Or you might just be hanging in there..Winning pips consecutively but then having to face that one monster of a trade which goes against you and wipe out your account. One month after you are back again with the determination never to let it happen again, but repeating the same old mistakes again and again.

I have little over 100 mails dropped into my inbox by traders through out the past 2 years. Except for few isolated cases everyone is barely making it. Forex trading is too much work. It will give you many sleepless nights due to 24 hour trading cycle. When you are in sleep, something major can occur in another part of the world and you wake up to see a mess.

What if you can make world’s best traders trade for you. What if whenever they open a trade on their account, the same trade is copied to your account. The only work you do is watching your account grow and send withdrawal requests… whenever you want.
Thanks to Leon Yohai’s ZULU Trade network, NOW IT IS POSSIBLE.

ZuluTrade is a hub of professional Forex traders who provide signals. Most of them trade for a living and you can check their trading history and many vital information before deciding to follow someone.

This is where we have to do little work. It is not as difficult as finding the perfect trade, but do put your research hats on. No system is foolproof. Your success will depend on the people you decide to get signals from. Select wrong providers- say good buy to your account.

Zulu has it’s own ranking system for signal providers. You would think if you add people from top 10 or top 20 your job is done. Far from the truth. You have to analyze each trader to suit your style of trading. They should be able to match your account size.

Not everyone starts forex trading with $10,000 standard accounts. If you start with a $500 and due to your signal providers large draw downs your account may go busted.

Let’s take a look at current number one ranked signal provider, “Forex Cruise Control”. Let’s see what are the data available to do our research on signal providers.

You can see he has a winning percentage of 74%. And a maximum draw down of 1060 pips.

As you can see “Forex Cruise Control” has a maximum draw down of 1060 pips in his trading history. Draw down happens when a trade goes against you. Draw down of 1060 pips means $1060 negative gain if you trade standard lots. If you trade mini lots it would be $106.

When your account balance is smaller than the drawdown, the trades will be closed and you will have to bear the loss. Even if signal provider sees a recovery in his large account you may not see any recovery as you may not be able to have open trading positions beyond 1060 pips.

That is why it is important to analyze your provider’s performance before adding them. You can add your own stop loss levels to prevent a trade go beyond what you can afford to loss.

You can check the signal provider’s trading history at the performance page. You can monitor every trade they have executed since the beginning.

I am putting my money where my mouth is, and I have enabled all my forex trades visible to all of you. Me and my fiance are operating the signal provider account “littlestar” and following is a screenshot of our recent trading history. You can check the complete trading history here.

The beauty of ZULUTRADE is you can have a one month demo run before investing a cent. This way you can have a demo account to the size you wish to invest and add signal providers of your choice and see how they perform for a month. If you are satisfied, you can go live with the same settings or you can make changes from what you have learned during the demo run.

To open a demo account, Go here,
And select “OPEN Account” from the top menu. The second tab from the left.

Click ” Get a free Demo account”

In the “Balance” field it is better to put the amount you are actually going to invest. Be it $100 or $10,000. It will be easier to get an idea of how much you would have actually made if it is your real live account.

Once the account is opened, log in and go to “performance” page. (3rd tab from the top menu). Go through at least 100 signal providers before deciding to add someone to your portfolio.

If you like a signal provider, click “Add to portfolio” button. From the popup window you can select “lots” and “Max open trades”.

Decide the lot size based on your account size. Smaller the account is, smaller your lot size should be and vice a versa. You shouldn’t be trading standard lots if your account size is $100. 100 pips to the wrong side and your account is gone. Don’t worry, you will learn all about lot sizes and whatnot in a matter of few days.

Max open trades.
As you may have already guessed, it is better to open few trades as possible when your account is small and vice a versa.

Once you add your selected signal providers, you can go to settings page and be familiar with choices available to you. I am not going to explain everything but feel free to explore the page. You can try different settings in your demo account before finding a optimal combination.

Now you can relax. Whenever your selected signal providers open a trade it will be opened in your account too. All these trades can be seen via the “positions” page.

And your equity balance will be increased whenever they make profits and decrease when they are losing. Log in every few hours and see what they are doing. You can monitor all their trades for one month in your demo account. If you still have doubts after the first month, open another demo account for a one more month. Keep doing this until you find your best providers and best settings. This may happen in a matter of days, or it can take months before you find your ideal combination.

