Financial Planning Q A

Recently I wrote an article for a womens magazine - Citta Bella. Perhaps some of the questions addressed here are your concerns as well. Heres the article:

Q & A For Citta Bella

Case: 30-year old Single Office Lady

1. I have 20K, how do I invest my money?

According to your risk preference, you may invest in fixed deposit, shares or unit trust. Fixed deposit is the safest investment however it generates only 2-3% per year return. As for shares and unit trusts there is certain investment risk involved but the potential returns are much higher than the fixed deposit, in general the gains are usually around 7-12% per year.

For a 30 year old single office lady, you can tolerate much higher risk than those who are married with children and those who are nearing retirement age, hence I would advice a 25:75 asset allocation for you, which means you may put aside RM5000 (25%) in the fixed deposit and invest RM15,000 (75%)in blue chip stocks.

Asset allocation is how much money you put into different asset classes—the percentage of your assets that are in stocks, bonds, cash, real estate, and commodities. Believe it or not, the choices you make in this regard are the most important part of your investing. A good mix of asset allocation will enable you to achieve sustainable profits from the stock market over the long run.

I usually recommend people to invest in blue chip stocks as blue chip stocks are good investment, not only you can gain capital appreciation, every year you’ll receive attractive dividends from these companies. Some examples of the blue chip stocks are: Maybank, CIMB, Genting, and Public Bank. However, if you are not comfortable investing directly in the share market, you may choose to invest in unit trust from a reputable fund management company.


2. How much savings do I need? I’m a 30 yr old single OL (office lady).

Assuming your retirement age is 55 and you live until 75 years old, you should set aside minimum RM500 every month into your retirement fund preferably in stocks or unit trust which will give you RM1,500 every month during your 25 year retirement period.
After deciding how much we need in the future, now, let’s see how we can achieve our retirement goal. Many people have the wrong attitude towards savings, they will choose to pay their monthly expenses first, whatever the balance (if any) will then turn into their savings. Sometimes, they may have impulse buying on branded handbags or hand phones, and they will not hesitate to withdraw from their savings to purchase them.

The right attitude should be to pay into the retirement fund before any monthly expenses. In addition, you should try not to withdraw from the fund for any impulse buying. A good way to help you to achieve your retirement goal is to set up a unit trust regular saving plan with a reputable unit trust company with initial RM1000 investment, followed by auto-debit instruction from your bank account to invest RM300 monthly into an equity fund.

However, if you notice, I did not include the EPF into this retirement fund. The reason why I didn’t include is because most of us, before the retirement age, we have already used up at least one third for purchasing property, and the remaining upon retirement the money is usually used for children’s university expenses, hence, the remaining may not be significant. However, if you do have money left from the EPF that will be a bonus for you.


3. I love traveling to different parts of the world, but I’m afraid I might spend too much on trips and not saving enough for my retirement, what should I do?

As Malaysia is moving towards becoming a developed nation and our society is becoming more affluent, overseas trips has become part of our lifestyle. However, these trips are not cheap, they may cost up to about RM2000 to RM6000 per person. If we lose focus we may ended up spending too much and not saving enough for our retirement fund. My advice is that you need to be disciplined enough to set aside the required amount, say RM500 monthly for your retirement fund first, the remaining you may allocate according to your other needs such as your overseas trip. Hence, it is very important that we must have proper financial planning to safeguard our hard earn money so that our retirement goal can be achieved.


4. Medical cost is getting too expensive, is it advisable to get myself covered with insurance? What is the right amount for my insurance coverage?

Medical expenses are rising faster than the costs of any other service. They are climbing at rates that very much exceeding the inflation rate. On top of that, with the hectic lifestyle and bad eating habits, the chances of contracting terminal illness have increased tremendously in the recent years. Hence it is very important that everyone should buy a medical insurance for protection.

How much medical coverage is enough depends on the following factors: your ability to pay the premiums, your health condition, your family history of terminal illness, your debt obligations and your family commitments and other personal objectives such as whether you need some investment component in it.

In general, for a 30 year old woman with good health condition would need minimum RM200,000 for a lifetime medical coverage. However, if budget allows, you may consider increase your coverage through other add-on benefits such as hospitalization, disability benefits, income benefits, and regular saving feature in it.


5. I am still young, do I need to write a Will?

It’s never too young to write your Will. As soon as you have turned 18 years old, you may start to write your Will. What is a Will? A Will is an important legal document that contains your instructions and wishes for distributing your property and assets after you die. This document contains the names of the people you want to benefit, your beneficiaries, as well as details about your home, land, vehicles, bank accounts, investments, jewelry, artwork, and other possessions. Your Will also allows you to choose a personal guardian to care for your children if you should die when they are still minors. Your Will should be written carefully, correctly and in compliance with the laws of your state to be sure your beneficiaries will be taken care of when you are gone.

