Hello, dummies
It's your old pal, Fuzzy.
As I'm sure you've all noticed, a lot of the stuff that gets posted here is - to put it delicately - fucking ridiculous. More backwards-ass shit gets posted to wallstreetbets than you'd see on a Westboro Baptist community message board. I mean, I had a look at the daily thread yesterday and..... yeesh. I know, I know. We all make like the divine Laura Dern circa 1992 on the daily and stick our hands deep into this steaming heap of shit to find the nuggets of valuable and/or hilarious information within (thanks for reading, BTW). I agree. I love it just the way it is too. That's what makes WSB great.
What I'm getting at is that a lot of the stuff that gets posted here - notwithstanding it being funny or interesting - is just... wrong. Like, fucking your cousin wrong. And to be clear, I mean the fucking your *first* cousin kinda wrong, before my Southerners in the back get all het up (simmer down, Billy Ray - I know Mabel's twice removed on your grand-sister's side). Truly, I try to let it slide. I do my bit to try and put you on the right path. Most of the time, I sleep easy no matter how badly I've seen someone explain what a bank liquidity crisis is. But out of all of those tens of thousands of misguided, autistic attempts at understanding the world of high finance, one thing gets so consistently - so *emphatically* - fucked up and misunderstood by you retards that last night I felt obligated at the end of a long work day to pull together this edition of Finance with Fuzzy just for you. It's so serious I'm not even going to make a u/pokimane gag. Have you guessed what it is yet? Here's a clue. It's in the title of the post.
That's right, friends. Today in the neighborhood we're going to talk all about hedging in financial markets - spots, swaps, collars, forwards, CDS, synthetic CDOs, all that fun shit. Don't worry; I'm going to explain what all the scary words mean and how they impact your OTM RH positions along the way.
We're going to break it down like this. (1) "What's a hedge, Fuzzy?" (2) Common Hedging Strategies and (3) All About ISDAs and Credit Default Swaps.
Before we begin. For the nerds and JV traders in the back (and anyone else who needs to hear this up front) - I am simplifying these descriptions for the purposes of this post. I am also obviously not going to try and cover every exotic form of hedge under the sun or give a detailed summation of what caused the financial crisis. If you are interested in something specific ask a question, but don't try and impress me with your Investopedia skills or technical points I didn't cover; I will just be forced to flex my years of IRL experience on you in the comments and you'll look like a big dummy.
TL;DR? Fuck you. There is no TL;DR. You've come this far already. What's a few more paragraphs? Put down the Cheetos and try to concentrate for the next 5-7 minutes. You'll learn something, and I promise I'll be gentle.
Ready? Let's get started.
1. The Tao of Risk: Hedging as a Way of Life
The simplest way to characterize what a hedge 'is' is to imagine every action having a binary outcome. One is bad, one is good. Red lines, green lines; uppie, downie. With me so far? Good. A 'hedge' is simply the employment of a strategy to mitigate the effect of your action having the wrong binary outcome. You wanted X, but you got Z! Frowny face. A hedge strategy introduces a third outcome. If you hedged against the possibility of Z happening, then you can wind up with Y instead. Not as good as X, but not as bad as Z. The technical definition I like to give my idiot juniors is as follows:
Utilization of a defensive strategy to mitigate risk, at a fraction of the cost to capital of the risk itself.
Congratulations. You just finished Hedging 101. "But Fuzzy, that's easy! I just sold a naked call against my 95% OTM put! I'm adequately hedged!". Spoiler alert: you're not (although good work on executing a collar, which I describe below). What I'm talking about here is what would be referred to as a 'perfect hedge'; a binary outcome where downside is totally mitigated by a risk management strategy. That's not how it works IRL. Pay attention; this is the tricky part.
You can't take a single position and conclude that you're adequately hedged because risks are fluid, not static. So you need to constantly adjust your position in order to maximize the value of the hedge and insure your position. You also need to consider exposure to more than one category of risk. There are micro (specific exposure) risks, and macro (trend exposure) risks, and both need to factor into the hedge calculus.
That's why, in the real world, the value of hedging depends entirely on the design of the hedging strategy itself. Here, when we say "value" of the hedge, we're not talking about cash money - we're talking about the intrinsic value of the hedge relative to the the risk profile of your underlying exposure. To achieve this, people hedge dynamically. In wallstreetbets terms, this means that as the value of your position changes, you need to change your hedges too. The idea is to efficiently and continuously distribute and rebalance risk across different states and periods, taking value from states in which the marginal cost of the hedge is low and putting it back into states where marginal cost of the hedge is high, until the shadow value of your underlying exposure is equalized across your positions. The punchline, I guess, is that one static position is a hedge in the same way that the finger paintings you make for your wife's boyfriend are art - it's technically correct, but you're only playing yourself by believing it.
Anyway. Obviously doing this as a small potatoes trader is hard but it's worth taking into account. Enough basic shit. So how does this work in markets?
2. A Hedging Taxonomy
The best place to start here is a practical question. What does a business need to hedge against? Think about the specific risk that an individual business faces. These are legion, so I'm just going to list a few of the key ones that apply to most corporates. (1) You have commodity risk for the shit you buy or the shit you use. (2) You have currency risk for the money you borrow. (3) You have rate risk on the debt you carry. (4) You have offtake risk for the shit you sell. Complicated, right? To help address the many and varied ways that shit can go wrong in a sophisticated market, smart operators like yours truly have devised a whole bundle of different instruments which can help you manage the risk. I might write about some of the more complicated ones in a later post if people are interested (CDO/CLOs, strip/stack hedges and bond swaps with option toggles come to mind) but let's stick to the basics for now.
(i) Swaps
A swap is one of the most common forms of hedge instrument, and they're used by pretty much everyone that can afford them. The language is complicated but the concept isn't, so pay attention and you'll be fine. This is the most important part of this section so it'll be the longest one.