To give you a head start, I suggest you to add following signal providers.

“Forex Cruise Control” – Rank No 01 and a consistent performer

“littlestar” – My account and rank in the top 20

“yamatofx2vera” – 99% win ratio with small targeted profits

I will write another post explaining how go live and trade with real money in ZuluTrade. It will be up before 09/03/2012 and I encourage you to demo test at least a month before trading with real money.

Start copying trades here,

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Since Writing this post, Sri lankan stock market gained 2500 points.
All share price index was at 4200 level when this was written back in May 1, 2010. Your capital would have appreciated by 160% at the time of this update.

A small island with a land mass of 65610 Sq.KM and a population of 20 Million, Sri Lanka lies off the southern coast of India. For many, Sri Lanka was known for its high quality ceylon tea until a few decades ago. In the past two and a half decades, Sri Lanka has been picked up by the global media mostly in relation to the civil war which hampered the country, or the 2004 tsunami that ravaged South and Southeast Asia.

30 years of war did not allow the country to reach it’s potential development. The destruction to the infrastructure prior to the 2002 ceasefire is estimated to be approximately $2.1 billion, nearly 13.5 percent of the 1998 GDP.

High expenditure on defense, loss of life and damage to property, underutilized factors of production, Inability to exploit tourism potential resulted a low and volatile economic growth throughout the civil war era.

The dark days for Sri Lanka is over now.The war finally came to an end on that historical day May 17, 2009. The country did not have to wait years to witness a peace dividend. A $2.6 billion IMF loan approved in July 2009 which boosted country’s developing activities. Sri Lanka is seeing major improvements in Economic indicators after the end of war as the uncertainties and risks of the war diminishes.

Falling inflation rates has driven the risk free rate down resulting the real returns to go up.

World’s 2nd Best Stock Exchange

With favorable macro economic conditions, Sri Lanka’s only stock exchange, “The Colombo Stock Exchange” became Asia’s best performing bourse and the world’s second best after Russia for the year ended Dec 31 2009.

Colombo stock exchange is one of the most modern exchanges in South Asia, providing a fully automated trading platform. The bourse consists of 236 companies with a combined market capitalization of $12 billion.

All share price index growth

The All Share Price Index measures the movement of share prices of all listed companies in Sri Lanka. It is based on market capitalization. Weighting of shares is conducted in proportion to the issued ordinary capital of the listed companies, valued at current market price.

As you can see, Sri Lankan stock market always performed well during a peaceful environment. Even before ending the war completely, during the cease fire agreement the market witnessed a significant growth.

In simple terms, If you have invested $10,000 at the beginning of last year (2009), your investment would worth $25,080 now.

* The calculation is based on all share price index growth and I hope the readers are aware of how indexes are used to measure market rates of return.

Industry experts believe the growth to be much higher under prevailing favorable macro-economical conditions coupled with stable political environment.

Milanka price index growth

The Milanka price index comprises of 25 companies and they are selected by considering their performances over the past four quarters. The Colombo stock exchange now reviews & revises the companies to be included in the MPI on a biannual basis.

MPI also behaves identical to ASI when macro-economic and political factors change. It also saw a significant growth during the cease fire period and reaching new grounds in these post war Era.

If you have invested $10,000 in a portfolio consisting of Milanka companies at the beginning of last year (2009), your investment would worth $27,351 now.

Individual company performances

Sri Lankan mass predicted and felt that the war is near it’s ending when they got ready for the new year 2009. Local and foreign investors started collecting shares knowing that good times are ahead. Their predictions were right. Financial analysts picked solid companies from sectors which has the potential to gain from peace dividend quicker than other companies and gave Short and Mid term buy signals.

Let’s see how few of them performed in the market.

All my individual company selections were based on my stock broker’s research recommendations. They gave positive buy signals to many companies which did extremely well and following companies were among those they recommended.

Diversified sector
To represent diversified sector, I took John Keels holding PLC which accounts for 9% of total market capitalization. Their business activities includes Tea Exports,Insurance,Pest Control,Industrial & Agro Holding Company Chemicals,Treatment of Timber,Management of Plantations,Travel & Tourism,Hotel operations.

