MIKE SER

This week, my team of trader specialists discuss the potential short term top in the markets. As well, we have a few traders share their trading success story with everyone. Hope you enjoy the webinar!

We discuss this week’s trading opportunities and also, we have a student share his day trading success story with everyone.

Some of you may know that I host a weekly 1 hour webinar on Saturday to go over trading ideas for the upcoming week with my top students. This is a paid service that I offer to all my existing students and I’ve decided to make this available (for the time being) to all my blog subscribers as well. These weekly sessions will give any newbie or experienced trader an idea of how we trade and look for trading ideas each week. Hope you enjoy the videos!

Now that we’re in the 3rd week of 2012, how many of you have already made new years resolutions and actually written them down? Come on… be honest. If you haven’t then I would suggest you allocate 30 minutes tomorrow and write them all down. Once you’ve done that, put beside each resolution or goal what you need to do every day to accomplish that and what will happen if you didn’t achieve those goals. Think about how much pain you would have if you didn’t put an effort towards it. This will help motivate you to avoid this pain. As well, put a time deadline on when you need to have that goal accomplished. Lastly, the most important thing is to make sure you review your goals every day. Often times you write down your master plan on what you want to achieve and then you forget about it. This happens with so many people and this is the biggest reason why people never achieve their goals. There are 4 questions that you need to answer to yourself every day:

WHAT goals do you want to achieve this year?

WHY do you want to achieve these goals?

HOW are you going to achieve them?

WHEN do you want to achieve your goals by?

Once you answer these 4 questions, you’re on your way to accomplishing every goal that you set your mind to. Good luck!

I hope everyone had an amazing 2011 and look forward to another wonderful year in 2012. 2011 had been one of the most exciting and rewarding times for me. I have helped many people leave their day jobs behind for good to become full time traders, developed an amazing online trader community, launched several successful training programs, and cultivated many long lasting friendships.

Also, I’m sure you heard me talk so proudly of Andy Man who became my first Millionaire Student, turning $1,600 into almost $2 million in 2011. What an incredible accomplishment!

It just makes my year having success stories like Andy and others whom I’ve mentored and seen them grow as traders. To know that I had such an impact on other people’s lives makes me feel energized and inspired to keep doing what I love. It’s like a father seeing his child grow up and become successful at whatever he/she focuses on.

In 2012, I’m on a mission to continue mentoring and developing many more millionaire students. Please keep checking my blog for daily posts on my insights about the markets.

Many of you who have been following my blog for a long time have heard me speak very highly of one of my most successful students, Andy Man. He was one of my students who I trained back in early 2007 and when I first met him, he knew nothing about the stock market but was determined to know everything about it. He was a very good student in the sense that he followed exactly what I told him to do and tried not to break any trading rules. At first, he struggled to make sense of what markets he should trade as we were deeply focused on high flying technology stocks that were so profitable at that time. However, over time we worked together and he decided to focus exclusively on the precious metals sector, specifically Gold and Silver. In fact, as the financial crisis was in full force in 2008-2009, it seemed like the only sector that was going up was Gold and Andy took advantage of the opportunities that appeared. As well, since the Gold and Silver Market traded 24 hours, this schedule fit him perfectly since he didn’t want to quit his job. One thing I do know about Andy is he’s very passionate about trading and he put in the hard work to really learn how to trade well. Most people give up on trading too early because they feel it’s too difficult or they don’t believe they can succeed. Trading wasn’t always profitable for Andy and he shared with me many obstacles that he faced. One conversation we had before was when he told me that if he wasn’t making money in the markets then he’ll keep trying until he did. That told me that he had the desire to succeed and that one day, he will succeed.

Just only a month and half ago, Andy told me that he turned $1,600 into $1.4 million while trading silver starting in may of this year. A phenomenal achievement! I told him that he should share his trading success with everyone, just like how I shared my knowledge and experiences with him just under 5 years ago. This is how we came up with the Part Time Gold Trader training program. For more information, please click on the link below for details.

Andy Man’s Part Time Gold Trader Program

We wish you much trading success!

The price of gold has risen sharply in the past 5-10 years and it has attracted a lot of interest from investors. In fact, just a few months ago, the price of gold had risen to an all time high of over $1900 an once and many believe that it will continue going much higher in the next few years. It was not long ago when the price of gold was only $300 an ounce in 2002.

Why has gold risen so sharply in the past few years? One reason is gold is only at a record high in US dollar terms because of the sharp fall in the US currency. The US government has been printing a lot of money to try to revive the US economy and it has led to paper money becoming more and more worthless. Therefore, the gold price has been rising because you can not print gold. As well, both China and Russia are now greatly increasing their gold purchases and disposing of their US dollars as fast as they can. In general, the gold price tends to rise when the US dollar falls.

As well, gold is considered a safe haven in times of political as well as economic turmoil. We have seen gold rise sharply after events such as the 911 attacks and most recently, during the financial crisis.

Lastly, gold is becoming a rare commodity and harder to find these days. Gold miners are  not discovering rich veins of gold today like they used to and nowadays hope to find mere flecks of gold. As well, not many new gold mines have come into production in recent years. With the absence of big new discoveries, demand for gold continues to grow, as does its price.

