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What Is Your Binary Options Strategy?
When you are just entering the world of binary options trading or investing, you may be on the receiving end of a lot of advice. It is not uncommon to hear people tell you to implement different gambling strategies because binary options are based on chance more than anything else. You will also hear a lot of advice from those who say there are many good ways to develop an effective strategy using indicators and market signals. Some will insist that with proper analysis of market data, a solid strategy can be developed too.
Are they all correct? Interestingly enough, the answer is yes. The reason for this is simple, and as one expert writes, “there is no such thing as a perfect strategy for every trader. There is only a best strategy for each individual trader.” Thus, your strategy has to be shaped around a few things:
- Your willingness and ability to follow your chosen strategy.
- Your personality. For instance, are you restless if you are taking the safe route or a higher risk strategy?
- Your budget and goals,
Identifying the answers to these questions is the first step to formulating a strategy. You should also understand that the winning percentage of most strategies will be somewhat constant, but the total number of successful trades varies on an individual basis and is based entirely on the strategies used.
For instance, some investors want a high percentage of winning trades and are more comfortable with risk averse trading. Others are ready to take more risk and are entirely comfortable winning fewer trades if the returns on winning trades are dramatically higher. This enables them to implement higher risk trades. The interesting thing about strategies and the kinds of trades they generate is that they are all built from the same data.
The Data of Strategy
For example, almost all strategies will look at issues like market trends, trading trends, highs and lows, reversals, and various kinds of indicators. The reason that high and low trends pay off in strategy development is simple: binary options trading applies to whether or not an asset rises above a strike price or doesn’t. It is the proverbial “yes or no” part of the proposition and analysis for either outcome pays off.
As an example, a lot of risk-averse investors will look for breakouts. They use these for trend line investing, which can be as brief as sixty seconds to a day, but can be used to coordinate investing in the direction of a short trend. Although this seems complex, it really is not. The key is that analysis cannot be broad and across all available markets. Instead, focused analysis on a specific area will allow even a novice investor to analyze for a breakout and then invest in binary options accordingly.
Just being able to detect a reversal or a downward trend over the course of a day can yield a very rewarding investment. The key is to understand your strategy based on your budget, personality, and your ability to stick with the strategy, even if it does not yield immediate success. When you do this, and use the right tools for analysis, you can create an effective strategy that brings you closer to your goals.
This is a guest post.
Two Reasons to Save And One Reason Not To
I’m a fan of saving money. I’m not doing as much of it as I’d like, but that’s because I’m focusing on killing my final credit card, first. I postpone saving, knowing that it’s
something that I need to do the moment my credit cards are paid off. It won’t wait any longer than that.
Why do I care so much about saving? It’s because I’m risk-averse. If I can avoid risk, I do, in most situations. I don’t want to risk going hungry if I lose my job, and I don’t want to risk eventually(very eventually!) having to fight the cockroaches for the right to drink my fiber supplements.
There are a couple of excellent reasons to save:
1. Peace of Mind. There is a certain calm that comes from having enough savings to weather a few storms. If your car dies when you’re broke, it’s a tragedy. If it dies when you’ve got some cash saved up, it’s a minor inconvenience. Knowing that the vagaries of fate aren’t going to shatter your life against a cliff is a reward all its own.
2. Cheap nursing homes suck. When I get old, I want to live in a comfortable nursing home. One with extended cable, nice beds, and attractive coeds in charge of the sponge-baths. That’s not too much to ask, but I have to save up for it now. Medicaid doesn’t cover homes like that. Those are strictly a private affair. To make that happen, I need to save and invest now, or I won’t be able to enjoy the fruits of my labors then.
And, of course, there is one shining reason not to save:
1. You’re living your life now. Saving everything you’ve got, to the detriment of your current life, isn’t healthy either. Life is short. Do you really want to be curled up in bed, trying to enjoy a sponge-bath, shivering at the regrets you’ve built by denying yourself everything? I’m certainly not suggesting you waste all of your money on coke, hookers, and video games, but it is important to take the time to build some memories, or your final years will be hollow.
You have to find the right balance between your future and your present. Every moment of your life is important, not just the ones that haven’t happened, yet.
3 Habits Every Soon-to-be-Successful Debtor Needs to Cultivate
Getting out of debt is primarily a matter of changing your habits. We’ve all heard people swear by skipping your morning cup of coffee to get rich, but that’s just a small habit. Much more important are the big habits, the lifestyle habits. Here are 5 habits to cultivate for financial success.