In simple terms, if you have invested $10,000 on John Keels Holdings at the beginning of last year it would worth $37,800 now. I have not accounted for exchange rate fluctuations during the time period.

Today one dollar equals Rs 114. For up to-date exchange rates please refer http://www.cbsl.gov.lk/

Hotels Sector

To represent Hotels and Travels sector I selected Aitken Spence Hotels which was one of the analyst’s favourite picks during the considered time period.

In simple terms,

Banking And Finance Sector
I selected Commercial bank of Sri Lanka to represent banking & Finance sector as I believe they are the best banking Institution in Sri Lanka.

Which means, if you have invested $10,000 on Commercial Bank PLC at the beginning of last year it would worth $33,900 now.

Are you too late?

True enough that most stock prices have sky rocketed when comparing with last year prices. As a result, the overall market price earning ratio is approximately 20 indicating that most shares are over rated at the moment. But it also shows that current investor sentiment is that the stocks are worth more,their future prospects are bright, and sellers are only giving up their stock at higher prices.

We should also not forget the fact that last quarter data of 2009/2010 financial year is not yet released to the market. Most companies have performed exceptionally well in the last quarter and once that financial data is released the P/E ratio will come down to fair levels.

Equity analysts forecasts company profits will rise by a mean of 60 percent this year. The consumption levels are increasing and earnings will keep growing in the next two to three years as a result of it. There has been no better timer to invest in Sri Lanka.

Start Investing

Foreign ownership of up to 100% is allowed in most of the listed 236 companies. Individuals, Regional Funds, as well as Companies incorporated outside Sri Lanka are permitted to invest in sri Lankan stock market.

Investment in shares in Sri Lanka and withdrwals of proceeds should take place through Share Investment External Rupee Accounts (SIERA) opened with commercial banks. The repatriation of proceeds arising out of investment made after 5th June 1990 are not subject to Exchange Control regulations.

Choose your Stock Broker

There are 15 licensed full service broker firms in Sri Lanka and all of them are maintaining the same brokerage. It is a must for you to select a broker firm with a qualified and experiences research team as your investment decisions will be based on their research reports. Select a broker firm which is capable of providing unique investment insights through extensive deep dive researches.

Following is the list of equity brokers in Sri Lanka and their locations.

1. J B Securities (Pvt) Ltd.
150, St. Joseph Street, Colombo 14.

2. Bartleet Mallory Stockbrokers (Pvt) Ltd
Level “G “, “Bartleet House”, 65, Braybrooke Place, Colombo 2.

3. Acuity Stockbrokers (Pvt) Ltd.
Level 6, Acuity House, No. 53, Dharmapala Mawatha, Colombo 3.

4. John Keells Stockbrokers (Pvt) Ltd.
130, Glennie Street, Colombo 2.

5. Asha Phillip Securities Ltd.
Level 4, “Millennium House”, 46/58, Navam Mawatha, Colombo 2.

6. Assetline Securities (Pvt) Ltd.
3rd Floor, “Forbes & Walker Building”, 46/38, Navam Mawatha, Colombo 2.

7. Somerville Stockbrokers (Pvt) Ltd.
137, Vauxhall Street, Colombo 2.

8. Lanka Securities (Pvt) Ltd.
228/2, Galle Road, Colombo 04.

9. Asia Securities (Pvt) Ltd.
Level 21, West Tower, World Trade Centre, Echelon Square, Colombo 1.

10. Ceylinco Stockbrokers (Pvt) Ltd.
Ceylinco House, Level 9, 69, Janadhipathi Mawatha, Colombo 1.

11. Capital Trust Securities (Pvt) Ltd.
42, Mohamed Macan Markar Mawatha, Colombo 3.

12. S C Securities (Pvt) Ltd.
2nd Floor, 55 D.R. Wijewardena Mawatha, Colombo 10.

13. CT Smith Stockbrokers (Pvt) Ltd.
4-14, Majestic City, 10, Station Road, Colombo 4.

14. DNH Financial (Pvt.) Limited.
Level 16, West Tower, World Trade Center, Colombo 01.

15. NDB Stockbrokers (Pvt) Ltd.
5th Floor, NDB Building, 40, Navam Mawatha, Colombo 2.

I have been trading in the Sri Lankan stock market since 2004 and have associated with many brokering companies and investment advisors. Feel free to contact me if you need any background information on your selected broker company.

