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General Investing

New Respect For Variable Annuities

For most of the 2000s, variable annuities got no respect. Here’s an example: in January 2008, a SmartMoney.com piece stated the opinion that “[variable] annuities only make sense for a tiny fraction of the population. The rest of us should be buying plain old mutual funds.”1

Less than a year later, mutual fund investors watched the S&P 500 go into a 39% freefall. As they reached for aspirin, many variable annuity owners saw their account values go up by 6% or more in 2008.2

If you happened to put some money in a variable annuity in the 2000s, you may look back and applaud your decision today. For years, the rap on variable annuities was that they were too expensive. Back in the 1990s, their fees were often near 3% of the account balance, while mutual fund fees were commonly half that or less.2

Then insurers started offering new perks with variable annuities. First came the “death benefits” stating that heirs of an annuity owner could get at least the original invested principal minus any withdrawals. Then came the “living benefits” – guaranteed minimum income benefits (GMIBs), guaranteed minimum withdrawal benefits (GMWBs) and guaranteed lifetime withdrawal benefits (GLWBs) for annuity owners. As the Great Recession hit, some of those that thought variable annuities were overpriced now felt they were underpriced, and we saw a new wave of interest in them.2,3

Variable annuities have their disadvantages. Their “guarantees” are only as strong as the insurance company making them. Additionally, if you’re retired and want to cash out and take a lump sum from a variable annuity, you’re not going to get the “guaranteed” amount. You’ll get the sum that remains in your funds. Yes, you can receive the higher “guaranteed” amount, but you won’t get it at once: the insurer will pay it out incrementally, usually at about 5% per year.2

Maybe it’s time for a second look. The concept of “guaranteed” returns is pretty attractive these days. While variable annuities are complex investments and not for everyone, many of the retirement-minded among us are taking a new look at their potential.**

**A potential annuity investor should consider investment objectives, risks and charges, and expenses of registered annuities or other securities offered by prospectus before investing. The prospectuses for these products contain this and other information about the investment company, and can be obtained from your financial advisor. Please read the prospectuses carefully before deciding whether to invest.

All annuity guarantees are based on the financial strength and claims-paying ability of the issuing insurer, who is solely responsible for all obligations under its policies. Generally, annuities have contract limitations, fees, and charges, which can include mortality and expense charges, account fees, underlying investment management fees, administrative fees, and charges for optional benefits. Most annuities have surrender charges assessed during the early years of the contract if the contract owner surrenders the annuity. Withdrawals of annuity earnings are taxed as ordinary income and may be subject to surrender charges plus a 10% federal income tax penalty if made before you reach age 59 1/2.

Withdrawals reduce annuity contract benefits and values. Any guarantees are contingent on the claims-paying ability of the issuing insurance company. Annuities are not guaranteed by the FDIC or any other government agency; they are not deposits of, nor are they guaranteed or endorsed by, any bank or savings association. For variable annuities, the investment return and principal value of an investment option are not guaranteed. Variable annuity subaccounts fluctuate with changes in market conditions; thus the principal may be worth more or less than the original amount invested when the annuity is surrendered.

Forex Trading Articles

How To Make Money In The Forex Niche – Some Alternative Approaches

Every year thousands of people enter the forex niche. Some go on to become highly profitable traders, whilst others end up losing money. However it’s important to point out that there are many ways you can make money in this industry.

It may be the case that you are making some decent profits from your trading, but are still trading relatively modest amounts. In which case you will probably want to find a way to make a little extra money, and one way of doing that is by selling your trading signals.

If you are a profitable trader, then your trading signals will always be in demand from other traders. So you could either start up your own website and promote it heavily in order to attract monthly subscribers, or you could sign up to an automated signal provider and let people access your signals this way instead.

There are a few of these websites up and running now and they work by bringing signal providers and people looking for signals together. The visitors can subscribe to as many providers as they like from one central website. As a signal provider you will get a small commission per trade per subscriber, so you can make a very nice income if you are a profitable trader because you will inevitably attract many subscribers.

The second way you can make an additional income from forex trading is by selling your trading system, or creating some kind of information product detailing everything you know. Again if you have a proven system in place and are clearly a very successful trader, then you should have no problems finding buyers for your product.

You can take this one step further by getting in touch with some of the main bloggers and marketers in this niche. These people will have very large email lists so you can offer them a commission for every sale that they generate in order to encourage them to promote your product to their list.