In order for your Will to be valid, and accepted by the court, it must be in writing, signed with your signature, and witnessed by at least two witnesses who are neither relatives nor beneficiaries. Otherwise, the court may not accept your Will, and it may be unenforceable. If your Will is found invalid, the court may distribute your assets as if there were no Will (or intestate), and the court will distribute your asset according to the Distribution Act 1958 (amended 1997) and it may take up to seven years for the whole process.

Playing with Bollinger Bands A Likely Long Term Profitable Strategy

Last week I wrote a post about the Bollinger Bands indicator and how I thought it could be exploited to achieve good profitability levels in forex trading. After doing a full analysis going through a visual 5-6 year backtest, a mathematical expectancy analysis and the final coding and testing of the strategy I can tell you that I have come up with a likely long term profitable system based exclusively on Bollinger Bands. Asirikuy members would definitely want to checkout last weeks video in which I explain the whole development process in detail showing you all the steps necessary to go from an idea to an actual, coded expert with great possibilities of long term success. On todays post I want to give my regular readers a look into this strategy and the results it finally achieves.

My first idea for coding this Bollinger Band system was taken from the thoughts I had a week ago regarding this strategy. I based the making of this strategy in the fact that when a bar closes above a certain number of volatility adjusted steps outside 2 standard deviations an important "signal" is given that predicts long term movements in that direction to a good extent. As I pointed last week, this strategy also signals a retracement in conjunction with the trend following aspect but definitely I wanted to explore the trend following aspects of the strategy first.

The mathematical expectancy analysis of this strategy wasnt disappointing at all with positive results for almost all period perspectives on the one hour charts. However - interestingly enough - long periods of time revealed a great characteristic of this system which is the predictive power over a singificantly long amount of time with almost no moves into unprofitable territory. This means that the strategy would definitely lend itself to the making of a system that could use an extremely favorable risk to reward ratio. Designing my systems money management around the conclusions of the mathematical expectancy analysis results I came up with a strategy that held a risk to reward ratio of exactly 1 : 4 meaning that the system can take four loses for each winning trade. For me this is quite unprecedented sine most strategies I coded have a risk to reward ratio oscillating from 2 : 1 to 1 : 3 but I had never been able to achieve such a high expectancy for winning trades with success. The results I achieved for a 10 year backtest (2000-2010) on the EUR/USD one hour chart are shown below.
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I have to say that I was very impressed to see that such a simple strategy with absolutely no internal closing criteria besides the TP and SL could achieve such an incredible performance. This strategy definitely shows that it is not complexity what determines the success of a trading strategy but true understanding of the underlying price action. Once you have some idea of how the market behaves and how indicators can be used to exploit an inefficiency a likely long term profitable system from a very simple set of logic can arise. It is important here to say that the above shown results are unoptimized and simply the variable settngs are the result of the mathematical expectancy analysis (for those who are wondering, yes, I tried a trailing stop but a solid TP works much better)

Simulations of this system are also bound to be quite accurate since the average value of the TP is well above 200 pips, meaning that this EA has an incredibly large take profit value that could not be faked by any type of simulation interference. Moreover, the EA only enters trades based on last bars close and therefore explicitely controls bar opening, something that is bound to make trading systems more reliable and back/live testing consistent. Of course, we would need to test this expert to find out but I believe that this system can be improved a lot more before actually releasing it as a Watukushay EA. It is however important to say that GREAT part of this straegys success is based on its volatility adjusted money management that allows it to adjust to changes in market conditions. Using a fixed SL or TP leads to incredible loses showing how adaptive money management is VITAL to achieve profitability.
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As you see on the above image, the success of the strategy is based in the fact that trades are taken almost always after a successful bollinger band breakout. However the fact that we are not focusing on the actual contraction/expansion of the bands but on the statistical meaning of a highly deviated price result makes us enter only meaningful breakouts while others that might have been entered on a contraction/expansion criteria (which is also hard to define) are avoided. The strategy does take a lot of loses (strategies with high reward to risk ratios are often very hard to trade psychologically because of this) however the great thing is that losing trades become evident after only a small move against us, allowing us to preserve the great 1:4 risk to reward ratio.

Currently I have created a forum post within the asirikuy community forum so that we can start improving this strategy and making it become a solid Asirikuy contribution. Of course, the system lacks any internal closing criteria and coming up with relevant ways to improve the systems closing of positions should be vital if this system is to be released for use in the future. If you would like to learn more about automated trading and how you too can come up with and design systems with long term profitability in mind please consider buying my ebook on automated trading or joining Asirikuy to receive all ebook purchase benefits, weekly updates, check the live accounts I am running with several expert advisors and get in the road towards long term success in the forex market using automated trading systems. I hope you enjoyed the article !

Money Management The most important most neglected aspect of automated trading

It is funny how people in forums and people who program expert advisors in general seem to address the problem of finding a profitable system and making it profitable. It seems that most of the time, most of their time and testing is spent on evaluating the entry and exit strategies of the trading strategy. People seem to think that the actual money in the forex market is gained by getting perfect entries and exits all the time, or most of the time.