You can also contact me if you need any further information or if you have further questions regarding this article. I will try my best to send you a feedback in a timely manner. ( Within 36 hours depending on the question).

Happy Trading !!!

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eToro’s minimum initial investment is $50. Now you can open 20 different trades with your investment whereas you could only open two $25 trades before. This is indeed a good deal for small time retail forex traders. Traders can get a lot more market action for their money.

We have few articles throughout this site which covers the basics of forex trading. You can also visit my forex website for some more detailed explanations.

I hope you will get the best out of this deal made available to you by one of the best and most innovative forex brokers of the world.

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If your web site is taking forever to load, half of your visitors will leave the page without even having a glimpse of what you have to offer. No matter how hard we work on our content, it will just be a waste of energy as most visitors will not stick around till it get loaded.

I, myself am guilty of not having fast loading web pages and I started working on it recently. I decided to share something very useful I found during this process. It is Yahoo’s Yslow firefox Add-on.

YSlow analyzes web pages and recommends ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages.

Yahoo’s performance team has identified 34 rules that determines the performance of a web page. Yslow analyzes 22 of these 34 rules which are testable. They have discovered that a web page’s performance can be increased by up to 50% following these rules.

Yslow give points on how your web site is measured on each rule and gives an overall grade for the complete web page.

You can start optimizing your web pages according to the grades given. If you are not sure of how to follow a certain rule you can always search for the term and find valuable resources. I got an “F” grade ( worst) when I installed this yesterday and managed to move up a grade during the past 24 years.

Yslow comes with some other usable tools which will help you analyze your pages easily. For an example, All JS Minified tool collects all external and inline JavaScript and removes comments and white space to decrease the size of the scripts. You can replace your JavaScript with the minified version to improve performance of the web page.

If you click on All Smush.it tool, Smush.it will be run on all the image components on the page. This tool will tell you which images can be optimized and will create a zip file with the optimized images. Likewise there are number of tools and reports comes with this add-on which will make your life more easy as a web entrepreneur.

Download Yslow here. It comes with the best price tag. 100% FREE.

Create a blog like this and start earning money.

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I recently started running few adverting campaigns on facebook and I am very impressed with the conversions. This is contrary to the popular belief that “facebook ads do not convert”.

Facebook advertising is tricky as it does wonders with some niches and absolutely do nothing for the rest.

It would have been nice if we can test run our campaigns without jeopardizing our advertising budget. As I have mentioned in this blog before, you need to burn at least $50 before making any decent judgments on PPC campaigns.

Let’s Cut To The Chase

Thanks to the good people at Visa business network, you do not have to spend this test money out from your pocket. They are making a very generous offer by giving you $100 worth facebook advertising credit just for joining their network. Signing up is absolutely free and they are throwing in another $75 worth yahoo ad credits just to make your smile wider :-)

You can join the Visa Business Network here and get your free advertising credits. The coupon will not work until you enter a valid credit card to your facebook advertising account. And you must utilize this credit within 30 days.

Perform a statistical analysis on conversions and if they are good, run a full-throttle advertising campaign on facebook. You only have something to gain from this whole experiment. Good Luck.

Do not forget to read,
50 ways to make money blogging

Create a blog like this and start earning money.

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No matter how many times I have answered this question before and even after writing the ” How To Create a blog” series I still get this question from some of my readers, “How Do I Get My Own Website Onto The Web?”

Building your own web site might have been a nightmare few years ago but now it is as easy as 1-2-3-4….

Step 01: Register a domain name

Domain name is your identity on the web. For example this web site’s identity is “antharjalaya.com”. You need to use a domain registrar in order to purchase the domain name. It will typically cost you less than $10.

I would advise you to buy a “dot com” name instead of other extensions. Try adding a hyphen and seperate the words if your desired name is not available in dot com format.
i.e
If startforextrading.com is not available try registering start-forex-trading.com

If it is impossible to buy your domain name in the dot com format try dot org or dot net. If your target market is limited to a specific country buying a country specific domain is also advisable.