Swaps are derivative contracts with two counterparties (before you ask, you can't trade 'em on an exchange - they're OTC instruments only). They're used to exchange one cash flow for another cash flow of equal expected value; doing this allows you to take speculative positions on certain financial prices or to alter the cash flows of existing assets or liabilities within a business. "Wait, Fuzz; slow down! What do you mean sets of cash flows?". Fear not, little autist. Ol' Fuzz has you covered.
The cash flows I'm talking about are referred to in swap-land as 'legs'. One leg is fixed - a set payment that's the same every time it gets paid - and the other is variable - it fluctuates (typically indexed off the price of the underlying risk that you are speculating on / protecting against). You set it up at the start so that they're notionally equal and the two legs net off; so at open, the swap is a zero NPV instrument. Here's where the fun starts. If the price that you based the variable leg of the swap on changes, the value of the swap will shift; the party on the wrong side of the move ponies up via the variable payment. It's a zero sum game.
I'll give you an example using the most vanilla swap around; an interest rate trade. Here's how it works. You borrow money from a bank, and they charge you a rate of interest. You lock the rate up front, because you're smart like that. But then - quelle surprise! - the rate gets better after you borrow. Now you're bagholding to the tune of, I don't know, 5 bps. Doesn't sound like much but on a billion dollar loan that's a lot of money (a classic example of the kind of 'small, deep hole' that's terrible for profits). Now, if you had a swap contract on the rate before you entered the trade, you're set; if the rate goes down, you get a payment under the swap. If it goes up, whatever payment you're making to the bank is netted off by the fact that you're borrowing at a sub-market rate. Win-win! Or, at least, Lose Less / Lose Less. That's the name of the game in hedging.
There are many different kinds of swaps, some of which are pretty exotic; but they're all different variations on the same theme. If your business has exposure to something which fluctuates in price, you trade swaps to hedge against the fluctuation. The valuation of swaps is also super interesting but I guarantee you that 99% of you won't understand it so I'm not going to try and explain it here although I encourage you to google it if you're interested.
Because they're OTC, none of them are filed publicly. Someeeeeetimes you see an ISDA (dsicussed below) but the confirms themselves (the individual swaps) are not filed. You can usually read about the hedging strategy in a 10-K, though. For what it's worth, most modern credit agreements ban speculative hedging. Top tip: This is occasionally something worth checking in credit agreements when you invest in businesses that are debt issuers - being able to do this increases the risk profile significantly and is particularly important in times of economic volatility (ctrl+f "non-speculative" in the credit agreement to be sure).
(ii) Forwards
A forward is a contract made today for the future delivery of an asset at a pre-agreed price. That's it. "But Fuzzy! That sounds just like a futures contract!". I know. Confusing, right? Just like a futures trade, forwards are generally used in commodity or forex land to protect against price fluctuations. The differences between forwards and futures are small but significant. I'm not going to go into super boring detail because I don't think many of you are commodities traders but it is still an important thing to understand even if you're just an RH jockey, so stick with me.
Just like swaps, forwards are OTC contracts - they're not publicly traded. This is distinct from futures, which are traded on exchanges (see The Ballad Of Big Dick Vick for some more color on this). In a forward, no money changes hands until the maturity date of the contract when delivery and receipt are carried out; price and quantity are locked in from day 1. As you now know having read about BDV, futures are marked to market daily, and normally people close them out with synthetic settlement using an inverse position. They're also liquid, and that makes them easier to unwind or close out in case shit goes sideways.
People use forwards when they absolutely have to get rid of the thing they made (or take delivery of the thing they need). If you're a miner, or a farmer, you use this shit to make sure that at the end of the production cycle, you can get rid of the shit you made (and you won't get fucked by someone taking cash settlement over delivery). If you're a buyer, you use them to guarantee that you'll get whatever the shit is that you'll need at a price agreed in advance. Because they're OTC, you can also exactly tailor them to the requirements of your particular circumstances.
These contracts are incredibly byzantine (and there are even crazier synthetic forwards you can see in money markets for the true degenerate fund managers). In my experience, only Texan oilfield magnates, commodities traders, and the weirdo forex crowd fuck with them. I (i) do not own a 10 gallon hat or a novelty size belt buckle (ii) do not wake up in the middle of the night freaking out about the price of pork fat and (iii) love greenbacks too much to care about other countries' monopoly money, so I don't fuck with them.
(iii) Collars
No, not the kind your wife is encouraging you to wear try out to 'spice things up' in the bedroom during quarantine. Collars are actually the hedging strategy most applicable to WSB. Collars deal with options! Hooray!
To execute a basic collar (also called a wrapper by tea-drinking Brits and people from the Antipodes), you buy an out of the money put while simultaneously writing a covered call on the same equity. The put protects your position against price drops and writing the call produces income that offsets the put premium. Doing this limits your tendies (you can only profit up to the strike price of the call) but also writes down your risk. If you screen large volume trades with a VOL/OI of more than 3 or 4x (and they're not bullshit biotech stocks), you can sometimes see these being constructed in real time as hedge funds protect themselves on their shorts.
(3) All About ISDAs, CDS and Synthetic CDOs
You may have heard about the mythical ISDA. Much like an indenture (discussed in my post on $F), it's a magic legal machine that lets you build swaps via trade confirms with a willing counterparty. They are very complicated legal documents and you need to be a true expert to fuck with them. Fortunately, I am, so I do. They're made of two parts; a Master (which is a form agreement that's always the same) and a Schedule (which amends the Master to include your specific terms). They are also the engine behind just about every major credit crunch of the last 10+ years.
First - a brief explainer. An ISDA is a not in and of itself a hedge - it's an umbrella contract that governs the terms of your swaps, which you use to construct your hedge position. You can trade commodities, forex, rates, whatever, all under the same ISDA.
Let me explain. Remember when we talked about swaps? Right. So. You can trade swaps on just about anything. In the late 90s and early 2000s, people had the smart idea of using other people's debt and or credit ratings as the variable leg of swap documentation. These are called credit default swaps. I was actually starting out at a bank during this time and, I gotta tell you, the only thing I can compare people's enthusiasm for this shit to was that moment in your early teens when you discover jerking off. Except, unlike your bathroom bound shame sessions to Mom's Sears catalogue, every single person you know felt that way too; and they're all doing it at once. It was a fiscal circlejerk of epic proportions, and the financial crisis was the inevitable bukkake finish. WSB autism is absolutely no comparison for the enthusiasm people had during this time for lighting each other's money on fire.
