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You see a lot of Forex trading systems online that claim that there complicated mathematical formulas can beat the market but this is not true for one simple reason.

Fact – Forex markets do not move to a mathematical theory which you can predict forex price movement with and the rest of this article will explain why, give the proof and show you a better way to win with your forex trading strategy.

You will hear a lot of traders telling you maths works and that gurus theories such as Gann, Elliot and Fibonacci are scientific and mathematical ways of doing trading but the definition of a mathematical theory is:

It works ALL the time not now and again!

The theories just mentioned don’t and neither do any other mathematical theories – its rubbish to say forex markets move to mathematics.

You often see systems sold that say they work to complex mathematical algorithms or were devised by a wiz kid – but look at the track record and what do you see?

A made up track record in hindsight, using closing data and knowing everything that happened! Well that’s not hard to do, anyone can make a profit if they know tomorrows price today but that’s not real life. Real life is – trading without knowing the price.

The track records are simply bent to show a profit, on the data segment studied and the more it’s bent, the more unlikely it is to work in real time, as no two segments of data ever repeat exactly.

If You Want to Win at Forex Remember this:

The markets don’t move to some mystical law that repeats exactly – but they do move on probability and by trading high odds set ups, you may not win every time but you will win more than you lose and with sound money management you can win long term.

The key is to use a simple odds based method, as simple systems always work best, as they have fewer elements to break in the brutal world that is forex trading.

Think About this key Point

In 100 years despite all the advances in computers, forecasting and speed of communications, we have seen no increase in the number of winning traders and this goes to show that complicated mathematics and fancy theories do not increase the odds of success.

A Simple Way to Succeed

Success in forex trading is dependant on a simple robust forex trading system, combined with discipline and sound money management; this has always been so and always will be.

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From early childhood and throughout the schooling system, we learn the “3R’s”: Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic – the science of numbers. (Nowadays, you need to add a fourth “R”- gRaphing!).
Later, we reach a certain level in our education where were may feel rightly or wrongly (often complacently) that our levels of mastering reading and writing are satisfactory.

However… What about numbers? Generally, we do not fully realize the extent to which numbers control and regulate our lives. We are all identified by innumerable numbers from birth to the very last moments of our lives. Just reflect only on some of our important dates: birth, starting school, finishing primary school, finishing secondary school, the admission to university and then also with every stage of our education imprinted with our marks, marks and marks (percentages!). Then other numbers: the first love (the date, some of us remember!), dates of: marriage, birth of children, the first work, salaries, divorce, then blood pressure, cholesterol and sugar levels, the first operation, the passing away (not yet?) and so on. These numbers are unique to you and unique to me. They all identify you and identify me.

Some numbers quantify information. These are essential to understanding facts, events, processes, laws etc… The US novelist, Nathanel West, 1903-1940, stated aptly: “Numbers constitute the only universal language”.

Studies have shown that even rhesus monkeys can understand the relation between numbers 1 to 9 i.e., they are able to judge whether the specified number is smaller or bigger than the other number.

So, what is the present state of arithmetic? Unfortunately, most of the people satisfy themselves on a very low level of its cognizance. (As an anecdote, I may tell you that I was approached by a lawyer who asked me: “I have to assign a plaintiff 15% of the amount demanded by defendant; how much is it?”). Most people fear numbers if they require any further calculations: making fractions, multiplying, using proportions or inverse proportions, converting to percentages or substituting to formulas. What are the implications of this fact? It often leads to impaired judgement of the average citizen regarding handling their home economics, investment and, as the case may be, the events in their own country and on our globe. As the citizens of a “global village”, we are all affected by events not only in our place or country but even in far-away-countries. Consider these numbers: people affected by HIV, bird flu, tsunami, price of a barrel of oil, tsunami in financial markets, increasing ozone hole, decreasing shoals of fish in oceans, decreasing number of polar bears, the increase in the average yearly temperature, increasing extinction of species of animals and plants. One can present endless number of examples.

The numbers can be puzzling, depressing, shocking, fascinating, mystifying or upsetting. Well, they can be… An educated, intelligent and honest person will perceive them this way. A Polish film director Jerzy Konwicki (renown for his “Ashes and Diamonds”) used to say: “only a cow does not care”.