One final way you can make some extra money is one that is ideal if you are not yet a profitable trader. You can simply set yourself up as an affiliate marketer and promote various products that you come across, that other people may be interested in buying. Product owners will often pay a sizeable commission (sometimes as high as 50-75% per sale) so this alone could provide you with a full-time income.

It is certainly a lot less stressful than trading the markets yourself. All you do is create a website or blog and set about building an email list so you have a large list of prospects. Then you can sign up to affiliate programs and do deals with product owners to start making some sales and generating some serious cash.

So the point is that there are a lot of opportunities in the forex niche. If you are making money from trading, then you have even greater opportunities to make even more money. However even if you are a poor trader yourself, you can still make a big profit from promoting various products and services in this niche.

Forex Trading Articles

Lessons In Foreign Currency Trading From Ebenezer Scrooge

Very few people have not heard of Charles Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge. However, since he is known mostly for his love of money, lack of kindness, and hatred for the Christmas season, it seems like folks have forgotten how sound his business practices were. In fact, his principles were so sound that it is obvious Scrooge would have been an excellent foreign currency trader. The next time you find yourself undecided over the latest trading news, consider the qualities of Scrooge.

Focus on Preserving Your Funds

Scrooge was a miser yet his greed would have benefited him in his trading decisions. When you are taking a look at forex news online it is easy to immediately start thinking about doing what you can to multiply your money. This is natural, but it is also a mentality that can easily lead to impulsive and reckless trading. It may sound counterproductive but if you concentrate on ‘not losing’, the profits will follow shortly thereafter.

Cheapness

At the beginning of the story you can see Scrooge grumbling about giving his assistant a paid holiday for Christmas Day. He does not just consider it inconvenient, he compares it to stealing. While this is certainly taking it to extremes, his reluctance to spend money would be an asset to him as a trader. Take time to look for brokers with low spreads, low overnight fees, and additional bonuses while thinking very carefully about paying extra for anything.

Be Willing to Spend

This might sound like a contradiction, but think about Scrooge’s position.

He was cheap and would often be unwilling to spend a dime more than necessary. That is the key. If he did spend money he made sure that he would be able to make it back in profits. What this means for traders is that it is alright to put money into the foreign currency market but only when there is a high probability of success. Perfect your strategy, trust your indicators, and do not hesitate to take a position.

Dedication

Say what you will about his personality, but nobody can deny the fact that Scrooge was a hard worker. Many people get into foreign currency trading expecting it to be an easy ride all the way through. Although it may not seem difficult to spend all day executing orders, that is because most of the real work is mental.

Towards the end of the classic Christmas Carol, Scrooge did see the error of his ways in regards to people. However that does not mean there is nothing to be gleaned from his financial practices. Despite his original failings as a human being, prospective foreign currency traders can make real money on the market by applying Scrooge’s mentality to their transactions.

Market Analysis

Principal Investment For Global Trader’s Market Trading Strategy

I was just hanging around forum sites the other night when suddenly, I got stuck and participated in the discussion. I couldn’t be able to prevent this feeling of bit amused on different traders’ opinions and reactions in the thread. Trading seems to be very influential that gives drastic impact to various people all over the world. Since trading is not a sure thing in most cases, I consider it pretty much like a game wherein you won’t be able to find out the result unless you give it a try, play and win. Surely, just like any other competition you need to have your own strategy. It is a tried and tested method of application to achieve great result and sure win.

A trading strategy is your principal investment to control things according to what you want to accomplish. For a global trader, it is basically a complete system on how you will execute a trade to meet substantial trading profits in a specific timeframe.

The stock and Forex market are two essential places for trading, they are kissing cousins. There are many evidences that stock market can make sparkling collision to Forex in various means. Surely, you won’t be able to comprehend the whole market scenario unless you made research and studied trading courses. The market is a very perplexed place that needs to be totally absorbed and understood. I would suggest that anyone who wants to trade in the market live should begin his career by learning the business completely. Stock trading basics will surely help but proficient education will be an edge for you to handle risky market situations.

The good thing about our current status in trading is that there are various training courses that offer in-depth trading education and seminars for both novice and expert traders. Of course, some traders will disagree and would probably raise an eyebrow for telling that experts should also need to enroll in some stock market trading courses. Learning is a continuous process of growth and development. There are so many things that need to be furnished and enhanced. No matter how successful you are, there would always be a tendency for you to lose. All you have to do is to prepare yourself to combat any unnecessary incident that you may encounter in the real-time marketplace. You have to know when to enter and exit a trade so you won’t be able to lose fortune and make bad credit.