I have seen people in forums go around for months trying to modify their strategies to make them profitable, they will add filters, add indicators, change the rules, optimize the variables, the indicator periods, add volatility filter, to sum it up, they will do everything they can to further perfect their entry and exit strategies. To further worsen things, most of their efforts are concentrated in the entry to the market, which is the most trivial and unimportant part of forex trading systems (see more on this on my ebook).

I have found out that the most important part of a trading system is not the entry or the exit of the strategy, but the money management. What ? Many people will just be awed by this fact as this is hardly even spoke of and people always neglect its importance when they program an automated trading system. When people buy an EA, they dont really care about how the EA actually manages their money, which is, as I have already said, the most important aspect of the system.

Usually people will use a money management system that just trades a fixed percentage of equity or a fixed lot size. They couldnt do any worse. Trading like this only relies on your account balance, not on the market and any money management system that makes sense, gauges the market to know how much money should be invested. For example, would you invest as much on the stock market now as you did last year ? The answer is NO. Why is this the answer ? Because how much you trade depends on how the market is behaving, is it a "good time" or a "bad time" ? Your money management must depend on both your account balance and market behavior, this is the way professional traders manage their trades. They dont trade X percentage or a fixed lot size, those money management strategies are just naive and precarious.

As I have shown previously, I have been able to take several systems that showed no profit at all and simply by removing all the additional filters that had been added and adding a money management system that made sense I was able to make them profitable. This is something you should NEVER neglect and something in which your attention should be focused. A money management that makes sense will make a system that makes sense and that trades according to how the market actually moves.

If you would like to learn more about automated trading systems, how I evaluate them, test them and how you to can build and program your own long term profitable automated trading strategy please consider buying my ebook on automated trading or subscribing to my weekly newsletter to receive updates and check the live and demo accounts I am running with several expert advisors. I hope you enjoyed the article !

Forex Brokers: Assisting You with Your Trading Needs

If you traded in the Forex market before or if you're still trading now, you may have heard the term Forex broker a lot of times. However, as an individual trader, you may want to know what is a Forex broker and what they do.

Forex brokers are individuals or companies that assist individual traders and companies when they are trading in the Forex market. These individuals can really give you that extra edge you need in order to be successful in the Forex market. Although they will be trading your funded account, all the decisions are still yours to make if you want to.

Forex brokers are there to assist you with your trading needs in exchange for a small commission from what you earn. Here are some of the services that a Forex broker can give you:

� A Forex broker can give you advice regarding on real time quotes.
� A Forex broker can also give you advice on what to buy or sell by basing it on news feeds.
� A Forex broker can trade your funded account basing solely on his or her decision if you want them to.
� A Forex broker can also provide you with software data to help you with your trading decisions.

Searching for a good Forex broker can prove to be a very tedious task. Since there are a lot of advertising in the internet about Forex brokers, Forex traders get confused on which Forex broker they should hire. With all the Forex brokers out there that offers great Forex trading income and quotations, you will find it hard to choose a good and reputable Forex broker.

With a little research, you can find the right Forex broker who can be trusted. If you lack referrals for Forex brokers, you can try and do a little research of your own. The first thing you need to find out about a particular Forex broker with the amount of clients they serve. The more clients they serve the more chances that these brokers are trusted. You should also know the amount of trades these brokers are conducting.

Knowing the broker's experience in the Forex market is also a great way to determine if he or she is the right broker to hire. Experienced Forex brokers will increase your chances of earning money from the Forex market.

If you have questions or complaints, you should call or email the company and ask questions regarding their trading system. You should never be uncomfortable doing this. Besides, they will be the one who will manage your money. And, it is your right to know about what they are doing with your money.

When choosing a Forex broker, you should also consider their trading options. You should also know that Forex brokers are different from what they can offer you. They differ in platforms, spreads, or leverage. You have to know which of the trading options is very important to you in order to be comfortable when you trade in the Forex market.

Most online Forex brokers offer potential clients with a demo account. This will allow you to try out their trading platform without actually risking money. You should look for a demo platform that works just like the real thing and you should also determine if you are comfortable with the trading platform.

Look for the features you want in a trading platform in order for you to know what to expect if you trade with them. If you are comfortable with a trading platform, you should consider trading with them, and if you are not, scratch them off your list. This is a great way to test their trading platform and not risk your money.

If a Forex broker is not willing to share financial information about their company, you shouldn't trade with them because they are reluctant to share company information. They should answer your questions regarding on how they manage their client's money and how they trade that money.

Always remember that if you see an offer that's too good to be true by Forex traders, it probably is too good to be true. The Forex market is a very risky place to trade and Forex brokers must tell you that there are certain risks involved when trading in the Forex market. Avoid hiring a Forex broker who says that trading in Forex is easy and a very good money making market with very low risks.

These are the things you should consider when you look for a Forex broker. If you find that right broker, you can be sure that you can really earn money.