True, a cow does not know, for example, about the “mad cow” disease and does not understand what it means that a certain percentage of cows are affected by foot-and-mouth disease and bluetongue virus. There are however, unfortunately, also some examples among educated as well as decision making persons, institutions and governments who do not care. They have dubious motives to ignore some numbers (and related facts) they do not like. What will be the consequences of their arrogance to human beings in the future? A Japanese proverb says that more intelligent are those who see further…

Below there are several examples of numbers compiled from the Internet, Time and Trumpet. They may not be exact; however you may find them interesting and worthy of your attention:

65 000 – estimated population of Africa’s black rhinos in 1970
3 600 – estimated population of Africa’s black rhino in 2007
2 000 000 000 000 USD – US cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, so far

3 500 000 – Jews murdered in Poland by German Nazis

32 000 000 – population of Poland before II WW; 24 000 000 after the war

1500 – new HIV infections a day in South Africa

1 000 000 – Americans killed yearly by heart attacks (cardiacnetwork.net)

7:2 – ratio of average number of TV sets to children in the USA

1500 – number of hours, the average USA teenager spends watching TV

67% – percentage of Australian and USA men are overweight

1 in 12- South Africans who had access to the Internet in 2007

15-30 000 000 – men suffering from erectile dysfunction (NIH, USA government statistics)

690 000 000 – number of Asians living on $1 or less per day (Asian Dev. Bank)

142.8 – number of women raped per 100 000 in South Africa; 150 per day

66 000 000 – number of people in the USA suffering with arthritis, the most common chronic health problem in the USA

3% – rate of the green gas increasing per year

7 600 000 – number of cancer death worldwide in 2007

5 200 000 – Americans suffer from full-blown diabetes and don’t know it…yet.

14 000 – dolphins killed annually in Japan

400 000 000 – number of people in the world suffering from depression and mental disorders (WHO).

Look again at the numbers. They alone are meaningless. However, together with the descriptive information, they carry powerful information, obviously to those who are intelligent enough to understand them. Unfortunately, it does not mean yet, that those who understand them and have authority to make decision/s to change some of the numbers/trends are willing to act…

Are you already feeling depressed? You should be… You are intelligent…
Till the next time… (2).

P.S.: While proofreading, my wife counsels me that I have omitted three other important R’s. During a whole life one should learn: Respect for self, Respect for others and Responsibility for your own actions. She is absolutely Right!

Wacek Kijewski is the author of stimulating and entertaining resource material on experimental science: “SI Units, Conversion and Measurement Skills” (the 2007 edition, IBN 0629340584, 186 pp, USD97. The book is recommended for students and lecturers science and engineering courses. Visit website: http://www.wacek.co.za and http://www.wacek.co.za/review.html Read seven reviews: UNESCO, UK, South Africa, Botswana, United States, Hungary. His other ezines:”The Travellers Temperature Tips”, “Is IQ a Metric Unit of Intelligence and…Stupidity”, “Al-Gebra and Illuminati Links Discovered”, “How to Measure Cultural Differences in Metric Units”, “The Traveller’s Temperature Predicaments (2). NB: The book is being sold by Amazon and other booksellers illegally.

It time again to revisit alternative financing strategies for business owners needing money. Whether your business needs capital to grow, meet payroll, or to just simply survive, there are numerous alternatives for your company when banks so ‘NO’.

Personal loans are no longer viable options for business owners. Banks have tightened their purse strings on personal credit just as they have with business credit. This tightening typically does not have anything to do with the state of your credit or the value of your collateral. But more reflects their past indiscretions with their depositors’ money. Further, most business owners, over the last two or three years, have already encumbered all of their personal assets, leaving nothing of value to collateralize.

The following lists many alternatives that may still be available to your business. These alternatives allow business owners to capitalize on their previous hard work; be it from building relationships with suppliers and other business partners to closing sales and building a strong customer base:

Using Your Business Relationships!

Trade Credit: It never hurts to work with your suppliers. Ask for better terms; either more discounts or longer time for payment. Here you can reduce your overall costs or allow more time to collect money from your customer before payment is due to these suppliers. Now, your suppliers may baulk at this discussion as they are probably feeling the same pinch as you are. However, impress upon them that it does their business no good (short term or long-term) if you go out of business, have to cut back your standard orders, or are forced to find other suppliers who offer better terms.

In conjunction with trade credit, do all that you can to collect your receivables from your customers, as soon as possible. If your suppliers offer you discounts for early payment, offer the same to your customers (just maybe not at the same magnitude) or offer discounts for cash. This allows you to collect payments faster as well as reduce you costs by paying less for the goods you need to run your business. Just remember, in this type of economy, cash is king.