Frugality
“Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship”– Benjamin Franklin
As Chris Farrel wrote in “The New Frugality“, being frugal is not about being cheap, but finding the best value for your money. When my wife and I had our second baby, we couldn’t justify spending $170 on a breast pump, so we bought the $30 model. It was quite a bit slower than the expensive model, and was only a “single action”, but for $140 of savings, it seemed worth the trade. Six weeks later, it burned out so we bought a new one, still afraid to justify $170 on quality. This thing took at least 45 minutes to do its job. When it burned out 6 weeks later, we decided to go with the high-end model. This beauty had dual pumps, “baby-mouth simulation” and it was fast. The time was cut from a minimum of 45 minutes to a maximum of 15. That’s 3 hours of life reclaimed each day fro $140. Six months of breastfeeding for each of two kids means my wife regained 45 days of her life in exchange for that small amount of money. At the rate of 6 weeks per burnout, we would have gone through 8 cheap pumps, costing $240. The high-end unit was still going strong when we weaned baby #3. Buying quality saved us both time and money. I wish we would have gone with the good one from the start. Sometimes, the expensive option is also the cheap option.
Maturity
- Image via Wikipedia
- Image via Wikipedia
“Maturity is achieved when a person postpones immediate pleasures for long-term values.” -Joshua Loth Liebman
Being a mature, rational adult is hard. It means accepting delayed gratification over the more enjoyable instant variety. We save for retirement instead of charging a vacation. It takes a lot of restraint to put off buying the latest toys, clothes, gadgets, cars or whatever else is currently turning your crank until you actually have the money to actually afford it. It means planning your future instead of looking like a surprised bunny caught in a spotlight every time your property taxes come due. (Who knew that the year changed every year? Do they really expect annual payments annually? Geez! There’s so much to learn!) It means thinking about your purchases and buying what you actually need, actually want, and will actually use instead of resorting to retail therapy whenever you feel like a sad panda. The only benefit to mature, rational management of your finances is that, given time, you will have the security of knowing that, no matter what happens, you will be okay. That’s a huge benefit.
Pleasure
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“Do not bite at the bait of pleasure, till you know there is no hook beneath it.” – Thomas Jefferson
If it hurts, you won’t do it. You have to learn to take pleasure from from things that won’t make you broke and you have to learn not to hate putting off the things you can’t afford. Take pleasure in the little things. Enjoy the time with your family. Presence means so much more than presents. So many people never learn how to enjoy themselves. Take the time to experience life and enjoy doing it.
Update: This post has been included in the Carnival of Debt Reduction.
53 Percent
I didn’t grow up with money. I never lacked for anything important, like food, clothes, shelter, affection, but we weren’t exactly rolling in cash.
When I was 6, I got a paper route so I could buy my own toys.
When I was 13, I started doing odd jobs on nearby farms.
When I was 15, I worked construction with my Dad in the summer. When school started in the fall, I gave up a study hall and my lunch period to work in the lunch room, serving food and washing dishes, for $4.25 per hour.
Within two weeks of getting my driver’s license at 16, I got a job working evenings and weekends washing dishes. I’d call it a part-time job, but it wasn’t, most weeks. A couple of months of busting my butt got me promoted to cook, which was more fun and had better pay. $6.25 and hour was a decent amount for a teenager in 1994.
Three days after graduating high school, I moved out.
At 18, I was living on my own, working two jobs. During the day, I stacked pallets. I stood at the end of a conveyor belt, picked up the 50 pound bags as they came my way, took 3 steps and set them back down. 1500 times a day. In the evenings, I was a cook at a different restaurant 5 miles away. My car was broken, so I had to bike to both jobs. In the winter. In Minnesota. That winter, my parents passed up a new washing machine to buy me a beater car so I didn’t have to freeze. It lasted until spring, but I’m still grateful for that car. That’s the only time I’ve taken money from my parents as an adult.
At 20, I was working 12 hour graveyard shifts in a machine shop when Brat #1 came along. I’d work from 5PM to 5AM, come home and take the baby so my wife could get 5 hours of uninterrupted sleep. That kid drank 8-10 ounces of milk or formula every hour, so without that, the idea of uninterrupted sleep was a cruel joke. We qualified for WIC, a “feed your family” welfare program. I was broke and scared of formula prices, so we signed up. My son puked up the one brand of formula we were allowed, and it hurt my pride, so we cancelled without ever using the benefits.
After 6 months of missing so much of my family’s life, I quit that job and moved into a call center, taking a $4/hour pay cut, before overtime. Fortunately, busting my butt every day allowed me to stomp all over my goals and get some decent bonus pay.
Working a daytime schedule also allowed me to go to school part-time. Here’s the scene: At 21, I had a baby, a full-time job, and I was going to school. I took student loans to make that happen. I was also doing side jobs fixing computers. Traveling IT for people who have no idea how to work a mouse. During this time, we started accumulating debt, based entirely on our own choices.
Within a few months of graduating, the years of busting my butt in the call center paid off and I got promoted to be the administrator for the phone system and collection system, which gave me valuable experience.
Until I got laid off.