Here's how it works. You pick a company. Any company. Maybe even your own! And then you write a swap. In the swap, you define "Credit Event" with respect to that company's debt as the variable leg . And you write in... whatever you want. A ratings downgrade, default under the docs, failure to meet a leverage ratio or FCCR for a certain testing period... whatever. Now, this started out as a hedge position, just like we discussed above. The purest of intentions, of course. But then people realized - if bad shit happens, you make money. And banks... don't like calling in loans or forcing bankruptcies. Can you smell what the moral hazard is cooking?
Enter synthetic CDOs. CDOs are basically pools of asset backed securities that invest in debt (loans or bonds). They've been around for a minute but they got famous in the 2000s because a shitload of them containing subprime mortgage debt went belly up in 2008. This got a lot of publicity because a lot of sad looking rednecks got foreclosed on and were interviewed on CNBC. "OH!", the people cried. "Look at those big bad bankers buying up subprime loans! They caused this!". Wrong answer, America. The debt wasn't the problem. What a lot of people don't realize is that the real meat of the problem was not in regular way CDOs investing in bundles of shit mortgage debts in synthetic CDOs investing in CDS predicated on that debt. They're synthetic because they don't have a stake in the actual underlying debt; just the instruments riding on the coattails. The reason these are so popular (and remain so) is that smart structured attorneys and bankers like your faithful correspondent realized that an even more profitable and efficient way of building high yield products with limited downside was investing in instruments that profit from failure of debt and in instruments that rely on that debt and then hedging that exposure with other CDS instruments in paired trades, and on and on up the chain. The problem with doing this was that everyone wound up exposed to everybody else's books as a result, and when one went tits up, everybody did. Hence, recession, Basel III, etc. Thanks, Obama.
Heavy investment in CDS can also have a warping effect on the price of debt (something else that happened during the pre-financial crisis years and is starting to happen again now). This happens in three different ways. (1) Investors who previously were long on the debt hedge their position by selling CDS protection on the underlying, putting downward pressure on the debt price. (2) Investors who previously shorted the debt switch to buying CDS protection because the relatively illiquid debt (partic. when its a bond) trades at a discount below par compared to the CDS. The resulting reduction in short selling puts upward pressure on the bond price. (3) The delta in price and actual value of the debt tempts some investors to become NBTs (neg basis traders) who long the debt and purchase CDS protection. If traders can't take leverage, nothing happens to the price of the debt. If basis traders can take leverage (which is nearly always the case because they're holding a hedged position), they can push up or depress the debt price, goosing swap premiums etc. Anyway. Enough technical details.
I could keep going. This is a fascinating topic that is very poorly understood and explained, mainly because the people that caused it all still work on the street and use the same tactics today (it's also terribly taught at business schools because none of the teachers were actually around to see how this played out live). But it relates to the topic of today's lesson, so I thought I'd include it here.
Work depending, I'll be back next week with a covenant breakdown. Most upvoted ticker gets the post.
*EDIT 1\* In a total blowout, $PLAY won. So it's D&B time next week. Post will drop Monday at market open.

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Almost every day people come to this subreddit asking the same basic questions over and over again. I've put this guide together to point you in the right direction and help you get started on your forex journey.
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A quick background on me before you ask: My name is Bob, I'm based out of western Canada. I started my forex journey back in January 2018 and am still learning. However I am trading live, not on demo accounts. I also code my own EA's. I not certified, licensed, insured, or even remotely qualified as a professional in the finance industry. Nothing I say constitutes financial advice. Take what I'm saying with a grain of salt, but everything I've outlined below is a synopsis of some tough lessons I've learned over the last year of being in this business.
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LET'S GET SOME UNPLEASANTNESS OUT OF THE WAY
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I'm going to call you stupid. I'm also going to call you dumb. I'm going to call you many other things. I do this because odds are, you are stupid, foolish,and just asking to have your money taken away. Welcome to the 95% of retail traders. Perhaps uneducated or uninformed are better phrases, but I've never been a big proponent of being politically correct.
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Want to get out of the 95% and join the 5% of us who actually make money doing this? Put your grown up pants on, buck up, and don't give me any of this pc "This is hurting my feelings so I'm not going to listen to you" bullshit that the world has been moving towards.
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Let's rip the bandage off quickly on this point - the world does not give a fuck about you. At one point maybe it did, it was this amazing vision nicknamed the American Dream. It died an agonizing, horrible death at the hand of capitalists and entrepreneurs. The world today revolves around money. Your money, my money, everybody's money. People want to take your money to add it to theirs. They don't give a fuck if it forces you out on the street and your family has to live in cardboard box. The world just stopped caring in general. It sucks, but it's the way the world works now. Welcome to the new world order. It's called Capitalism.
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And here comes the next hard truth that you will need to accept - Forex is a cruel bitch of a mistress. She will hurt you. She will torment you. She will give you nightmares. She will keep you awake at night. And then she will tease you with a glimmer of hope to lure you into a false sense of security before she then guts you like a fish and shows you what your insides look like. This statement applies to all trading markets - they are cruel, ruthless, and not for the weak minded.
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The sooner you accept these truths, the sooner you will become profitable. Don't accept it? That's fine. Don't bother reading any further. If I've offended you I don't give a fuck. You can run back home and hide under your bed. The world doesn't care and neither do I.
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For what it's worth - I am not normally an major condescending asshole like the above paragraphs would suggest. In fact, if you look through my posts on this subreddit you will see I am actually quite helpful most of the time to many people who come here. But I need you to really understand that Forex is not for most people. It will make you cry. And if the markets themselves don't do it, the people in the markets will.