Using The Strength of Your Customers!

Receivables and/or Purchase Orders: If your business has accounts receivables sitting on its book just waiting to be collected, you maybe able to get cash for those assets NOW. There are cash advance companies (not banks) that specialize in purchasing your receivables. Companies like Bridgeport Capital Service, RTS Financial Services, or Paragon Financial Group. These companies will purchase your invoices for up to 90% of their amount. They will then work with your customers to collect these receivables (saving you both time and money on collection). When the invoices are paid, these companies will refund to you the remaining 10% of the invoice amount. This type of funding is great for struggling companies as these cash advance businesses will focus more on your customers’ credit and business strengths than your.

Many of these same companies will also finance your purchase orders. If you place an order with your suppliers and agree to pay for their goods over time, these cash advance companies will finance these agreements. This could allow your business the opportunity to take advantage of trade discounts (percentages off the purchase amount) as your company will have immediate cash to satisfy your supplier. This is very similar to having a line of credit with your bank but as an individual credit facility for each purchase.

Credit Cards: I not saying go out and get more credit cards. If your business accepts credit cards, there are companies (again, not banks) that may advance cash to your company based on your FUTURE credit card receipts. These facilities are only paid back when your business generates credit card sales. Thus, if you have a slow month, you are not stuck with a huge monthly loan payment. As your credit card sales ebb and flow, your repayment of these advances will ebb and flow in tandem.

Using Your Character!

Need just a small amount of cash to get you by? Try social lending sites like All World Private Funding!, Zopa, Prosper, or Lending Club. These sites create peer-to-peer lending in which ordinary people, who have additional cash, can review your request and contribute to the funding of your loan. The benefits of these programs include getting the money you need, possible lower rates and better terms than most banks offer, and you get to tell your story directly to the lenders.

Similarly, there is Micro-Credit companies. The largest in the US and around the world is ACCION USA. Micro-finance companies limit their total out lay to a maximum of $25,000 per loan. However, most micro-credit funders like to build relationships first with their borrowers. Thus, they may only approve smaller amounts in the beginning and increase your loan amount as you pay back each facility. These companies will also work with startup firms or those that have been turned down by traditional banks and other financial institutions.

Never forget your friends and family. These are the people who know you best and may better understand what you are trying to do with your business. There are many cons with borrowing money from those closest to you but new companies like Virgin Money will help you manage this new relationship. Companies like Virgin will help you keep everything in a business like manner.

Now, while there is a lot of focus these days on traditional banks, most communities also have Credit Unions. Credit Unions are not-for-profit organizations. Thus, they do not have to worry about Wall Street or shareholders. While the majority of Credit Unions have yet to fully adopt commercial lending departments, they should have lending programs in place that will meet your business needs.

Some of these alternative options maybe a little more expensive, overall, then having a single credit facility with a bank. But, they are a sure fire way of leading your company through our current credit drought. The key to success is to do your homework. Find the program that best fits your needs and that will provide the greatest benefit at the lowest cost to your business. Some business owners tend to panic a bit when they begin to feel the credit pinch. It is only natural as raising money for your business is time consuming, time that can hardly be spared in these trying times. But, remember to think about the long term. Don’t just settle on the first source that gets approved, find the best fore you. Be diligent!

Joseph Lizio holds A MBA in Finance and is founder and owner of http://www.businessmoneytoday.com

These trends relate to the increasing cost of retirement which in turn is linked to longer life expectancy and the effects of a massive ageing population.

Firstly, as we know, most major employers are moving away from the final-salary pension schemes of old. The promises made by employers are proving to be very expensive to keep and as such, current corporate management is trying to lower or remove this burden.

The second major trend is the devaluing of state retirement benefits. Of course, this differs from country to country, but the trend is for pensioners to receive less, not more benefits.

Whilst the masses appear to be completely unaware of this trend, the clock to retirement age is ticking and each passing month without action is one less in which preparation can be made.

Suddenly, investors need to decide whether they want to focus on alpha or beta. For the lay person, this means either trusting in the skill of an investment management to outperform the market, or, relying on the market and investing passively in an index. This is a very difficult call to make.

Should an investor stick with the more traditional unit linked funds investing on the stock exchange and bond markets, or look to more adventurous areas such as hedge funds, property and commodities? Can an investor protect themselves from the potential swings in the market by diversification?

