to find the optimal trading duration to achieve best overall profits.Exit strategyNot only do traders have to decide how long they should stay at a particular position but also their exit strategy. This means they have to decide the rate of crashing out of the trade when they are in the winning position and the rate to cut losses if in a losing position. Accordingly, traders should decide on their stops and limits.There are far too many exit strategies to choose from. The best exit strategy is one that will increase your overall profits with lower risks. How can this be achieved? Consistent rigorous testing needs to be done on your trading strategy with the various exit strategies. How I wish I could provide you with the best exit strategy, however the best strategy does not exist. Therefore, you’ll have to perform your due diligence to test it out to know the answers.Observing key support and resistance levelsTraders should also incorporate currency news to monitor market information and technical support and resistance levels that affect their positions as this helps improve their trading returns. Normally traders will employ forex trendline as a useful tool to help identify key support resistance levels as well as provide a visual overview of the market condition. Together with forex trendline tool and the right analysis of the price charts, traders can easily implement their trade entries or exits in any trade. Alternatively, one can simply lower a substantial amount of risk by using scaling in trade entries, scaling out trade exits or shifting stop loss to breakeven points as soon as these key levels are reached by the market price.Maintain a trading journalMany traders tend to fail at currency trading because they keep on making the same mistakes. To learn how to be a currency trader who make lesser mistakes, traders have to maintain a trading journal or also called trading diary to keep track of the strategies that work for them and those which don’t work for them.The journal should contain important information of their trading performance. These include the date and time of taking a trade position, the rate paid for taking the trade position, the reason for the trade position, the strategy for the trade position and the date and time of exit of the trade position.Addition information that proves useful and should be included in the diary is the rate and reason for exiting the trade position, if the trader had followed their planned strategy and the profit or loss incurred in the transaction. Based on this compiled information the trader can recognize successful trading patterns and spot them the next time they trade. This journal will also keep a history of the mistakes they made and should be a reminder to them not to commit those mistakes again.With the help of these tips, it is possible to improve any trader’s currency trading system for the better. I am sure you get the idea. Many ideas presented here require the currency trader’s due diligence to test their strategy, bring some small little changes so that their system can be optimized to bring in greater overall profits. Also by using appropriate trading tools, traders can fully optimized the effectiveness and efficiency of their trading process.
Leading a Small Business Strategically
On Monday morning, the business owner returned from a long vacation to find his business closed. He was left with a note on the door that read, “This is to inform you that I’ve resigned. You left me to act in your behalf, but you didn’t tell me about these problems. The bills were months behind. Your suppliers were calling because they hadn’t been paid. You left me with several personnel issues that I didn’t have the authority to correct. I tried to deal with these matters responsibly, but they continued to grow. Why in the world would you leave us in such a hostile climate?”Today, many small businesses are experiencing the realities of global competitions. Many companies feel that they must restructure to stay competitive with world markets. After 18 years of managing projects and conducting over 100 organizational evaluations of business organizations, I realize that both large and small organizations struggle in implementing their operations effectively. According to a 2004 Small Business Administration (SBA) study, 580,900 small businesses opened in 2005, and 576,200 closed. The SBA noted that 67 percent of these new companies were able to survive at least 2 years, while 44 percent survived at least 4 years. What can be done to help small businesses achieve more market success? I have seen the benefits of strategic thinking in large successful organizations. Strategic thinking may be what a small business needs to sustain growth. Small businesses that cater to the workforce’s needs in the future workforce will gain a competitive advantage.There are four critical factors that will be discussed for gaining this competitive advantage:(1) inspire vision,(2) define core competencies,(3) apply strategic thinking, and(4) connect with employees.VisionEmployees want to know that their leaders are focused on the future as well as today’s problems. Vision is a key ingredient to keeping businesses on target. James Kouzes and Barry Posner, authors of The Leadership Challenge, conducted research on sixty thousand organizational leaders. They note that highly effective leaders inspire a shared vision: “To enlist people in a vision, leaders must know their constituents and their language. People must believe that leaders understand their needs…”A leader who has a clear vision can assist in guiding his or her organization. Most business leaders are too busy with the current issues of today and find little time for vision building. This leaves workers as well as the organization unfulfilled. Having a shared vision provides the small business a competitive advantage. Some critics will argue that a vision is not critical for small business success. This is simply not the case. Visionaries concentrate on future opportunities, not today’s limitation. Vision relates to the ability to look beyond physical constraints