Tuesday, May 29, 2012

FOREX Education - Want to Win? Don't Pay Attention To The News!

The rise of the internet has seen more news and FOREX education than ever before become available to traders and it's available instantly, but it won't help you make money.
In fact if you try and trade by utilizing news stories you will lose and a simple fact will explain why:
Fact:
Consider this:
50 years ago around 90% of traders lost all their money and this figure remains the same today 90%.
This is despite the huge range of new tools and breaking online news that is available to help traders - the ratio still remains the same.
The reason for this is an important part of your FOREX education:
Markets move to the following equation
Market fundamentals + Investor Perception = Price movement.
We all see the news but it is the way all the investors interpret it that is important.
The market is a discounting mechanism and all the news instantly is reflected in the fundamentals.
If you see experts talking on the TV or writing stories, then this information is discounted - The arguments may sound convincing, but that is what the media does sell stories.
The experts who put out stories are not traders and their more often than not dead wrong.
If it was easy to trade off news stories, a lot more traders would make money and the fact is they don't.
By listening to the news and acting upon it you will lose.
Let's go back to the equation:
Market fundamentals + Investor perception = Price movement
As the market is instantly discounting news we can simply assume all fundamentals and news is instantly reflected in price action.
All you need to do is follow price action and focus on investor perception of the fundamentals.
This makes a technical approach ignoring the news the best way to trade the markets.
As investor psychology is constant, repetitive chart patterns can be spotted and acted upon.
If you try and use the news you will simply lose.
Consider the fact that markets collapse when the fundamentals are most bullish and rally when they are most bearish and you will see that trying to act of the news is a waste of time.
How many times do you see a market ignore the news and go the other way?
It happens all the time.
Will Rogers famously said:
"I only believe what I read in the papers"
He was joking, but many FOREX traders actually do believe what they read and think they can trade off it and lose.
The market is a discounting mechanism and trying to trade off news stories will most likely see you fail.
So if you want to make money trading FOREX keep in mind this important bit of FOREX Education
Understand the past, think in the present and look to the future.
You can do this by simply following technical analysis and see future trend changes people listening to the news will never see.

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Why Online Education is Over-Promoted?