So how do investors take advantage of rising gold prices and profit from it? There are several ways to invest in gold. One way is to buy physical gold bullion or gold coins that you can store in the bank vault. The benefit of owning physical gold is you can physically hold your investment even if the world’s banking system collapses.

Another way is to buy an exchange traded fund (ETF) that is listed on the stock exchange and invests only in physical gold. It tracks the price of gold based on the spot price and doesn’t require you to physically store gold. You can buy this ETF like a stock and the symbol is GLD.

Other investors prefer to buy gold company shares because you can make more money when the price of gold rises. For example, if the gold price rises 100 per cent, most gold company shares can probably rise 200-300 per cent and some junior gold mining company can rise 400 per cent or more. The reason is gold stocks amplifies a gold price rise because the company’s profitability can rise at three times or more the rise in the gold price.

Whichever way you decide to invest in gold, you can benefit from the rise in the price of gold for many years to come.

                           CFD’s have become one of the world’s most popular and profitable trading products for active traders in the past 10 years. Why? Because CFDs provide easy access to trading stock markets all around the world, more leverage, more control, and also a very cost effective way to trade.

A contract for difference or commonly referred to as CFD is a contract between two parties, a buyer and seller to exchange the difference between the opening and closing price of a share. CFD’s are very easy to understand and trade. In fact, it is exactly like trading shares but the main difference is the trader doesn’t own the shares. CFD trading allows traders to purchase the right to buy or sell shares in a given stock at a certain price for a pre-determined period of time.

There are many benefits of trading CFD’s instead of trading regular stocks. The main benefit of trading CFDs is the easily available access to leverage. Leverage means that you only need to deposit a percentage of the value of a stock position to secure the trade which gives you the opportunity to diversify your portfolio by freeing up more capital for other trades or to boost your profits. CFD’s use the power of leverage to trade and typically needs an initial margin of 15% of the total value of the trade to enter the position.

Also, CFD’s allow you to be able to easily trade any stock market around the world including the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong and other European countries. However, CFDs are not permitted in the United States, due to restrictions by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Also, CFD’s provides a convenient way for traders to profit from a falling stock market where trading ordinary shares may not. The concept is called selling short which means you borrow shares of a stock and sell it in the expectation that you can buy back the shares at a lower price. The trader hopes to profit from a decline in the price of the stock between the sale and the repurchase, as the trader will pay less to buy the stock than he received on selling them. With CFD’s, you don’t have to worry about borrowing stock and with a simple click of the sell button, you can easily make money when the stock market goes down.

Lastly, there is a disadvantage of trading CFD’s which you need to be aware of. One thing you need to be careful is playing with too much leverage. Leverage can help you make a lot of money but it can also cause you to lose all of your capital if you are not careful. As well, there are interest charges on the leveraged capital that you are borrowing from the brokerage firm. If you hold a stock for a long period of time, you can pay a lot of interest.

There is a Canadian company located in Toronto called Tradestone Markets that offers CFD trading. You can go to their website at www.TradeStoneMarkets.com

If you are a trader who wants to make lots of money in the stock market, you should consider CFD’s as a tool for you to achieve your goal.

Recently, I’ve gotten lots of emails from my loyal readers asking me what kind of trader workstation do I have set up in my trading office. So what I did is take a picture of my computer setup.

I am not even going to go into details about the technical specifications of my computer because I don’t really understand what all the mumbo jumbo tech stuff means. All I know is I just got a very powerful desktop computer that is mainly designed for gaming purposes. It has a very fast and powerful processor that is capable of handling up to 8 monitors at once. You can see that I only have 4 monitors (2 vertically placed 21.5 LCD Monitors and 2 19″ lcd monitors) for now. But 8 is a pretty lucky in Chinese so maybe I should add more soon. No…. I don’t have a monitor fetish. It’s just a trader thing…. Anyhow, I would suggest that if you’re day trading to get the widescreen LCD Monitors that allow you to place the monitor in Portrait format. It allows you to see the charts so much better.

Also, you can see that I keep my trading desk very simple and organized. You want to feel that you have a clear and uncluttered mind while you’re trading. Lastly, I do suggest that you only use a wired keyboard or mouse instead of wireless. You never know when you’re in the middle of a trade and your batteries or your wireless connection dies.

We’ve all read and heard the marketing pitches of how you can be wealthy beyond your wildest dreams and become a millionaire trading the stock market. For some people, it’s a dream but for one of my students, Andy, it is a reality.You may remember me talking about him in May of this year when he turned $1,500 into $300,000 in 2 weeks. Well, he informed me a few weeks ago that he became a millionaire. How? Andy continued to produce amazing results turning that $1,657 into $1.4 million dollars!!! Yes… that is 6 zeros after the number and an astronomical 100,000% return in 5 months. No there is no typo. He did that in 5 months from May til Sept 2011. You’re probably still asking “How did he do that?” Well, that is truly a million dollar question. Andy started trading just 3-4 years ago and decided to develop his expertise in the precious metals sector. He profited from trading gold and silver, and the amazing thing is he profited mainly from the price of gold/silver dropping. The concept is called short selling. I’ll share more of his strategies, methodology and mindset throughout my blog in future posts but what I wanted to let all of you know is you can be a millionaire from trading. It’s not a distance dream like winning the lottery but a reality, if you wish to make trading a success.