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LESSON 1 - LEARN THE BASICS
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Save yourself and everybody here a bunch of time - learn the basics of forex. You can learn the basics for free - BabyPips has one of the best free courses online which explains what exactly forex is, how it works, different strategies and methods of how to approach trading, and many other amazing topics.
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You can access the BabyPips course by clicking this link: https://www.babypips.com/learn/forex
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Do EVERY course in the School of Pipsology. It's free, it's comprehensive, and it will save you from a lot of trouble. It also has the added benefit of preventing you from looking foolish and uneducated when you come here asking for help if you already know this stuff.
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If you still have questions about how forex works, please see the FREE RESOURCES links on the /Forex FAQ which can be found here: https://www.reddit.com/Forex/wiki/index
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Quiz Time
Answer these questions truthfully to yourself:
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-What is the difference between a market order, a stop order, and a limit order?
-How do you draw a support/resistance line? (Demonstrate it to yourself)
-What is the difference between MACD, RSI, and Stochastic indicators?
-What is fundamental analysis and how does it differ from technical analysis and price action trading?
-True or False: It's better to have a broker who gives you 500:1 margin instead of 50:1 margin. Be able to justify your reasoning.
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If you don't know to answer to any of these questions, then you aren't ready to move on. Go back to the School of Pipsology linked above and do it all again.
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If you can answer these questions without having to refer to any kind of reference then congratulations, you are ready to move past being a forex newbie and are ready to dive into the wonderful world of currency trading! Move onto Lesson 2 below.
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LESSON 2 - RANDOM STRANGERS ARE NOT GOING TO HELP YOU GET RICH IN FOREX
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This may come as a bit of a shock to you, but that random stranger on instagram who is posting about how he is killing it on forex is not trying to insprire you to greatness. He's also not trying to help you. He's also not trying to teach you how to attain financial freedom.
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99.99999% of people posting about wanting to help you become rich in forex are LYING TO YOU.
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Why would such nice, polite people do such a thing? Because THEY ARE TRYING TO PROFIT FROM YOUR STUPIDITY.
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Plain and simple. Here's just a few ways these "experts" and "gurus" profit from you:
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• Referral Links - If they require you to click a specific link to signup for something, it means they are an affiliate. They get a commission from whatever the third party is that they are sending you to. I don't care if it's a brokerage, training program, hell even an Amazon link to a book - if they insist you have to click their super exclusive, can't-get-this-deal-any-other-way-but-clicking-my-link type bullshit, it's an affiliate link. There is nothing inherently wrong with affiliate programs, but you are literally generating money for some stranger because they convinced you to buy something. Some brokers such as ICMarkets have affiliate programs that payout a percentage of the commission you generate - this is a really clever system - whether you profit or blow your entire account, the person who referred you to the broker makes a profit off you. Clever eh?
• Signal Services, Education & Training Programs, Courses - If somebody is telling you they are making a killing with a signal service and are trying to convince you to join it, I guarantee they are getting a piece of your monthly fee. And better still, these signal services often work...for about a week. Just long enough to suck a bunch of poor fools into it. You see people making money, you want in so you agree to pay the $200+/month subscription fee. You follow the signals and it looks like it's making money for a few days or weeks. Then it turns sideways, you start losing money hand over fist. Pretty soon you have lost most of your trading account because you blindly followed a signal service. And better still - when you go screaming at the person running the signal service they will be very quick to point you to their No Refunds policy. To add insult to injury, the buttfucker that referred you to the signal service in the past will likely listen to you getting mad, and then come back with something like "Sorry it didn't work out, but I just joined this other amazing service and it's working great, you should come join it to earn your money back. Here's my link..." You get the point here right?
• Multi-Level Marketing (MLMs) - These people are scum. They are going to offer you training and education, signals, access to forex experts and gurus, and all kinds of other shit with the promise that you will live the dream and become financially free. They are also loading you into a pyrmaid scheme where you will be hounded to recruit other people and make money off them just like you got roped into it. A really prime example here is iMarkets Live (or IML for short). Don't touch this shit with a 10 foot pole. I don't care what they are claiming, you will lose everything using them.
• Fund Managers - These people make my skin crawl. It's a classic scam and it works like this - somebody will post online about how much money they are making trading forex/commodities/stocks/whatever. Most of the time they won't explicitly post they are offering a trading service, rather they just put the message out there and wait for the ignorant masses (that's you) to contact them. They will charm you. They will lie to you. They will promise you the moon if you simply wire them some money or give them API access to your trading account. Care to guess what happens next? If you send a wire transfer (or Western Union...hell any kind of payment to them) they will vanish. Happens usually after they take a bunch of suckers for the ride. You sent them $2,000 and so do 9 other suckers. They just made $20,000 and are gone. With API access to your account, you will find your account gets blown super fast or worse - possibly leaving you open to persecution by the broker you are using.

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These are just a few examples. The reality is that very few people make it big in forex or any kind of trading. If somebody is trying to sell you the dream, they are essentially a magician - making you look the other way while they snatch your wallet and clean you out.
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Additionally, on the topic of fund managers - legitimate fund managers will be certified, licensed, and insured. Ask them for proof of those 3 things. What they typically look like are:

• Certified - This varies from country to country, in the US it's FINRA (http://www.finra.org). They need to have their Series 7 certification minimum. You can make the case that other FINRA certifications are acceptable in lieu of Series 7, but the 7 is the gold standard.
• Licensed - They need to have a valid business license issued by the government. It must clearly state they are an investment company, preferrably a hedge fund because they have some super strict requirements to operate (and often require $25,000+ in fees just to get their business license, so you know they at least have some skin in the game).
• Insured - They need to be backed by an insurance company. I'm not talking general insurance for shit like their office burning down. I'm talking about a government-implemented protection insurance program - in the US I believe that is issued by the Securities Investment Protection Corporation (https://www.sipc.org/).

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If you are talking to a fund manager and they are insisting they have all of these, get a copy of their verification documents and lookup their licenses on the directories of the issuers to verify they are valid. If they are, then at least you are talking to somebody who seems to have their shit together and is doing investment management and trading as a professional and you are at least partially protected when the shit hits the fan.