For those that wish to avoid the complexities and rely on a managed fund, choosing a manager can be hard to do. Even the legendary Bill Miller who had beated the S&P 500 for an incredible 15 consecutive years has just had 2 poor years in a row.

In fact, the average US mutual fund investor averages much lower returns than are possible. This is in part due to the unfortunate habit of private investors to jump onto an investment bandwagon and buy into hot funds at the top of the market. Some studies suggest that this causes most investors to earn a massive five percent less each year than the S&P 500 index.

Such mistakes are primarily due to a lack of understanding. Private investors often lack economic, business, political, financial or stock exchange knowledge – and this can prove to be very expensive. This – of course – is understandable. Not everyone has the desire or capacity to become an expert in economics or geopolitics. And yet, this is what these changes essentially require. At the most extreme, this may prove to be the difference between a prosperous or a poor old age.

All these things really prove is that the private investor needs to understand the stock exchange and it’s workings more and more – and that an ever greater number of people need to become private investors. This will be a massive change in how individuals are responsible for their own affairs.

Stuart Langridge is a financial advisor and personal finance columnist. He shows people why they need to invest on the stock exchange and why we all need to Invest on the stock exchange for a more comfortable retirement.

When it comes to starting up your own work from home business, there are fewer ventures better to get into than Forex trading. More and more people are starting to realize the potential this form of trading has and are enthusiastically becoming involved. But what is forex trading?

Forex trading is simply trading between different currencies from all over the world, ie. trading on the Forex market. So let’s say you use your US dollars to buy a thousand Euros. What you’ll be hoping for is that the price of those Euro’s goes up, which will intern increase your initial investment.

So how do I get started?
Before getting started, you’ll first need to spend some time educating yourself on different methods you can adopt to build a successful trading business. Too many people fail at this not because they’re not smart enough or that they’re just unlucky, but because they jump in too early, lacking the knowledge necessary to read the market.

Every successful trader has spent a lot of time studying the different ways in which to use the market to their advantage. Not only that but quite possibly the most important part of being successful on the Forex market is to find one method and stick with it!

A lot of traders end up failing because they jump from one thing to the next. They hear about someone making money using a new technique, so they try it. Then they hear another new ‘awesome’ method and forget about the one they were just using and jump on over to this next one.

These are the people who will inevitably fail. Find a method and stick to it! Sure you may lose money at first, but you’re getting invaluable experience in the process and learning more about how to use the method, which will in the end result in more of a natural reading of the market.

Looking to make money with forex trading? Get your daily dose of forex trading strategies at our free information blog.

Tax reduction and tax deferral are the primary benefits of obtaining a cost segregation study. Income taxes are a substantial burden for most real estate investors. Tax deductions help with this burden. While some level of taxation is necessary, it is both inappropriate and imprudent to pay more than your fair share.

Income tax is based on net profit or taxable income. The basic formula for calculating taxable income is revenue less expenses (tax deductions). Expenses can include both direct payments to third parties (labor, rent, supplies, etc.) and non-cash deduction. The primary non-cash deductions are depreciation and amortization. Tax reduction (tax cuts) are a direct result of increasing tax deductions.

The tax deduction benefit real estate owners gain from cost segregation is a higher level of depreciation. This non-cash tax deduction reduces taxable income and income taxes. For example, if the amount of depreciation increased by $100,000 (as result of a cost segregation study), taxable income would decrease by $100,000, and the owner experiences a $35,000 reduction in taxes (based on 35% tax rate).

Most real estate owners depreciate real estate based upon splitting the cost basis between land and improvements. The property owner or tax preparer typically estimates the portion for the land and attributes the balance to long-life improvements. Long-life improvements depreciate over 27.5 years for rental residential property and 39 years for commercial property

While this simplistic method is lawful, it cheats the real estate owner of tax deductions. A cost segregation study identifies up to 130 short-life components. (Cost segregation is different than component depreciation, which was available until the early 1908s. However, the result of both is to increase depreciation and tax deductions during the early years of ownership.) These short-life components typically comprise 20-50% of the improvement cost basis and are depreciated over 5 years (20.0% per year), 7 years (14.29% per year) and 15 years (6.67% per year).

Depreciation effectively changes the character of income from ordinary income to capital gains income. While the maximum income tax rate for ordinary income is 35%, the maximum rate for capital gains is 15% (less than half the ordinary income tax). This affects substantial income tax reduction.