of the natural ream. While other organizations are engaging in trivial matters, an effective small business leader should inspire his workforce with a shared vision, thereby meeting their purposeful living needs.Core CompetenciesLeaders should clarify their core competencies with workers during rapid change. In times of restructuring, an organization should maintain its core functions. On the contrary, large businesses try to compete by quickly extending themselves in the marketplace, thereby becoming “all things to all people.” Their workers become confused because inconsistency and uncertainty exist. Companies find themselves doing things that they are not part of their organizational competencies. This provides a good formula for failure. In an effort to compete with global competition, many organizations downsize or ree-ngineer their processes, but lose their core competencies in the market.C.K. Prahalad, author of Competing for the Future, maintains that senior managers sometimes do not perform their homework in order to compete with the rapid market changes. He notes that restructuring is usually a dead-end initiative; however, re-engineering that eliminates unnecessary work and enhances processes is beneficial because it is directed toward company objectives such as customer satisfaction or total quality initiatives. Therefore, communicating a clear focus on core competencies is a competitive advantage for any business. Understanding a small business’ core competencies is an important element in organizational growth. Leaders then become the instruments to ensure that workers’ assurance.Strategic ThinkingEmployees want to know that their leaders are critically evaluating the market and industry competition. The enormous demographic changes within the 21st century American workforce are creating personnel issues for organizations unwilling to change their paradigms. Exemplary organizations think strategically and operate in duality. Watt Wacker, Jim Taylor, and Howard Means, authors of the Visionary Handbook, admonish that we live in an Age of Possibility where individual are able to claim their own future. They explain, “Fail to build your own future, and someone is going to build one for you….”Most businesses engage in some type of planning; however, few organizations properly engage in strategic thinking. Therefore, this becomes a competitive advantage in the marketplace for small businesses. Strategic thinking is more than meticulous planning in an organization. Strategic thinking consists of two components that are knowledge about the present and foresight about the future. Organizational strategists call this duality. Successful businesses exercise this phenomenon routinely. Most small businesses are concerned about today’s customers or tomorrow’s contracts but have little regard for future consequences. Some of the characteristics of effective strategic thinking include focusing on important issues, maintaining a long-term view, appreciating consequences, and remaining flexible. Strategic planning and vision work together because proper planning provides the basic framework and rationale for determining an organization’s direction while addressing the day-to-day challenges. Therefore, effective organizations go beyond detailed planning into a mode of strategic thinking.Connection with EmployeesEffective organizational leaders understand the important of connecting with a culturally diverse workforce. On numerous occasions, companies sing the praises of new technologies while workers are often devalued in the process. Leaders should see followers as more than mechanical parts for their organizational objectives. Jeffrey Pfeffer, author of the Human Equation, acknowledges that an organization’s success is directly related to its implementation, and this capacity comes from the workers, how they are treated, their skills, and their efforts as it relates to the organization.The Emergent Workforce now crosses gender, age groups, race, and geography. Employers must now deal with four generations in the same workforce for the first time in American history. The leadership style that may be effective for a Baby Boomer employee may fail with a Generation X employee. Some of the cultural changes include the acceptance of downsizing as a part of work life, the traditional family decline, the competitive nature of a global business structure, and the advancement of communication technologies to build person-to-person relationships. Some of these factors have impacted the workers attitude about their job and the quality of life. Today’s employees do not want to be a component in a big machine; they want to be valued because they are more than a physical being. In the quest for profit, many large businesses lose focus on the importance of socio-technical systems.However, small businesses cannot afford this luxury. Large organizations have difficulty adjusting to the personal needs of their employees in a rapid, competitive environment. Cultural and social changes place an additional burden of their flexibility to operate. This is a distinct advantage for a small business owner. Staying connected is critical to this success. Therefore, an effective leader in a small business must maintain a good relationship with his followers to assure credibility with the group.The Path ForwardIn spite of global pressures and front-line competitions, small businesses can achieve a high level of success with the right approach. The 21st century provides a brave, new world of personnel challenges such as virtual organizations, outsourcing, and the financial constraints of declining budgets in many federal agencies. Small business leaders can apply five critical factors that are vision, specific core competencies, goals, strategic thinking, and connection with employees. These problems then become an opportunity for small businesses to level the playing field thereby increasing their success rate. Therefore, these methods provide a logical, practice process for starting, growing, and sustaining a successful small business. Start today and grow your small business!