We have to admit that we are not perfect. Traders must realize that the only safe way to make unyielding profits is to provide yourself some investment for future success. The principal things you need for investment are solid trading education, personal training and trading software. These principal investments will facilitate you in getting great financial freedom. From these, you can build up strong market trading system and risk-tolerance strategies.

Now, I knew why Shamus Bradley strictly imposes traders to have a goal prior to executing trade in the market live. He wants traders and investors to get great strategy for reaching that goal in the safest and most certain way.

General Forex

Forex Trading Tips – Prepare Yourself Well Or Lose Everything

There are iron rules in each business and ignoring these rules will make the players kicked out quickly from the game, this is also applied in forex trading. Apply these forex trading tips in your trading career to make steady profits, keep your account save, and play by the rules:

1. Never Make An Entry Without Doing Analysis First

There area always times when you will stumble upon something that looks very promising, perhaps from news or trends. These ‘hunch’ may bring you profits once or twice, but it just coincidence, you will never survive in forex trading if all that you got is ‘hunch’ instead of proper analysis and logical decisions.

This has happened to the majority of the traders when they started; they manage to make a profit by speculating, thinking that they already master the secrets of forex trading, and start giving forex trading tips to their acquaintances. This attitude is identical to a gambler in a casino: throw the dice and pray. You’ll be thrown out from the game in no time with this kind of attitude.

2. Learn Step by Step

Foreign exchange has many factors and elements; it is purely not possible to grasp it instantaneously. If you are a novice, do not deposit USD10,000 in your new account and have various tests with it. Trading currency is similar to gambling; when someone lose, there are always a winner at the other side. These winners will finish your USD10,000 in no time and by reading this forex trading tips you have learned to avoid it.

The best ways to go is take it slow. Start with a practice/dummy account while learning. It is possible to test a variety of methods, currency pairs, robots, and signals there without concerns. If you have discovered a system that is effective, you can proceed to a mini account for further test. Nevertheless, if you have confidence in your system, go ahead and open a live account.

By “system that works”, I refer to a system that can generate profits on regular basis at the end of the month without you have to spend your entire time maintaining your open positions. If you have confidence in it, learn to control your emotion and allow it to do the work.

3. Utilize Trusted Forex Trading Platform/Forex Broker

No matter how good your system is, trading in a poor quality platform will ruin your opportunity to gain profits. Usually, you will get free trading platform from your broker; these are what you need to look in your trading platform/forex broker:

– Support all currency pairs that you interested in. At the minimum it must support popular currency pair like EUR/USD, GBP/USD, and USD/JPY.

– Allow you to put take profit and stop loss order; this is very important risk management method.

– Provide charting feature, news feed, advices, and research material; to make it short: all that you need to make proper analysis. If possible, a daily forex trading tips can be beneficial as well.

– Customer support available. If possible, get the one that provide 24 hours support so you can contact them any time when you get problems.

– Currency trading is a global business, so it is great if your broker take deposit in multiple currencies.

– Simple procedures applied in their services, including withdrawal.

4. Figure out how to Use Stop Loss and Take Profit Order

Stop Loss and Take Profit is orders that you put to close your position at certain price. Instance: you buy GBP at 1.678; then you place Stop Loss order at 1.648 to limit your loss by 30 pips. You also put Take Profit order at 1.708 which means you will close it when you get 30 pips profit.

This is important so that you can prevent your emotion to take part on the “close decision” and screw it up. If the market is move against you, you won’t close the position since you are hoping the market to swing back to your side, thus turn potential loss into profits. In most cases, this will only bring you more losses. This is very important since it is the cause of many traders falls. If you don’t remember everything that I mentioned in this forex trading tips, remember this: emotion is only going to make your trader career short.

Other possibility: the market moves in your favor and you start to gain profits, but you still hold it because you want even larger profits. You can ever predict when the market will moves against you and when it really does, it will be already too late. In both scenarios, greed is the one in movement. But when logic dictates, you can control greed.

Main point here: you should not rush everything when you learn or trade forex. Take your time to learn the rules, test, practice, analyze, and read several forex trading tips for the day. However, I don’t recommend you to do it by yourself since it can be long and painful process.