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LESSON 3 - UNDERSTAND YOUR RISK
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Many people jump into Forex, drop $2000 into a broker account and start trading 1 lot orders because they signed up with a broker thinking they will get rich because they were given 500:1 margin and can risk it all on each trade. Worst-case scenario you lose your account, best case scenario you become a millionaire very quickly. Seems like a pretty good gamble right? You are dead wrong.
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As a new trader, you should never risk more than 1% of your account balance on a trade. If you have some experience and are confident and doing well, then it's perfectly natural to risk 2-3% of your account per trade. Anybody who risks more than 4-5% of their account on a single trade deserves to blow their account. At that point you aren't trading, you are gambling. Don't pretend you are a trader when really you are just putting everything on red and hoping the roulette ball lands in the right spot. It's stupid and reckless and going to screw you very quickly.
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Let's do some math here:
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You put $2,000 into your trading account.
Risking 1% means you are willing to lose $20 per trade. That means you are going to be trading micro lots, or 0.01 lots most likely ($0.10/pip). At that level you can have a trade stop loss at -200 pips and only lose $20. It's the best starting point for anybody. Additionally, if you SL 20 trades in a row you are only down $200 (or 10% of your account) which isn't that difficult to recover from.
Risking 3% means you are willing to lose $60 per trade. You could do mini lots at this point, which is 0.1 lots (or $1/pip). Let's say you SL on 20 trades in a row. You've just lost $1,200 or 60% of your account. Even veteran traders will go through periods of repeat SL'ing, you are not a special snowflake and are not immune to periods of major drawdown.
Risking 5% means you are willing to lose $100 per trade. SL 20 trades in a row, your account is blown. As Red Foreman would call it - Good job dumbass.
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Never risk more than 1% of your account on any trade until you can show that you are either consistently breaking even or making a profit. By consistently, I mean 200 trades minimum. You do 200 trades over a period of time and either break-even or make a profit, then you should be alright to increase your risk.
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Unfortunately, this is where many retail traders get greedy and blow it. They will do 10 trades and hit their profit target on 9 of them. They will start seeing huge piles of money in their future and get greedy. They will start taking more risk on their trades than their account can handle.
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200 trades of break-even or profitable performance risking 1% per trade. Don't even think about increasing your risk tolerance until you do it. When you get to this point, increase you risk to 2%. Do 1,000 trades at this level and show break-even or profit. If you blow your account, go back down to 1% until you can figure out what the hell you did differently or wrong, fix your strategy, and try again.
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Once you clear 1,000 trades at 2%, it's really up to you if you want to increase your risk. I don't recommend it. Even 2% is bordering on gambling to be honest.
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LESSON 4 - THE 500 PIP DRAWDOWN RULE
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This is a rule I created for myself and it's a great way to help protect your account from blowing.
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Sometimes the market goes insane. Like really insane. Insane to the point that your broker can't keep up and they can't hold your orders to the SL and TP levels you specified. They will try, but during a flash crash like we had at the start of January 2019 the rules can sometimes go flying out the window on account of the trading servers being unable to keep up with all the shit that's hitting the fan.
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Because of this I live by a rule I call the 500 Pip Drawdown Rule and it's really quite simple - Have enough funds in your account to cover a 500 pip drawdown on your largest open trade. I don't care if you set a SL of -50 pips. During a flash crash that shit sometimes just breaks.
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So let's use an example - you open a 0.1 lot short order on USDCAD and set the SL to 50 pips (so you'd only lose $50 if you hit stoploss). An hour later Trump makes some absurd announcement which causes a massive fundamental event on the market. A flash crash happens and over the course of the next few minutes USDCAD spikes up 500 pips, your broker is struggling to keep shit under control and your order slips through the cracks. By the time your broker is able to clear the backlog of orders and activity, your order closes out at 500 pips in the red. You just lost $500 when you intended initially to only risk $50.
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It gets kinda scary if you are dealing with whole lot orders. A single order with a 500 pip drawdown is $5,000 gone in an instant. That will decimate many trader accounts.
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Remember my statements above about Forex being a cruel bitch of a mistress? I wasn't kidding.
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Granted - the above scenario is very rare to actually happen. But glitches to happen from time to time. Broker servers go offline. Weird shit happens which sets off a fundamental shift. Lots of stuff can break your account very quickly if you aren't using proper risk management.
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LESSON 5 - UNDERSTAND DIFFERENT TRADING METHODOLOGIES
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Generally speaking, there are 3 trading methodologies that traders employ. It's important to figure out what method you intend to use before asking for help. Each has their pros and cons, and you can combine them in a somewhat hybrid methodology but that introduces challenges as well.
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In a nutshell:

• Price Action Trading (Sometimes called Naked Trading) is very effective at identifying when trends will start and finish. This gives you the advantage of staying ahead of the market and predicting when a change in trend direction will occur. It has the disadvantage of being really easy to screw it up if you don't plot your support and resistance lines properly and interpret the chart wrong. Because you can identify a change in trend direction, you'll generally make more profit on a new trend than a technical strategy will.
• Technical Analytics (or TA) uses math and statistics to try and identify where the market is headed or confirm/reject whether a trend is happening. It has the advantage of being very math and stat driven which is hard to refute the numbers, but it has the disadvantage of being late to the party when it comes to identifying trends (hence why people call TA a lagging strategy). When people fail using TA, it's not because of the math - it's because you misinterpreted what the math is telling you.
• Fundamental Analysis (or FA) uses news and macro scale events to predict what is going on. A really good example right now is Brexit, what a clusterfuck that is. Every time some major brexit news breaks it causes all sorts of choas in almost every currency pair. Fundamental trading has the highest potential profitability per trade but it also has the highest potential drawdown per trade.

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Now you may be thinking that you want to be a a price action trader - you should still learn the principles and concepts behind TA and FA. Same if you are planning to be a technical trader - you should learn about price action and fundamental analysis. More knowledge is better, always.