The Relation Between a Brand and Brand Elements
It is in human psychology to stand out in a crowd, to have a unique persona built around one’s self and to carve out an own niche. This desire of identity is reflected in a number of activities we carry out in the business world. I’m particularly referring to marketing a brand making it sell. But is that all there is to it? Do marketers simply brand a product and dish it out to retailers? There is a far more intricate and complex assembly of crucial and tactical tasks involved.Branding may be defined as a mode of communicating to the customers the special feeling or an image of a product that a manufacturer intends. Thus, coming into being of a new brand almost instantaneously initiates another thought process – how to make it known amongst the public and in what manner should that be done. A brand alone is just a name in it self. Of course, that name to a certain extent is representative of the product’s traits in one way or the other but we need more descriptors or enhancements to amplify and bring up the brand to a more recognizable level – one that registers effectively in the mind of a consumer, with a differential impression. This is where the ‘Brand Elements’ come in to play. Brand elements essentially consist of visually or verbally distinct information that identifies and differentiates a product or service by utilizing constituents such as names, logos, symbols, characters, slogans, and packaging. These elements may also include the jingle of a certain ad. All of these essentials basically compound the brand with an image that consumers form in their minds and then react towards that specific brand based on what they have perceived about it.At this point then, we, on a preliminary basis can inspect the connection between the above mentioned elements and the brand itself. Figuratively, we can connote a brand with a person or an individual with unique or rather inimitable traits and the brand elements can represent the ‘aura’ around that person. As personality traits define a person, in a similar fashion the brand elements ‘introduce’ or more appropriately put, create awareness about the brand.”Brand Awareness influences the formation and strength of the associations that make up the brand image” (Source: Keller, K.L (2008). Strategic Brand Management: Prentice-Hall)”To underscore the verity that there exists a very potent connection between the brand and the brand elements and that the brand is greatly influenced by the nature of combination of those elements, it would be best to aid my discussion with examples, namely TV ads. Here the core concept of this essay can be elaborated by two Television commercials that make use of different elements to embellish the brand with a unique image.Emirates Airlines – “Keep Discovering” Campaign (Search this on YouTube)”Emirates’ biggest ever advertising campaign, ‘Keep discovering’, was launched at the Global Corporate Communications conference in Autumn 2002 and quickly rolled out to our key territories and across pan-European, Arab, African and Asian media”The whole idea of the ad employs a very simple theme but it’s one that has a certain magical effect to it. It begins with two men looking out of their hotel room when one suddenly notices the snowfall outside and tells his friend about it. From there on, the very ambient and beautiful sounding Emirates trademark jingle softly picks up as the two friends rush downstairs, through the reception and then out the main exit of the hotel ending up in the street with the snow falling. Both look up with smiling faces with an excited expression and then throw a little snow at each other after which there is a fade out and the tagline “When was the last time you did something for the first time?” appears and fades into the closing scene where the camera is placed in the waiting lounge of the airport focused at the window while a child runs towards it to have a closer view of the jet outside.Before parsing and analyzing the brand elements used in this ad and relating them to the brand, I want you to move along with a preemptive notion that Emirates Airlines has tried to position their brand in a very decent, sophisticated and rather distinctive manner taking an emotion-based approach. Through out the commercial, you do not see any cabin crew, planes flying through the clouds or Air traffic Control centers – all of these would have been the conventional elements. Emirates chose it not to be this way instead they went for a metaphor-driven and a little unorthodox approach. The way the two friends look out the window, run outside and play with the snow evokes a strong feeling of nostalgia – as if perhaps they were reminded of an old childhood memory, a memory of being somewhere maybe. Then the tagline “When was the last time you did