The glorious era of old print media dominance is over, and the era of cyberspace has taken over. The proliferation of Information Technology has given rise to the newest bloodless revolution in mankind in the field of knowledge and information dissemination, the Internet. The Internet is a network that provides quick and effortless access to the largest global information database available, the World Wide Web. When tapped correctly, the internet has the potential to become one of the most valuable and stimulating educational tools available to the multitudes, and its recognized merits as such are one too few. I therefore do not agree with the statement that the Internet is overrated or its merits, chief of which are the unparalled efficacy of its research and news capabilities, are celebrated without reason.
Information of practically everything in existence can be found and retrieved on the internet at the touch of a button, providing for knowledge to literally be at our fingertips. There is a wealth of valuable research information available online which most internet users have free access to, allowing the net to act as a cheap and easy to use information source for the masses. While the library once opened the doors to knowledge and information, its necessity now has been eliminated almost in its entirety by the advent of fast speed Internet transmission of information, paving the way for academic institutions such as universities, governmental bodies and established organizations like Time Magazine and the Gates Foundation to create web portals and store and share information online. High-powered search engines like Google now have the capacity to search millions of pages of text in such websites in a fraction of a second, thereby speeding up the often grueling research process students and researchers edure greatly. The recent introduction of online print and other visual media libraries is in fact a testament to the pulling power and attractiveness of using the internet, and it has further reduced the need for physical travel to traditional libraries, all the while needlessly worrying about the availability of crucial books or the opening hours, especially when racing to finish up research work.
Net conferencing or web video conferencing is one way the Internet can be used for two or more-way dialogues between university professors and students who reside on the other side of the world for information exchange through question and answer sessions, effectively disregarding the constraint of physical location that would otherwise inpede education. The Internet thus imparts knowledge indirectly by acting as a portal where intellectual minds can convene and debate on issues pertaining to their respective fields. Such information transfer has undergone technological advances to the extent that virtual schools have been set up on the web offering students online degree courses, and an increasing number of well-established universities are jumping on the bandwagon, replacing distance learning by mail with internet education. The University of London is a prime example of a university that offers the option of pursuing online Bachelors and Masters Degree courses to international students from the comfort of their own homes.
Online education is also a concept that is currently used by many schools in Singapore, where a week or two of formal classroom education is replaced by online education, called e-learning, and the importance of students utilizing the internet for online education purposes and becoming net-savvy is stressed by the schools as well as the Education Ministry. Due to the successive mass implementation of this project, Singapore is the first country in the South-East Asian region to have plugged all its junior colleges and tertiary institutions to the internet. Online education is also used by non-governmental, private, tuition centers where a student communicates with his tutors and takes lessons online, a convenient way for busy students to reduce transport time to centers, yet still enroll for tuition lessons.
The internet also doubles as a source of news articles and websites that gives minute by minute updates on current affairs in the local/global arena. This causes people wired to the internet to receive immediate updates about the latest happenings hot off the press and hence, always be 'in the know' instead of waiting for the next days newspaper or the television/radio news updates that are only aired at fixed timings. It is thus no wonder that online news sites such as CNN and BBC are slowly siphoning off subscribers from the old news medium of print journalism. According to the United States Audit Bureau of Circulation, there was a 2.6% drop in the circulation of nearly 800 newspapers over a six-month period last year. 1.2 million Subscribers at that time abandoned their papers. The decline in this circulation has prompted old news media empires to turn to the Internet to set up news websites with paid subscriptions for fear of losing their existing readers. The Straits Times in Singapore is an example of a newspaper that has created a website that can only be accessed through paid online subscriptions, but promises to provide live updates real-time, an effort that can be seen as moving on together with the advance in technology as well as cashing in on the Internet phenomenon. The availability of up-to-date news articles on global issues also encourages the education on political affairs among the populace by providing them an insight into governmental actions and events.
Though the virtues of the Internet as mentioned above are aplenty, every great invention has its drawbacks, and hence, some of its merits have an unfortunate probability of turning against themselves when not properly utilized. Top on the list of drawbacks is the dissemination of poor and inaccurate information, a terrible danger to the foolhardy. When books were the norm, information that was researched on was found by looking at bibliographies and indexes and cross-referencing these to the matter in hand. Although we might never have been certain if the information presented in the books was correct, we would be able to rely on author's reputations, book reviews or recommendations from teachers and friends. Now however, the problem that has surfaced with the Internet is that almost everyone capable of typing is able to publish something somewhere on the web, and as such we are facing the growing predicament of information overload - How can we be certain what we are reading is correct?
Wikipedia.com is a microcosm of this phenomenon of unverified information overload that has penetrated the internet community. Wikipedia.com contains the largest collection of "encyclopedia" articles in the world, which are also, however, written completely by volunteers. Anyone can edit the articles and any individual who has even a remote interest in a topic can write a new one. It now boasts more than a staggering 810 000 articles in English, as well as hundreds of thousands more in dozens of other languages. Readers are subjected to millions of times more information than any of them have the capacity to read in their lifetimes, a large proportion of which may not be fully factual or unbiased since the moderators themselves are not regulated and might not be certified experts on the various issues.
Books, on the other hand, are trusted far better to be accurate but at the time of printing only, offer a more concise information base to look up queries, and are needed for in-depth analysis of the subject which the Internet might not give. Even though online books are sold and available online, they may not be reliable as a technological malfunction could corrupt or delete it and the information may be lost. Material available on the Internet is also nowhere near as thorough and as well-organized as a good reference library. There are also further limits of technology as a teaching tool in education. Students often face difficulties in looking at information from the Internet with a critical eye. We tend not to be skeptical and instead take every piece of information at face value. Though there is a wealth of valuable research information available, it is often difficult and time-consuming to find information on lesser known or lesser publicized topics since research engines are by protocol programmed to sieve out information on topics which have a high representation in the web.

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Online Education, Metatextuality: A Survival of the Fittest