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With regards to technical analysis, you need to really understand what the different indicators are tell you. It's very easy to misinterpret what an indicator is telling you, which causes you to make a bad trade and lose money. It's also important to understand that every indicator can be tuned to your personal preferences.
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You might find, for example, that using Bollinger Bands with the normal 20 period SMA close, 2 standard deviation is not effective for how you look at the chart, but changing that to say a 20 period EMA average price, 1 standard deviation bollinger band indicator could give you significantly more insight.
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LESSON 6 - TIMEFRAMES MATTER
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Understanding the differences in which timeframes you trade on will make or break your chosen strategy. Some strategies work really well on Daily timeframes (i.e. Ichimoku) but they fall flat on their face if you use them on 1H timeframes, for example.
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There is no right or wrong answer on what timeframe is best to trade on. Generally speaking however, there are 2 things to consider:
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• Speed - If you are scalping (trading on the really fast candles like 1M, 5M, 15M, etc) odds are your trades are very short lived. Maybe 10 minutes to an hour tops. For the most part, scalping strategies will produce little profit per trade but make up for it in the sheer volume of trades. Whereas swing trading may only make a few trades but each one could be worth a significant amount of money.
• Spread (the fee you pay to the broker when you trade) - If you are a scalper, the spread is your worst enemy because you have to overcome it very fast to make a profit on your order. Whereas swing trading the spread hardly impacts you at all.

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If you are a total newbie to forex, I suggest you don't trade on anything shorter than the 1H timeframe when you are first learning. Trading on higher timeframes tends to be much more forgiving and profitable per trade. Scalping is a delicate art and requires finesse and can be very challenging when you are first starting out.
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LESSON 7 - AUTOBOTS...ROLL OUT!
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Yeah...I'm a geek and grew up with the Transformers franchise decades before Michael Bay came along. Deal with it.
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Forex bots are called EA's (Expert Advisors). They can be wonderous and devastating at the same time. /Forex is not really the best place to get help with them. That is what /algotrading is useful for. However some of us that lurk on /Forex code EA's and will try to assist when we can.
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Anybody can learn to code an EA. But just like how 95% of retail traders fail, I would estimate the same is true for forex bots. Either the strategy doesn't work, the code is buggy, or many other reasons can cause EA's to fail. Because EA's can often times run up hundreds of orders in a very quick period of time, it's critical that you test them repeatedly before letting them lose on a live trading account so they don't blow your account to pieces. You have been warned.
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If you want to learn how to code an EA, I suggest you start with MQL. It's a programming language which can be directly interpretted by Meta Trader. The Meta Trader terminal client even gives you a built in IDE for coding EA's in MQL. The downside is it can be buggy and glitchy and caused many frustrating hours of work to figure out what is wrong.
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If you don't want to learn MQL, you can code an EA up in just about any programming language. Python is really popular for forex bots for some reason. But that doesn't mean you couldn't do it in something like C++ or Java or hell even something more unusual like JQuery if you really wanted.
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I'm not going to get into the finer details of how to code EA's, there are some amazing guides out there. Just be careful with them. They can be your best friend and at the same time also your worst enemy when it comes to forex.
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One final note on EA's - don't buy them. Ever. Let me put this into perspective - I create an EA which is literally producing money for me automatically 24/5. If it really is a good EA which is profitable, there is no way in hell I'm selling it. I'm keeping it to myself to make a fortune off of. EA's that are for sale will not work, will blow your account, and the developer who coded it will tell you that's too darn bad but no refunds. Don't ever buy an EA from anybody.
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LESSON 8 - BRING ON THE HATERS
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You are going to find that this subreddit is frequented by trolls. Some of them will get really nasty. Some of them will threaten you. Some of them will just make you miserable. It's the price you pay for admission to the /Forex club.
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If you can't handle it, then I suggest you don't post here. Find a more newbie-friendly site. It sucks, but it's reality.
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We often refer to trolls on this subreddit as shitcunts. That's your word of the day. Learn it, love it. Shitcunts.
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YOU MADE IT, WELCOME TO FOREX!
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If you've made it through all of the above and aren't cringing or getting scared, then welcome aboard the forex train! You will fit in nicely here. Ask your questions and the non-shitcunts of our little corner of reddit will try to help you.
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Assuming this post doesn't get nuked and I don't get banned for it, I'll add more lessons to this post over time. Lessons I intend to add in the future:

• Demo Trading
• Why you will blow your first account and what to do when it happens
• Trading Psychology (this will be a beefy one and will take a while to put together)
• Exotics vs Majors and which you should focus on as a newbie (aka how to blow your account in a single trade with exotics)
• Which Broker Should You Use? (This is covered in pretty good detail on the FAQ already - https://www.reddit.com/Forex/wiki/index - so I may not bother)
• Hedging (there isn't really a good guide written on this anywhere)
• Doubling Your Risk to Save Your Ass or Lose a Shit Ton (aka Martingale & Anti-Martingale)
• Risk On/Off
• Forex Calendars
• Currency Strength / Heat Maps
• Swap
• Margin Calls (What are they and why are you getting them?)

If there is something else you feel should be included please drop a comment and I'll add it to the above list of pending topics.
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Cheers,
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Bob
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Quick background for those new here. This started with me saying that if a person gets suitable good at entering the market and finding places to get high RR trades, it is entirely possible to flip small amounts of money into larger ones relatively quickly. To demonstrate this, I said Id flip $40-50 into over $1,000 over a year and link up Myfxbook to track all my trades. I’d also run versions of the strategy with the info posted for people to log into the accounts, see the trades and copy them if they want (see ForexCopy).
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The first one I bust on day one. I tried to do it really quickly ($1,000 in a week or so from $40). I got up around 200% - 250% and then zero’d it. The trades I lost in where not really good opportunities, and I as overly aggressive with them. Was dumb.
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The second one I tried running via a copy trader, it messed up early trades and vitaly went bust in the opening hours (I do not think it ever went into profit).