Increasing depreciation also affects deferral of payment of income taxes. Instead of paying taxes (at the ordinary income tax rate) in the year income is earned, taxes are paid (at the capital gain rate) in the year the property is sold. Cost segregation effectively generates an interest free loan (until the property is sold) and reduces the tax rate (from 35% to 15%).

Cost segregation produces tax deductions and reduces federal income taxes across the country and in every size market. Below are just a few examples of where cost segregation generates meaningful tax deductions.

City:

• Miami, FL
• Bridgeport, CT
• Washington, DC
• San Francisco, CA
• Atlanta, GA
• Dallas/Ft. Worth, TX
• New Orleans, LA
• New York, NY
• Baltimore, MD
• Hartford, CT
• Indianapolis, IN
• Wichita, KS
• Detroit, MI
• Charleston, SC
• Providence, RI
• Grand Rapids, MI
• Jacksonville, TN
• Boise, ID
• Santa Rosa, CA
• Columbia, SC
• Columbus, OH
• Oxnard, CA
• Greensboro, NC
• Allentown, PA
• Harrisburg, PA
• Louisville, KY
• Fresno, CA
• Akron, OH
• Chicago, IL
• Portland, OR

Cost segregation produces tax deductions for virtually all property types.

Property Type:

• Manufacturing/processing
• Tennis club
• Retirement home
• Auto service garage
• Mini-warehouse
• Single-tenant retail
• Medical facility
• Hotel
• Retail
• Vacant land

Almost every industry, including the following, can generate cost-efficient tax deductions by using cost segregation.

Industry:

• Wood product manufacturing
• Warehousing and storage
• Truck transportation
• Transportation equipment manufacturing
• Textile product mills
• Textile mills
• Real estate lesser
• Publishers
• Printing activities
• Plastic and rubber products manufacturing

O’Connor & Associates is a national provider of investment property consulting services including cost segregation studies, due diligence, insurance valuations, tax reduction, property tax, market research,expert witness,private bond activity,taxes,residential property appraisals,Tarrant Central Appraisal District,Tips and Tricks for Appealing Your Property Taxes in Dallas,Dallas county appraisal and Federal tax reduction. Our appraisers are competent to appraise virtually all types of property including land, neighborhood shopping centers, warehouses, bowling alleys, motels, mobile home parks, self-storage units, retirement homes, multifamily housing, movie theatres, veterinary clinics, single-tenant retail centers, funeral homes, bars, amusement parks, hospitals, schools, night clubs, apartments and medical facilities.

Have you ever wondered how much a part of your investments will be worth 10 years from now? How about 20 years? You can easily figure it out without using a financial calculator. Just use the Rule of 72, your financial calculator in investment.

Let’s say you invested $10,000 in a fixed annuity earning 6% a year. In 24 years, your assets will be worth about $40,000. Then how does it work?

And the Rule of 72: Divide the number 72 by the interest you earn, and it will give you the number of years it will take for your money to double. Using the above example, 72 divided by 6 equals 12 years for doubling. Pretty simple-hah! Since there are two doubling periods in 24 years, the original $10,000 would be worth $20,000 in 12 years, and $40,000 in 24 years.

Using this same Rule, an investment earning 8% would double in about 9 years, and a 12% investment would double in 6 years.

You need to remember that a 6% interest rate in a Certificate of Deposit would not work as well as a 6% annuity. A CD earning 6% would leave an investor approximately 4% after taxes. The Rule of 72 would only apply to an after-tax yield. A 6% annuity would be tax-deferred; therefore, the entire 6% would be counted.

The Rule of 72 works best with fixed investments, or those with a fairly stable return. Also, it only works if you reinvest your assets. The Rule does not apply if you withdraw any funds.

You can even use this Rule in reverse. For example, you are 38 years old, and you’d like to know how much you’d have to invest today to retire a millionaire.

Using the same Rule, assuming a retirement age of 65, and an average annual return of 8%, here is how it would work:

Step One: 72 divided by 8% would signify that your money would double every 9 years.

Step 2: At age 65, you want your assets to be worth $1,000,000, so…

Step 3: You work in reverse, going back 9 years for every doubling period.

$1,000,000 at age 65 (your goal)

$500,000 at age 56 (9 years earlier)

$250,000 at age 47,

$125,000 at age 38 (lump sum)

If you invest $125,000 at 8% until age 65 (before taxes), you would have about $1,000,000 at retirement. This amount would change, of course, if you invested more than $125,000, or if the interest were higher, or better still, you started investing a little sooner than age 38.

