November 2009 Archives

Forex trading is getting more and popular with each day, and rightly so, since it’s such an unexplored part of the financial world for the average individual, or the r retail trader. Although forex offers great potential to anyone with the right attitude and background, it can and does lead to unfortunate results for some people who neglect their education and have misconceptions and too high expectations from the market. In this article we’ll take a look at five of the most common mistakes.

5 Guidelines for Deciding the Perfect Broker

Currency trading involves numerous trials of analysis and decision-making before the trader has acquired the necessary abilities that will allow him to be successful in his endeavors. One of the most basic of these issues is the choice of the broker. Although this aspect of trading is often regarded as a peripheral issue and not emphasized as much as it could be, it is nonetheless exceptionally important for anyone seeking to ensure that his experience is free from worries and troubles as much as possible. We analyze the market to avoid faulty trades; we should analyze the brokers to avoid the bad apples who will ruin our plans and destroy our career before it has had a chance to begin.

The Monfort Plan (Wiley Finance, April 2010) presents the new architecture of a redefined capitalism. This summary piece introduces the five year action plan and explains why a new architecture may be needed in today’s environment.

Today’s capitalism is based on a vintage architecture that dates back to the 1940s and the American effort to pull the world away from Nazi Germany and Soviet communism. It was then when the four institutions of this old architecture were designed: the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations and the GATT. The old architecture designed by the Bretton Woods elites served a purpose: it contributed to the economic resurgence of Western Europe and brought peace to a continent that had fought wars for centuries.

Subsequent to the design of the new architecture the Truman Administration proposed and implemented the Marshall Plan, the plan for the economic recovery of 17 countries in Western Europe. The plan enabled the vision of Jean Monnet to come up with a European Community of Coal and Steel, the parent of the European Union. These were times of courage and vision. The great changes of the 1940s and 1950s were precipitated by the devastation of the two World Wars and the economic collapse of the Great Depression. The environment set the basis for thirty years of phenomenal economic growth on both sides of the Atlantic.

The second half of the twentieth century had two flavours that modeled the world's geo-political pattern of both Hemispheres: the cold war and the emergence of neoclassical economics fathered by Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan and implemented by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Neoclassical economics brought about an increasing mathematical sophistication where economic sub-fields such as financial economics prospered thanks to the work of gifted mathematicians such as Merton, Black or Scholes. Monodimensional utility functions prioritized profit maximization over other variables such as human dignity or environmental sustainability. Academia was captured in the allure of models. Our economic policy-makers were constrained by mathematical models that worked on paper.