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The “I can flip $40 to $1,000 as long as I can keep reloading $40s” challenge is far less impressive. So, I have been reloading that account with tiny amounts, trying to get from $2 or so up to a more useful equity figure. I have failed doing this various times, but it has been down to accuracy being less sharp that it may have been rather than this not being viable.
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This is viable. It is fucking hard. Don’t get me wrong. Entering the market when you have 5 - 7 pips before you get margin called is tricky. Kinda fun, too. Good training in getting entries. With a couple good entries, though, entirely viable. $2 can get to $5, $5 can get to $15 and that is enough pips at 0.01 to have a damn good cracking at catching some big moves. Realistically, I think it only takes 10 really good trades to have a fairly useful bankroll.
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So let’s just write the $40 - $1,000 thing off. I bombed that.
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I am willing to up the ante. Rather than $40 - $1,000 over 12 months, I think I can do $2 or $3 to $5,000 in 18 months.
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This is contingent upon a couple things;
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• I may need to rebuy a few more times (although, maybe not).
• I need the markets to trend in the nice structured way that currently are through the next year (or be super volatile and be well positioned for that).

This may sound outlandish and crazy, but the maths behind this are fairly solid. All it takes is catching a few 50 - 100 pip trades. A few of these can take $2 to $30, a few more and it is over $100. I can get 1:10 - 1:15 risk reward trades, and can increase risk:reward with in-trade management and adding positions (or hedging positions in profit). So using 5 - 10% risk in really prime opportunities, and it does not take many of them in a row to make some decent money compounding an account from $100.
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Technical Details on Margin Requirements
You may be wondering how this can even be feasible. It may seem logical that even the best trader in the world could not get started from $2, but actually with the right brokerage conditions and pair selection, this can be done.
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I am using IC Markets. I have 1:500 leverage.
Commission per trade is 0.6 of a lot (so, about $0.04-0.06 per trade with my position sizes).
My spreads are usually under a pip. They sometimes go to zero spread.
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Pair selection.
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NZD and JPY are the lowest margin requirement currencies, and these can trend well. So I focus on these for starting out. I am trading NZDJPY, I require $1.33 margin to open 0.01 lots. So this means if I close all my trades and have under $1.33 I can not open any more trades.
However, my stop out level is 50% of my margin requirements. So I get stopped out when I have $0.65 equity. This gives me about 15 pips from $2. I can also hedge this, and can use ways to manipulate margin requirements to get the most bang for my buck (which can be good or bad, it goes both ways, but it gives me more options).
So with these settings, to take $2 to $10 is not all that hard. Catch 50 pips or so a couple times without the first trade drawing down 10+ pips. With $10, I have 100 pips at 0.01 (or the option of far more creative positioning), I think 100 pips is plenty margin for error to get into a few good trades and get going.
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I’ve pinned the Myfxbook for this to start from today (16th January 2019) since this is the first day I am taking this seriously.
https://www.myfxbook.com/members/inweedwetrust/40-1000/2893650
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Deposit $1.50 + account balance $0.65 = Slightly over $2 to start.
The net deposit on this account is now around $66.
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Update.
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I want to quash this idea that the only way someone can make large returns in FX is using reckless risk and gambling. Obviously many people do this ,but some just know ways to get far more reward for their risks.
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Here is a trade I am. I had about $3.50 equity when opening the first two trades. 5 pips and 2 pips stops. I was risking about $0.50.
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https://preview.redd.it/ljohtjwqdwa21.png?width=1366&format=png&auto=webp&s=24d62c7296c8afdc15907dbe42a18a37f389e1fd
Then as the move has developed, I have adjusted my stops and added to the position. I am targeting 60 pips or so here, about $20 pay off. I have nothing at risk now. I will end the trade really close to breakeven, if not slightly up.
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I have turned $0.50 risk into potentially $20 profit, and done this in the space of 10 pips.
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**I am not saying this is easy**. It has taken me years of studying price moves to know how, and far more importantly when to do this. I am saying it something that can be learned, and when applied well ... can be surprisingly profitable.
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Update.
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https://preview.redd.it/1jptz02cfwa21.png?width=1366&format=png&auto=webp&s=a8af8bd06a16058ae2369fe634215116d806fc31
Now I have set hedging orders on an area I know price often pulls back from. If it pulls back to the level I expect, I can exit the hedges and have the buy stops under there. If it then goes higher, I banked an extra X% on the gain with the hedges.
I have set a hedging order above the high for if price blows through the take profits (making me short) and continues upwards. The worse case scenario sees me lose rather little, the best case (price filling take profits and then coming down to make the sells profitable, or the price retracing so the sells are profitable then it making a high) yield substantial profit potential.
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Piling up potential profit, without adding on much potential risk.
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Update.
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https://preview.redd.it/v70pqc9qiwa21.png?width=1362&format=png&auto=webp&s=a252499e2dc4f5ffc782fb6e44ffc5d8b8fb0fa6
Then I use the rules of the Extreme Edge strategy to trail stops. To get my line in the sand. I now have locked in a profti (albeit small) and can potentially make somewhere in the $25 - $30 range or perhaps more from my $0.50 risk.
https://www.reddit.com/Forexnoobs/comments/af15l9/extreme_edge_strategy_detailed/
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Update.
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This never worked out (I screwed it up). It is a lot harder with $2 on a 1 minute chart whilst posting live updates. However later you will see how I can take these same principles that can make $0.50 risk into $20 and use them to get into positions where $10 risk can be $300. Or where $100 can be several thousand.
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Update.
So I was a bit early on that move, but this is what it looks like when it works. Occasions to position like this happen fairly frequently. I can get myself into these positions where I am risking a nominal amount for much larger gains many times in a day. I can take the same principles and apply them to weekly charts and position for "flash crashes", and other volatile moves.