I have posted a complete step by step tutorial on how to buy a domain name in one of my earlier blog post. Read it here.

Step 02 : Create your web site.

Make sure you present your web site with a high level of quality, functionality, and professionalism. You can hire a web designer if you you do not have any previous experience. This is the most common approach adopted by many web entrepreneurs and this is the easiest way to get your web site up and running.

Hiring a web designer will cost you approximately $100- $1500 and higher price web designers are not always the best. So, have a very good look at their portfolio before making any upfront payment.

Designing your own web site can be a quite entertaining experience
if you are a quick learner.You need to learn little HTML but it is not difficult considering all the resources available online.

You can use a simple text editor to write your HTML pages, or you can utilize on of the many free HTML editors available on the web.

I use Adobe Dreamweaver software as it does all the HTML coding for me. But you are still required to learn the basics of HTML. If you know how to use MS word, it will not be difficult to use Dreamweaver.

Website templates.

One easy way to get your website design is to begin with a template. Website templates are Semi finished web pages that have been predesigned and assembled with all the graphics and necessary code needed to get a web site online quickly.

The above is an example for a fashion/ clothing template. You can just edit the text and make it your own web design.

There are many places on the web where you can buy templates, or get them for free. An important aspect of using a template is to utilize as much customization as possible. For a startup company, a template is a good way to save some money and focus on keeping up a positive cash flow.

Step 03: Choose a web hosting plan

In order for your website to be available to anyone at anytime, you need to host it with a web host. It is a web server leased to you by a web hosting company. Basically, web hosting provides a way for people to access your web site through the internet. Without it, there would be no way for people to see the page.

There are several thousand web hosting companies out there to choose from. It’s best to chose a web hosting company based on a recommendation. You need to look for following details before making this very important decision.

1. Reliability and speed of access
2. Bandwidth allocated to you.
3. Disk space given to you.
4. Their Technical support.
5. Availability of FTP, PHP, Perl, SSI, .htaccess, telnet, SSH, and MySQL.
6. Email, Autoresponders, POP3, Mail Forwarding.
7. Control Panel type.
8. Multiple Domain Hosting and Subdomains.
9. Price
10.Monthly/Quarterly/Annual Payment Plans.

I have posted a complete step by step tutorial on how to set up a hosting account in one of my earlier blog post. Read it here.

The following are the best web host companies I can recommend for you to use. I have done an in depth analysis of all these providers and they simply meet all the criterias of a good host.

Hostgator

This is what I use for all my web sites. I bought one unlimited plan and now I am hosting over dozen web sites with Hostgator without paying anything extra.

Special Features :
One click blog/ forum and other scripts installation.
Excellent support staff.
45 Day Money Back Guarantee.
Beautiful and professional web template gallery.
Starting at $4.95 a month.

Blue Host

They will give you a domain name for free and Unlimited domains can be hosted for no extra charge. Starting at $6.95 a month.

Fat Cow

They will provide a Free Domain name, Unlimited disk space, Unlimited bandwidth and Point & Click Site Building Tools.
Other than that they will fix you with $75 worth FREE advertising.
They do not have a monthly payment plan and their service will cost you $66 a year. ($ 10 off for our readers for a limited time and your cost will only be $56.)

PoWWEb

Free Domain name, Unlimited disk space, Unlimited bandwidth and Script Instant Installer starting at $4.88 a month.

Step 04 : Upload your site to the web.

There are 2 ways of uploading your web site files to Internet. The most common method is via FTP. FTP allows you to quickly transfer many files and I am using the FREE software “filezila” for this purpose.

Another method is to use the File Manager within your cPanel control panel, which has an upload feature which allows you to browse your computer and select the files you wish to upload.

Time will not stop and wait for you

If you have an idea for a web site , start acting on it today. Don’t wait till you learn everything. That will never happen. You cannot learn to swim by reading a guide book. This is the same.

I did not know anything about building web sites until I start building one. My first web site taught me everything I need to build and run a web site.

It will not cost you more than $15 to start. ( $10 for the domain name and $5 for the first month hosting.) Allocate one hour from your day and you will end up with a rewarding web site in 14 days.

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