The online education content community should be taking notes from the book publishing industry. It's an adapt-or-perish world in which those who embrace technology such as tablet computers and apps are able to thrive, while those who stick to the same old packaging are doomed to die off.
Metatextuality is key here. If your content has it, you are entering the world of the average internet-user: a world that's dynamic and constantly in dialogue with other sources.
The death of textbooks
With more and more students getting their degrees online, education technology is wildly expanding. Not only online education students are finding textbooks irrelevant, but those who attend brick-and-mortar schools are increasingly opting out of buying the course textbooks.
In many subjects, textbooks are going the way of the dinosaurs. While textbooks like language, philosophy, and other humanities remain necessary, many other course textbooks such as biology and math are becoming obsolete as students use Google to find the answers they're looking for.
All the information is out there, and students no longer depend on textbooks to find it in a consolidated format.
The transformation of one publishing house
In a recent Reuters article, Mark Egan profiles the innovative New York publisher Nicholas Callaway, who saw wild success with the publishing of the children's app book "Miss Spider's Tea Party" on Apple's iOS platform. His company began publishing regular paper books in the 1980's but now concentrates its energy exclusively on iOS app versions.
With an openness to more dynamic story-telling methods, Callaway's company transformed from a traditional publishing house to a technologically innovative one.
From stories to learning Content: the transformation of your learning system
Just as you can tell a story in a number of ways, you can teach in a number of ways, in an endless number of formats and media. The way we interact with stories, news, educational content, and all kinds of information online offers a range of possibilities for online education systems.
I also loved the concept of another successful publishing company described in Egan's article is DMC Worldwide, whose most recent venture is Copia Interactive: social e-reading.
"We think there is space around the book for community to grow," said Seth Kaufman, Copia's vice president of marketing and merchandising.
Copia Interactive, still in beta, allows users to not only buy books, but also inteact with one another. They can annotate books, publishing their comments and reactions.
When Kaufman explains Copia to publishers, he likes to tell them, "There are many friends I have who would never buy a Sarah Palin book, but if Jon Stewart annotated Sarah Palin's book, they might buy that book."
As online education content developers, how might we tap into the potential of metatextuality?
How to make your online learning content metatextual
If it's online, information has the potential to be interactive and metatextual. Meaning, it can refer to information outside the text, like linking pages in a blog. It can create and be part of a vast network of information-there's no limit to its scope.
Education, with or without professors and textbook companies who stubbornly stick to traditional methods, is moving in that direction.
In order to adapt and thrive, online education platforms must join the publishing industry and offer an interactive and metatextual learning experience to their learners. Platforms like Coggno offer a simple way to tap into the interactive potential of online learning for those both beginner and expert learning content developers.

Thursday, May 10, 2012

Online Financial News - Easily Upgrade Your Financial Knowledge

Everybody needs finance to live happily. Finance can fulfill small and big needs easily. People work non-stop to earn income. It is important that one should stay updated with financial news all the time in order to grow more and to enhance their lifestyle. Earlier it was tough for people to keep themselves updated with financial news but with the blooming internet technology staying updated with finance news has become easier and convenient. Online financial news helps the people to upgrade their finance related knowledge in an efficient way.
The online financial news help to keep the various professionals, businessmen and even students to stay updated with the current happenings of various business and financial sectors. In order to grow in life and to make your dream come true staying upgraded with the currents trends can preferred to be the best option. With the help of online mode you can find there are various sites available, which are ready to advance your financial knowledge with a simple click of mouse.
In this fast pace of life and huge competition, staying updated with the latest trends can prove to be helpful in various ways. After liberalization and globalization the economy of the country is at the highest peak which has enhanced the business opportunities for the people. So, in order to manage these opportunities in better way, online financial news can prove to be an effective option to boost up relations with each other in terms of financial business activities.
The online financial news sites offer you the latest financial news around the world, while just sitting at the comfort from your home. You are suggested to do the research well and understand the concepts and motives behind financial news carefully. In this way only you can select the appropriate deal according to your requirements.
Online financial news educates the people with latest financial news that can help them to secure their future and expand their business accordingly. These sites enhance the knowledge of the people about financial market so that they cannot get mislead or puzzled while taking decision. These sites have solution for all financial queries of the people.

Saturday, May 5, 2012

AutoDesk - Fighting For Education And Innovation

An article from the international CAD software company's Chief of Education, released in February, is stating the great importance of the next generations correct education. He fervently states that it is not only the use of new technologies we need to teach as they become implemented more and more in educational settings, but the need for the understanding of how the technology works. Otherwise, we could leave a generation that can perfectly well use the technologies, but can't innovate nor even fix the products.
The Chief of Education at AutoDesk, the producers of AutoCAD, states that part of the problem is that unlike just a few decades ago, people are not learning what is behind the box, i.e. how it functions. We instead go to a professional or manufacturer to fix our products as they get more and more complex. Although this does mean we usually get our product back in one piece, we are not learning how technologies work, nor passing on the interest in learning how technologies work to our future generations. He simply puts it that youngsters are not as 'curious' as they once were, which could possibly harm the future generations ability to innovate.
A future generation without innovation or the skills to fix products could be potentially disastrous. It could leave many de-skilled and unable to create and design elements, which could be important to our lives in the next 50 year's time. Thus, it is up to the education industry to make those important decisions that produce a better education system, where people can rediscover their wonder for innovation and understand how technologies work. It is also up to us as a society to adapt education to our new needs and the new brilliant minds of this generation and the next, which are our future.
The Chief of Education at AutoDesk was inspired by the TED 2011 conference, named the Rediscovery of Wonder, which was host to a number of influential and inspirational thinkers in a variety of industries, from science to the arts. It's important that in such a time, where we are facing environmental and economic issues, that we keep our future generation's inspired to innovate, whether that be in science or the arts. Like the Chief of Education at AutoDesk states, we must teach our children how to innovate, in order for them to succeed in the future