This is obviously on an account with more equity, I got margin called on the small one, will try again tomorrow. I was probably 2 pips away from going to $2 to close to $100 today (assuming the trades come through as I think). Will be abl to check what it could have been. If I'd hit the first trade, it would have mirrored the trades in the account that is copying my account *2 risk. If these swings hit, this account may make about $50 in them. Which will put it up about 100% (trading only 2x 0.01 at any time) since we fixed the margin/FIFO copying issues. Bit early to be counting chickens, but we'll see. https://www.myfxbook.com/members/drcherrypoppemt4-9084923/2910254
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https://preview.redd.it/xhqv5tf55za21.png?width=1359&format=png&auto=webp&s=e63d97b4d7ef32573071afff3c31f67a98f725e6

Hello all.
I will make this quite frank. I've been noticing dangerous advise being spread around the forums that is based too much on hype and I do not want the layman investor to suffer. We are all here to profit intelligently, not to gamble. So I would just like to offer a few tips to new investors of stellar. I am not a stock professional but have ties to the finance industry and have dabbled in forex and investments. I got burned so that you don't have to, so heed my advise. Especially since I have institutional friends who have helped me along the way (think Goldman, BNP, JP, etc).
Tips:
1.) Do not over-diversify your portfolio but pay attention to exposure. Investing is all about the risk-reward ratio. Greater risk does not always mean greater reward. For example, I have 80% of my portfolio in traditional investment vehicles like real estate investment trusts, stocks, bonds, and exchange traded funds. 20% is for cryptos however this is what I consider my 'play' money since cryptos are a very young market, that is based more on potential rather than value (you can't gauge the financial health of crypto using traditional tools like cashflow analysis or price/earnings ratios). I think cryptos are incredibly valuable but going all in especially with the inflated nature of bitcoin, would be dangerous for any of you, so I would suggest you diversify between traditional and cryptos.
2.) Reduce crypto risk by analyzing competitors to your alt coin. As I said before, do not overcompensate this diversification but bet for and against a crypto. In forex institutions use this tool to limit exposure to currency volatility. Imagine you go long GBP/USD, then you should naturally short GBP/CAD to a degree in order to limit exposure, but maximize growth potential. In the crypto world crypto pairs aren't really traded so they are illiquid markets, but I would suggest hedging a bit of stellar with XRP and even bitcoin. With this strategy I have been able to mitigate my losses from the recent stellar drop. Picture cryptos as a ranked list with the most valuable on top and the worst in the bottom. If BTC is on the top of your ranked list and XLM is in 3rd place but XRP is in 2nd place, then short XRP/BTC and go long XRP/XLM. I know these pairings don't all exist but it's to give you an idea how to think about the market.
3.) Support and resistance is important for technical analysis. The way you determine this is simply by seeing the area where past price action has not been able to surpass (resistance) or where past price action has not been able to drop below (support). Usually when a support or resistance level is tested multiple times it becomes stronger. However, there are ways to guess how breakouts are formed. See the chart below.
https://imgur.com/u9r2e0c
In the chart you have what is called accumulation. The price keeps testing the 400 resistance mark, making it a stronger barrier, however every dip in price is higher than the proceeding dip. This signals that there is a solid accumulation that will result in a break out. Just because a price level is tested multiple times does not mean there is a break out. You need to usually have such an accumulation phase (think of the imagery of stairs). In the same chart you can also see the price has not been able to really go below 400 because it is the new support level and the more it tests it, the stronger the barrier will become.
4.) Statistics has a fine way of helping us in our journey. My best friend is a mathematician and was able to offer advise on statistical trend setting. He stated that the longer the trend is set, the higher probability that it will keep going in that direction. Sounds obvious right? Well there is some truth to this but this goes right to my next point.
5.) For every second and moment you have a position open you increase your risk exponentially. This is why high frequency trading exists. So I am trying to offer a nuanced point that while trend continuation is statistically likely, so is the exponential increase of risk. These two last tips are particularly for leveraged traders.
6.) Be creative. Try to implement value investing criteria on cryptos in order to assess the true value of your chosen currency, whatever that may be. It can truly be difficult for ones like Bitcoin but for centralized cryptos like XRP and non profits like XLM it isn't too difficult. I saw an investor here requesting stellars financial statements and had a slight grin. That is the type of investor you should be. Vigilant, because more than making money, we should all be focusing on protecting money. Do not be greedy, because you will be susceptible to hot tips and emotion. Make 'preserving' your capital a priority. As long as you are gaining above inflation, all of you are winning. And now...
7.) Luck number 7! Anyway, buying on the dips is a great strategy, especially when it is testing a support or resistance zone that has been tested a bit before. Buying into a dip in a zone that has only been tested once is a bit risky. You want to see a form of sustainable accumulation.
8.) Do not simply invest in a crypto purely based on the dip. I will admit I have done this sometimes to an extent and it is okay. But the point of this post is to encourage you to do your homework and measure valuations, based on market volume, liquidity, technological announcements, and financial statements. The reason I sometimes partially ignore this is because I usually enter investments to hold at least 8 months -1 year minimum.
9.) Centralization and decentralization do not matter in crypto. I know XRP gets hate and I'd prefer stellar lumens, but that is not purely a reason to not invest in a currency. With centralization you get more compliance and regulatory oversight which marks higher security in investment. Cryptos are amazing, but with institutional involvement, this is an important case to make.
10.) Governments do not have conventional ways to regulate cryptos, but they do have tools to manipulate the market, so be attentive. All it takes is one major country to become heavily involved, in order to ensure a large price drop.
11.) DO NOT SHORT! I REPEAT DO NOT SHORT! Leave this to the professionals. Whereas with buying a currency you have a limited downward risk (you only have the risk to lose all your money), with shorting you effectively have no price floor to limit risk and exposure since the price theoretically has unlimited growth potential. If you decide to short stellar at 0.10 cents then you can lose all your investment and even be in debt (depends on leveraging), because the price can go anywhere from 0 cents to infinity. When you buy, you limit your risk to 0 cents which is where you lose all your money, but maximize growth potential which is technically infinite. This plays into the concept that the longer you have a position open, the greater the exponential risk.
I hope you all enjoyed my guide. I am by no means an expert and am new to cryptos, however I've had associates involved for longer and friends that are also in finance (I worked in the back office of a private equity firm even though that wasn't glorious).