Depending on your goals, and your age, you could retire earlier or later than age 65. You don’t have to invest a lump sum to retire comfortably. Just have a goal, and a systematic investment plan, and your retirement needs will be accomplished.

Kaushik Adhikary operates http://www.myinsuranceinsiderinfo.com, a blog all about fresh and quality content on personal line of insurance and finance field. He loves giving away Free Stuffs and now giving away Free Memberships to his Newsletter,Special Reports,E-Course,E-Books et. all absolutely free.

For more more valuable informations, Click Here-http://www.myinsuranceinsiderinfo.com

So you want to host a wine tasting? Make it fun! Wine tasting doesn’t have to be a stuffy affair. After all, wine is first and foremost about pleasure. So even if you are trying to organize an education tasting, you should keep it enjoyable. One of the best ways to keep your guests interested and focused on the wine while having a great time is to plan a fun wine tasting theme. A cohesive theme helps keep the tasting focused and helps to get guests involved, drawing them out to comment on and discuss the wines. After all, the discussion is what is really the most fun and educational, not just tasting the wines. Otherwise you could just have wine tastings all alone at home!

Some of the themes listed below are not mutually exclusive. Mix it up, make it interesting in any way that seems entertaining to you and your guests. You can even throw in some wine tasting party games to really turn up the excitement.

Blind Wine Tastings:

A blind wine tasting is a fun way to get everyone involved and keep your guests guessing. In a blind tasting, the tasters are blinded to the wines. Generally, the bottles are covered with a brown bag to hide their identity and then numbered with a marker. That way your guests are not biased based on the label, producer, price or anything else. You can share your unbiased thoughts and impressions about the wines. You can have random wines or they can all have some theme, such as a vertical or horizontal tasting (see below). It can even be fun to incorporate a game such as scoring each wine to see which wine gets the most votes. Or you can award prizes for the person who guesses the the most wines correctly (vintage, producer, region, grape varieties, etc.). At the end you reveal the wine and can discuss further once you know what the wines were. It is a good idea to reveal the wines while everyone still has a bit of each wine left to taste so they can go back and reassess their impressions after finding out what they were drinking.

Vertical Wine Tasting:

A vertical tasting is an assortment of the same wine, from the same producer and vineyard, across several vintages. It is a great way to begin to understand both the style and specific characteristics of a producer or vineyard as well as the subtle differences that result from the different growing conditions of different vintages. While this can be difficult to arrange for someone new to wine, who only has access to the newest wines that are on the current market, if you have friends who collect wine and can help source the bottles this type of tasting can be very educational.

Horizontal Wine Tasting:

A horizontal wine tasting theme is much easier to put together. It is a tasting of various wines from the same vintage. Ideally, wines from the same region and general style are tasted from one vintage to compare the different producers and vineyards. This helps to learn about the characteristics of the vintage as well as the differences between the various producers or vineyards the wines come from. This type of tasting is much easier to put together than a vertical tasting because the wines all come from the same vintage. If you stick to a current vintage then you will have many options you can find in the marketplace. While it is generally best to stick to one region or style of wine, if you really want to challenge your guests you can include several wines from the same vintage but from different regions, grapes or countries to help learn about the, sometimes dramatic, differences between them.

Wine Region Theme:

A great way to learn a lot about a particular wine region is to host a tasting where the theme is just one wine producing area. Choose several wines produced in that region, from different producers, vineyards and sub-regions within the area. As you and your guests taste through them, pay attention to the similarities as well as the differences. Can you identify any characteristics that unify the wines? What sets them apart? Ask these questions to your guests. If you draw people out to talk, discuss and argue, your tasting will be more fun and educational.

Wine Scoring Party:

Another fun way to get your guests all personally involved is to ask everyone to score each wine. While most tasters find it easy to say if they like or don’t like a wine, it requires much more attention to the details of the wine to give it a specific score. There are different ways to do this. One of the best is to supply your guests with a wine tasting score sheet which serves as a template to score wines. You can have sections with room for notes on the wine name, color and appearance, aroma, flavor and mouthfeel and overall impressions and conclusions. For the standard 100 point score they can give up to 5, 15, 20, and 10 points each for the color/appearance, aromas, flavors and overall impression/finish, respectively. The scores for each are added and added to 50 to create the final score between 50 and 100. You can then compare scores across guests and figure out how the wines ranked.

