Trading News

The concept of leverage involves using borrowed capital for investment and amplifying the potential returns. While leverage can magnify profits, it also magnifies losses. Below we focus on how you can generate leverage in your portfolio, through options, futures, borrowing, shorting, and more.   Key Takeaways – How to Generate Leverage in a Portfolio Leverage […]

In institutional settings, and for advanced individual traders, beta portfolios are often given a slight boost with leverage. This is often done with futures or other derivatives (e.g., options) that embed institutional borrowing rates (rather than paying retail markups). But what is the optimal leverage ratio? Too little gives you modest returns. Too much exposes […]

Investor letters are an important form of client communication for trading shops, hedge funds, and all investors that require giving performance and outlook updates to limited partners (LPs) and other stakeholders. We’ll cover what all is involved in one and an example at the end.   Key Takeaways – Investor Letters Investor letters are important […]

How do you start a successful trading career today? What are the best ways to ensure you have success? Let’s take a look.   Key Takeaways – How to Start a Successful Trading Career Choose a time horizon that fits your personality. Most discretionary traders these days operate on multi-week to multi-month timeframes. Learn markets […]

When people think of bubbles, we think of high and rising asset prices that far exceed the fundamental value of the underlying assets.  The expectation, or at least the risk, is that at some indeterminate point in the future prices will reverse and cause large losses.  But can bubbles actually be a good thing?    […]

What actually stands in the way of trading success? Let’s go up a level and think about the big things that hold back success in anything. We practically all have something (or many things) holding us back from achieving what we’d ideally hope to achieve. Sometimes it’s a certain way of thinking. It might be […]

XM continues its global march after obtaining a license from the Securities and Commodities Authority (SCA) of the United Arab Emirates. The authorization enables XM to provide its full suite of trading products through its UAE-focused website, available in Arabic and English. Key Takeaways XM has secured a category 5 license from the UAE’s SCA, […]

Are trading gurus skilled, lucky, or playing a different game altogether (sales)? We’ll present the different angles, common narratives, and see what the real story is.   Key Takeaways – Trading Gurus: Skill, Luck, or Neither? Trading can be skill-based depending on edge and execution. Casino gambling is always a negative-expectancy game where the house […]

Gold is not used in most portfolios, which are typically a stock-bond mix. Gold nonetheless has value because of its unique properties as a non-financial store of wealth that has a strong track record of offsetting equity and bond declines. If we ignore other asset classes (most notably bonds), how would we optimize a gold […]

A cooling failure at CyrusOne data centers has halted trading across CME Group platforms, freezing futures and options on Globex, EBS FX, and related markets like commodities, treasuries, equities, and energy. Key Takeaways The global outage occurred during a thin post-Thanksgiving Friday session. Pricing is frozen or unstable in key futures (equities, treasuries, energy, commodities) […]