Guest Post

The market continues to trend up while we’re just weeks away from the holiday rush. In 2013 we’ve seen a market that’s treated many of us quite well and given us plenty to be thankful for. Many of you road Telsa to the bank, got on board the Yahoo bandwagon, or enjoyed watching Netflix for other reasons than movie marathons.

In hindsight the year was incredible, but it didn’t always feel that way. With eleven months behind us, we approach the home stretch and there are still many uncertainties keeping traders up at night.

When will the market top?

How will everything play out with the FED?

What’s going to happen with China?

Is this Bitcoin thing the real deal or just another Beanie Baby?

No one can confidently answer these questions. Some traders will comb through as much research as possible, make an educated prediction, and trade or invest accordingly. Most traders will predict wrong and most traders will lose money.

Successful fund managers and veteran traders avoid these risks all together. They’re equipped with tools and strategies that are rarely affected by the majority of market issues.

Regardless if you’re an options trader, equities traders, swing trader or day trader, there’s always a way to profit in the market. You just have to find it and stick to it.

On November 20th and 21st, you’ll have the chance to find six of these strategies as Marketfy hosts their first ever Holiday Trading Summit.

Over the course of two days, six different equities and options traders will come together and reveal the strategies that have kept them secure in all types of market conditions.

In the spirit of the holidays, Marketfy.com will also be donating a holiday meal to City Harvest, for every person who signs up to this free event.

If you trade options or equities, one of these six strategies will fit your trading style.

Candlestick guru, Stephen Bigalow, will be revealing the early warning signals for reversal alerts. Bigalow has spent the last thirty years applying his Business & Economics degree from Cornell University to the investment and trading world. He’s authored three top selling investment books and is an active member of AAPTA – the American Association of Professional Traders.

RealMoney (TheStreet.com) experts, Timothy Collins and Bob Byrne will be showing you how to profit from volume profiling and weekly options. Collins’ experience in the market ranges from helping individuals with portfolio customization to managing multiple hedge funds. Byne, a full-time private day-trader has ten years of experience using technical analysis and using a proprietary volume profiling technique.

Options tape reader, Anand Sangvhi (“Sang”) will teach you a five-point checklist for exiting your trades at the right time. Sang, a former corporate grinder, quickly learned in 2006 that trading options using time tape reading was more profitable than a boring 9 to 5 job. Since then, his company SangLucci has become one of the leading experts in options tape reading.

Credit Spread master and former financial CFO, Nic Chahine, will show you how to master credit spreads in any market condition. Chahine began mastering options spreads after an internet venture left him plenty of money and time to pursue his passion of the markets. Since then, he’s launched his own successful fund and honed the skill of gauging risk and maximizing potential.

Swing trading veteran, Serge Berger, will explain how to combine candlesticks with swing trading. Berger has been an active trader since 1998 while spending time at JP Morgan and an equity, options, and futures proprietary firm. His methods of dividing the markets into separate time frames and characters allows him to remove emotion from the decision making process.

Trader and entrepreneur, Hubert Senters, will provide a strategy that allows you to risk $156 to potentially make $1,000. Senters has built his trading skills and companies on the philosophy that, “if you need to accomplish something in life, find someone who is passionate about the topic of your interest and learn everything they know about it.” Senters and his companies have been featured on Bloomberg, CNN, CNBC, and the Trading Expo.

To join Marketfy’s first ever Holiday Trading Summit, register for free at the link provided below. Your registration will result in a holiday meal donation to City Harvest, for a child in need.

Click here to register for the Holiday Trading Summit while seats remain available!

Guest Post

When you have a good credit rating, you can do a lot with it. You will have a better chance of approval if ever you decide to acquire a loan from a bank for a major purchase such as a house or flat, a car, or some big luxury items. If you ever decide to start a business of your own in Singapore, you should also be able to get a bigger loan from numerous financial institutions if your credit rating is strong.

But before you have a good credit rating, you have to build a credit history first. Your credit history is the basis for your credit rating and will show lenders your ability to pay for items that you buy.

1. Open an account with a bank

If you have a bank account, whether it’s a savings account, a checking account, or both, this will bode well for your reputation with lenders. Lenders see individuals with bank accounts as more stable and consistent. If you can also show that your bank account is active, then this would also be a good sign and will improve your credit history. Additionally, if credit card companies see that you have an active bank account, then this will increase your chances of being approved for a credit card. Manage your credit cards well and achieve a high credit rating.

 2.       Get a credit card

If you don’t have a credit card yet, then it’s time for you to get one. If you are understandably wary about getting a credit card, you need not use it for most purchases you make. You can decide to keep it only for emergencies, for instance, or when you want to buy a major appliance. Apply for credit cards with established companies – this is a crucial step to acquiring good credit rating. Of course, you have to make sure that you pay for whatever you purchase in full or at least pay off the balance on the card each month.

 3.       Manage your credit card well

Ultimately, having an excellent credit rating all goes back to the credit card (or cards) you have. If you can, try to pay your credit card bills in full – and on time – each month. This goes a long way to letting lenders know that you take your account seriously. Additionally, when you make purchases, make sure you can afford them. If they are big purchases, then make an estimate of how much you have to pay each month so you can set this amount aside. In the same vein, you have to remember to use your cards regularly. An unused credit card may actually lower your credit score.