Wine and Food Pairing Dinner Party Theme:

Traditionally, wine is not meant to be enjoyed alone. Throughout history wine has accompanied food and many people believe that alongside food is where you should enjoy and judge wine. While tastings of wine alone is a lot of fun, a full dinner can really make the food and wine shine, bringing out nuances of each that were missing before. If you or your friends love to cook, pairing wine with each dish or course is a great way to both learn about the wines but also to learn about what types of wines work with specific foods. You can serve several wines alone with a given course and vote on which paired the best with the food. A fun way to do this is to choose a country or region and pair that area’s cuisine with the wines produced there. For example, you can pair traditional Spanish cuisine with Spanish wines. The cuisine and wine of these old cultures grew up alongside each other over centuries and therefore they often create some of the most profound food and wine pairings. There are so many other options, from the general (like French wine with French food) to the specific (like Provençal cuisine with Bandol wine or Southwestern French cuisine with Bordeaux). If you are really enthusiastic you can even decorate the room and table in the style of that region to get everyone in the mood. Get creative and make it fun!

Josh Dusick is the editor of the Wine Tastings Guide at http://www.wine-tastings-guide.com where you can get information about how to host a wine tasting party, how to serve and taste wine and even about pairing wine and food.

I love it when I read forum entries from people suggesting trading strategies along the lines of:

- Enter long when the RSI(14) is above 50, the stochastic (14,5,3) has crossed positive, and the Williams %R(14) is rising from the oversold area
- Enter short when the RSI(14) is below 50, the stochastic (14,5,3) has crossed negative, and the Williams %R(14) is falling from the overbought area

(Disclaimer: I just made up that strategy, so don’t trade it without testing it first – the fact is though – I seriously doubt it works)

Look, there are many problems with calling something like this a strategy, but the one I want to discuss today is simply that each of these indicators belongs to the same class of indicator. The RSI, the stochastic and the Williams %R are all oscillators.

An oscillator is a momentum based indicator that moves above and below a horizontal axis representing a position of neutral momentum.

Now each of these three oscillators measures momentum slightly differently. RSI measures it through comparing the magnitude of higher closes to lower closes over a set period of price bars. The stochastic measures it showing where the current close fits relative to a high/low range over a set period of price bars. The Williams %R works on the same concept as the stochastic, showing the relationship between the current close and the high/low range set over a period of price bars, however it does so through a different formula.

Basically, all are measuring the same thing. Quite likely, you’ve added some extra complexity to your strategy that serves no useful purpose at all.

Is there ever a need for more than one oscillator? Possibly, yes. It depends on what you’re trying to achieve. You might use one for indicating oversold or overbought price areas, and a different one for indicating increasing or decreasing momentum. You might even use one indicator twice, with different parameters, to represent momentum over both a shorter and longer time period. In this case, it’s fine.

However, I suspect many traders when developing their trading approach don’t really think about it to this degree. I suspect most just slap an indicator on their chart for no other reason than their platform provides it, and then look through the price history to see whether it shows potential for profits.

In this case, they can probably benefit from removing any redundancy.

So, what indicator classes are there? With some exceptions, the majority will fit within one of these four classes:

1. Trend indicators, such as moving averages, directional movement or trendlines.
2. Volatility indicators, such as bollinger bands, average true range or standard deviation.
3. Oscillators such as RSI, stochastics and Williams %R.
4. Volume / Market Strength indicators, such as volume, on balance volume or money flow index.

Generally you shouldn’t need more than one indicator to determine trend, one to determine volatility, one to determine momentum, and one to measure volume. In many cases, through a study of price action, you can even eliminate those single indicators and determine trend, momentum and volatility through price alone. Of course, that’s not for all people.

What I encourage you to do is to look carefully at the indicators you’re using. Do you have more than one indicator from any of the indicator classes? If so, is there a valid reason for it, or is it simply redundancy that has slipped unnoticed into your trading strategy? More often than not, I’d suggest your strategy could benefit from removal of that extra redundancy. Trading is one business where ‘simple really is best’.

Happy trading,
Lance Beggs

Would you like to learn more about how I trade the forex and equity index markets? Check out the articles, videos and trading resources on my website right now at http://www.YourTradingCoach.com

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Steve Hill is a webmaster from Birmingham, he has interests in a number of websites including:
stuttering therapies
video advertising