something for the first time?” further reinforces that percept of having done something memorable, something special at some place, some point in time and here Emirates implicitly implies “let us take you back there again” which calls to one’s mind a unique significance. This significance was denoted by the entire environment of the commercial; the hotel, the street and the snowfall. Places, memories, nostalgia are the emotions portrayed here. Such emotions may be stirred up in the mind of a person who travels a lot to different destinations and as traveling is Emirates’ business, they have creatively tied these emotions to themselves and essentially represented their brand in that context. This ad campaign was called “Keep Discovering” which is the slogan of Emirates Airlines. At the end of the commercial, even the slogan is highlighted very gently as the child runs to the window anxiously observing the airplane that slowly taxies across the tarmac. Finally, the lovely soundtrack of the commercial complements the entire theme with the way the guitar chords softly progress and then the enigmatic, stretched vocal note sung while the tagline is displayed. At the end, the dramatic piano notes play and fade out delicately – an unusual amalgamation of the elements that gives Emirates Airlines an image of grandeur and dignity and that is how they intend customers to remember them.Intel Core 2 Duo – “Multiply” Campaign (Search this on YouTube)Intel Corporation announced its Core 2 Duo processors in 2006 accompanied by the ad campaign which they called “Multiply”. This title was chosen to highlight the processor’s capability to handle multiple tasks at a time hence multiplying the performance output. The campaign was produced by the ad agency, Mckann Erickson.The ad starts with the opening caption “It’s time to multiply” and then the actor appears with multiple copies of him all dancing to the music very briskly. Then the following captions appear and change to the next one “Multiply your intensity”, “Multiply your computing power”, “Multiply your possibilities” and finally in the end “Introducing Intel Core 2 Duo Processors” followed by the tagline “The world’s best processors” also read aloud by the background voice over.Intel has tried to create an active, new age and upbeat image of its Brand with this commercial. The dancing characters and their well-pronounced energetic moves basically stress on the dynamism and speed of modern computing – features that Intel has integrated into the Core 2 Duo Brand. The multiple copies of the same 2 actors all following a different dance pattern and appearing at the same time symbolically represent the ability of Core 2 Duo processors to manage multiple computational tasks simultaneously with speed. Then the tagline “The world’s best processors” (which seems to be rather simplistic) tries to position Intel’s Core 2 Duo brand second to none.Brands undergo the process of evolution continuous change. Everything needs to be updated and kept up with the flow of time and modernization. A T.V commercial with all its elements that worked in the 80′s will not be effective or altogether useful today at all. Compare the 1984 Apple Macintosh commercial (YouTube) with the Intel Core 2 Duo ad and there will be a stark difference. Today the Macintosh commercial with all its elements (especially, the running female athlete with the old hair-do) is considered old fashioned.Brand elements can therefore direct the audience’s attention to a specific or set of specific characteristics that Brand managers want their brand to be attributed with. The method engaged in choosing and using the elements is directly contingent upon the image intended to be associated. These elements may also reflect the corporate culture that prevails within the workplace. To highlight this fact, consider only the logos of the two popular icons in the I.T. industry; Google and IBM. Google designed its logo in a very lively and vibrant colors which aside from many other things, depicts the relaxed and casual work environment at their offices. IBM’s logo on the other hand appears in a characteristic blue color with a bold and strong typeface which projects its relatively sober and to an extent, formal office culture. Even in most of their ads, one can see men dressed in suits with ties on sometimes around corporate office structures (such as buildings, cubicles etc).So conclusively, a brand can have its meaning and purpose portrayed through the elements that it incorporates in its advertisements. The selection of these elements is basically contingent upon the way brand managers want consumers to perceive or understand the purpose of their product. If properly harnessed, these elements can get the message across to wider audiences and thus create extensive awareness about the brand.