Why Hedging FOREX is Superior to Directional Trading
Recently at a convention on FOREX Hedging there were people in the audience who had spent as much as 80,000 or more on trading courses. None of them had any success with trying to predict trends as directional traders. Most lost a lot of money in the process.
Apparently there are about 250,000 FOREX traders. I would guess that 98% of them are directional traders. Yes, 250,000 traders in a 3.2 Trillion/day market while there are 144 Million stock traders in a much smaller market place. The New York stock exchange is about 30 million a day and comes nowhere near the liquidity of the decentralized FOREX market.
So, why so few are hedging the FOREX market? I believe this is mostly because of a lack of a system that consistently works.
Most directional traders with any experience have thought of hedging the market but most come to the conclusion the hedge just cancels itself out over time. So, most just give up on it not knowing how to make it work. But, what if, instead of zeroing out all profits you could actually double your profits with the hedge?
Let's take the EURUSD and the CHFUSD pairs.
These pairs are historically negatively 93-98% of the time. That is when one pair goes up the other goes down, and vice versa, up to 98% of the time. Now, over time these would pretty much just cancel each other out and you would not be left with much of a profit and maybe would even see a slight loss if the hedge was not in your favor.
Now what if you could ALWAYS buy low when one pair went down and sell high when the other correlated pair went up? And when the market corrected do the same in the opposite direction over and over and over again?
This is how I 'trade' the market. Really it is more like 'investing' since I do not look at charts, do no analysis of markets, care very little about fundamentals as long as the hedge is sticking. I also only spend about 5-15 minutes a week resetting my buy and sell limits. The rest is done automatically.
Now, that is the ONE of the ways that I build my equity. The other is daily interest paid at special negotiated rates from some of the biggest brokers in the US and Switzerland. Not all brokers are alike in the rates that they pay even though they are based on the rates set by the respective central banks.
Because the system I use is so consistent and works so well the brokers are not only willing to bend over backwards to give us the best interest rates available they are also willing to give us 400:1 leveraging. Some brokers extend this 400:1 leveraging up to one million dollars. Note that no other system to my knowledge gets this kind of leverage on that kind of money. It is a first in FOREX retail history and there is a good reason why.
Now, at first blush you may think that 400:1 leveraging is increasing our risk. In directional trading it certainly would be putting you in grave danger of losing your capital all that much quicker.
But, in fact, when you hedge the market as we do 400:1 leverage actually DECREASES your risk. Hence, the brokers are quite happy to provide this kind of leverage for this style of trading because it actually reduces the risk of a margin call and it makes the brokers that much more money.
Now, why is 400:1 so important to hedging the market in the way we do it? Well, because of the daily interest!
Let's take an example and say you have $5000 in your trading account and a 10% margin set.
That means you have $500 allocated to the market. If the net interest we receive is 1.11% annually then this would not be a lot of money. We could do better at the bank! ...well maybe...
But, what happens when this $500 is leveraged at 400:1? All of a sudden this 1.11% interest becomes 44% per annum! Now, I am sure you would agree that this is a return worth looking at and that most money managers would sell their mothers for this kind of return!
But, this return does not include the buy low/sell high profits. Add these all together and you have a system that on fairly conservative margin can produce very handsome and consistent profits without risking your shirt and without needing to sit in front of a computer all day and night watching charts until you go cross-eyed.
There is one more way that equity can increase or decrease. That is via the market fluctuations in the hedge. Sometimes the hedge will work in your favor and sometimes it will go against you. When it is in your favor you can see windfall profits beyond the daily interest and buy and selling process. If it goes against you it will cause a pullback in your equity for a period of time.
Compounding is also possible. When your balance and equity increase significantly over time your margin is going down. That means it is getting more conservative and safer if you just let it grow. But, if you want to keep your margin at say 10% then you can reallocate your portfolio and buy more lots which bring more interest and more buy low/sell profits.
Now, if you think that daily interest at 400:1 and 100% winning transactions makes sense what would you think if we could smooth out the fluctuations that give us the big profits and big pullbacks, i.e. volatility?
Well, we could up our margin could we not? We could increase our margin without incurring much more risk and in fact may even be able to reduce it when we hedge the hedge. The net result means more interest, more profit, and less risk while freeing up our time to spend the money we are making instead of ignoring our family stuck to a chart on a screen.
Presently such an enhancement is in testing and may soon to be released to the public if tests are successful. If you want to keep updated on this new development be sure to subscribe to my update list.
By learning how to HEDGE the FOREX you not only increase your profit and reduce your risk. You can also get a life! That to me is the most attractive part of this whole system.
The great thing is it is not difficult to learn either. I personally coach people in the system I use and it usually takes a couple of hours and about 10 minutes a week to monitor before my students are on their own.
Wayne Nash is a semi-retired investment professional, FOREX trader, and online entrepreneur with over 15 Years of online marketing, coaching, and investing experience and serves a large international investors network from almost every country in the world. Wayne speaks fluent Japanese and has lived in Japan since 1985 and spends part of the year in his native BC in Canada.
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