Again, busting my butt saved it. My boss volunteered to “forget” about the vacation time I had used that year so it would get cashed out on my last day. I could cover expenses for a while.
Job hunting became a full-time job and it paid off. I landed my current job right as my funds ran out.
I work, on average, 50 hours per week. When it’s needed, I’ve cleared 100 hour work weeks. I have a side business as a firearms instructor. I have a side business doing web consulting for businesses. I blog here.
I do whatever it takes to support my family. I am that support.
I have never had an unemployment check, and I’ve never used government charity.
I have busted my butt to be where I am today, and continue to bust my butt to make it better.
Some day, I’ll be out of debt, and that will also be due to hard work, not charity.
I love my family.
I pay my taxes.
I give to charity.
What D&D Taught Me About Finance
I admit it: I’m a geek. I’m not a hobby geek who only geeks on the weekends. I’m a full-fledged, licensed and certified geek. I am a geek about so many wondrous things that it’s hard to list them all. My wife knows, my kids know. It’s not much of a secret. One of my many geek qualifications is my sordid history of gaming. Role-playing, tabletop only. If that’s gibberish, it’s okay. Nobody needs to understand my geekitude but me.
I started playing Dungeons and Dragons more than 15 years ago. There were no live chickens or human sacrifice. Just a small group of geeks, proto-geeks, pseudo-geeks, and the occasional nerd playing DnD in a poorly lit room for several hours. We laughed, we cried, we fought evil, saved the world, and raised the stock price of an assortment of caffeinated beverage companies.
As the man said, I told you that, so I could tell you this:
DnD taught me many things. It taught me THAC0 calculation, dice-identification, and the fact that no woman, anywhere, considers tabletop roleplaying to be an alpha-male trait. “I’m a level 73 kinder warrior-mage-thief” is not a pickup line anywhere in the world, even Gen-Con. Remember that. Also remember, the singular of dice is die. If your are talking about one, it’s a die. Get it wrong and I will throw a bag full of dice at you and make you dig out the purple, sparkles-like-a-vampire, 27-sided die from among the hundreds of other dice.
DnD also taught me some surprising things about the world of personal finance, which is not a part of a planar campaign.
All the best toys cost too much. At the current exchange rate of 10 silver pieces(sp) to 1 gold piece(gp), potions of extra healing will drive you into debtor’s prison. Just as a sword of extra-slaying +10 will cost you everything you earned raiding that castle for the last 6 Wednesday evenings, so will a big screen TV set you back a full month’s salary. Don’t risk your life or sell your life’s energy for something fleeting, just because it’s “the best” or the newest gadget, geegaw, or artifact.
Never sell your soul for a castle or a horse. When the Baatezu come to offer you a “no money down, 0% for a year, all-expenses-paid, surrender-your-first-born” deal for a castle or the prettiest horse in the park, take a cue from the former First Lady. Just say no. Spending money today that you have to pay for tomorrow is almost always a bad idea. Don’t spend your soul, spend your savings. Don’t buy something until you can afford it. A Lexus or an Arabian, a mansion or a rambler. Are any of them worth auctioning your future?
Your armor isn’t stronger just because it’s shiny. A suit of Full-Plate of Protection-From-the-Charms-of-Bar-Wenches +5 may look pretty, but it’s not going to help against the orcs, kobolds, or trolls unless, of course, they are wearing skirts and sitting on a bar-stool above a sawdust-covered floor. Does the shiny new iPod really provide a benefit, or is it just a shiny gadget to woo the ladies?
A good sword is necessary to keep your stuff. This is a not a call to self-defense, or mugger, err, orc-slaying–though why that’s ever viewed as a negative is beyond me. You need to be aggressive in defending your loot. Call your credit card companies and demand they turn over the booty, err, lower your rates. Tell your friends to step away from the Diamond Ray of Disappearance, err, expensive outings or you will chop off their heads, err…no wait, that one can stay. I think my friends may be scared of me.
[ad name=”inlineleft”]The promised reward for completing an adventure isn’t the only way to make money. Sure, the local duke(your boss), may be willing to pay you a chest of gems(your salary) for defending the town from the ravages of the Tarrasque(your job), but that isn’t the only way to make money. You could do your job, collect your pay, and go home at night, but why? Don’t forget to pick up the loot along the way. If you spot the shiny penny, grab it, whether it’s abandoned gold, a new idea for a niche-blog, or a chance to turn your leisure hobbies into money. There are thousands of ways to make money outside of your day job. Every one will help your bottom line.
It takes cunning to slay the dragon. When tackling your debt(dragon), wading in swinging your sword may be emotionally satisfying, in the short term, but long term, it’s just a painful method of reminding yourself that you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup. Make plans. Have a strategy. Come out a winner. Then, sit down for beer and dragon steak. Goal-less, plan-less attacks fail in the long-term.
Update: This post has been included in the Carnival of Personal Finance.