It is also good to make a list of your expenses and payables each month, as well as your receivables. This way, you can keep better track of your finances and will have a greater chance of managing your credit card efficiently. List down how much you would like to save each month. This will also help you be more prudent with your spending and allow you to stick to your estimated budget.

A credit card is a useful tool in improving your credit score if you know how to manage it properly. Improve your credit rating and you will have a better chance of getting bigger loans to improve your life.

By Tim Melvin

“The casino is open and we must go play now.”

That seems to be the attitude that infects all too many investors. When the opening bells ring on the NYSE every morning at 9:30 am EST, traders seem to feel the need to do something.

The ticker tape is running, the talking heads on the media are cheerleading different stocks and sectors. The advertisements are almost constant, urging out to trade more efficiently and smartly, using the new super-duper platform that has all sorts of charts and the information you need to beat the market.

The sad truth all of this is done not to help you trade better, but to pay the bills needed to keep the studio open and keep commission dollars flowing into coffers of brokerage firms. It creates an atmosphere that encourages activity much like the casinos set the stage to keep you gambling.

Behavioral Analysis

Virtually every study ever done on the behavior and results of individual investors has shown us that retail investors badly underperform the stock market over time. The chief culprits for this lack of profits are trading too much and have a propensity to chase the hot stocks and stories of the day.

Year in and year out, roughly 90 percent of them are set to lose money. Only 10 percent turn a profit and far fewer beat the market returns, much less squeeze a living out of all the frenetic in-and-out trading in a short period of time. The brokers do pretty well off all the activity, but the traders themselves do not do nearly as well.

Investors and wannabe traders need to accept a simple fact. If you have a career, a profession, run a business or are otherwise occupied during the day, you are not going to win the trading game. Wannabe traders are trading against people with more information who spend eight to 12 hours a day doing nothing but studying the stock market.

Would you take on LeBron?

Serious traders have a flock of analysts and more than likely are getting technical advice from the people who invented the indicators and patterns novices are trying to master. When trying to beat the market by engaging in short-term trading or switching from hot stock to hot stock, traders are engaging in the financial equivalent of playing LeBron James in a game of one-on-one. You are not going to win, and the statistics and studies have proven that it is a losing game.

It is worse when individual investors decide to jump over and try to trade options. The depth and level of knowledge needed to successfully trade options requires full-time concentration on these markets and in-depth extensive knowledge of math and statistics. The guy on the other side of your trade is not making directional bets on markets and indexes and there is a good chance he is a literal rocket scientist.

The rocket scientist is armed with enough computing power to conquer the world and that option will be priced so as to take advantage of your desire to make a bet. The worst thing that can happen to a retail options trader is to make a few winning bets and start to think they understand how to trade options. That’s when you run the biggest chance of losing an enormous amount of money. Most individual options traders are swimming with the sharks while wearing meat suits and just don’t know it yet.

The amazing part of all this is that individual investors have a huge advantage and simply choose not to use it. They seem to prefer the excitement of the ringing bells and ticking tape to actually making money in the stock market. Individual investors have no mandate that dictates the type of stocks they must buy or which ones they must avoid.

They do not have to endure the quarterly performance pressure the larger investors face constantly. They can buy much smaller stocks than the institutions and hold them for as long as they like. They have a size and time advantage that is substantial and most choose not to use it.

It seems simplistic to say that buying cheap stocks in a bad market is the most profitable way to invest but it is exactly the truth for investors. If you look at the Forbes list of rich people the ones who made their money directly from investments and not just fees like Warren Buffett and Wilbur Ross made their money in exactly that fashion.

Be a boss like Schloss

Consider an investor like Walter Schloss who never aspired to be the biggest and kept his fund small but constantly just bought all the cheap stocks he could find and held them until they worked. Schloss earned about 20 percent gross for his investors for almost 50 years simply by buying cheap stocks in bad markets and holding them for long periods of time. He took advantage of the size and time advantage and made an enormous amount of money for himself and his investors.

There is a reason private equity is consistently one of the highest performing asset classes. Investors buy businesses when condition in the economy, or a specify sector, are not very good and they can buy a business at a bargain price. Investors hold them for a full business cycle or two and sell them in five years or so at a huge gain when conditions have improved substantially.

Investors could care less about the ticker tape or the candlestick pattern of a portfolio company and focus only on the business value. This is exactly the approach individual investors need to use to make money in the stock market.

Price and patience is the key to stock market profits. Buy businesses at a cheap stock price and hold them until they are no longer cheap. Ignore the bells, patterns and noise coming from Wall Street.

Your broker may not like it, but your accountant will.

Tim Melvin is a value investor, money manager and writer. He has spent the last 27 years as in the financial services and investment industry as a broker, adviser and portfolio manager. He has also written and lectured extensively on the markets with his work appearing on RealMoney.com, DailySpeculation.Com as well as several print publication including Active Trader and the Wall Street Digest. You can learn how Tim invests in low risk, high yield stocks by clicking here and watching his FREE webinar now.