IRS Link to Publication — Found Here Publication 463 discusses common business-related deductions such as travel, entertainment, gift, and vehicle expenses. The guide is meant to explain which expenses are deductible, how to report them, how to prove them, and what to do if you get reimbursed. Business expenses are commonly paid for out-of-pocket by employees and business owners, and many of them are unsure exactly which expenses are tax-deductible. Continue reading...
Credit card companies and banks generally charge an additional percentage for all purchases made with a card in a foreign country. If you’re traveling abroad, you may want to find another way to pay. Most credit card companies and bank debit cards will charge an additional percentage on transactions made abroad, to help them pay the cost of clearing the transaction with international institutions. This is sometimes called a currency conversion fee. Continue reading...
Tickeron’s Trader Clubs is a great opportunity to be a part of a community, interact with fellow traders, exchange ideas, and compare your skills. These clubs also help create an audience if you want to monetize your skills in the future. To access from the menu bar, simply click on the marketplace and then select Trader Clubs. Here in Trader’s club, you have two options You can start your own club or join any club that suits your trading or investing plan. Continue reading...
An ‘expiration date’ refers to the time when an option contract must either be acted upon by the owner (buying or selling the security in question) or left to expire. With derivatives such as options and futures, there will be an expiry, or expiration date in the contract, after which they expire worthlessly. Most options contracts will expire in 3, 6 or 9 months from when they are generated, and they all share the same expiration day of the month on their contracts in the United States, which is the 3rd Friday of the month at 4 PM. Continue reading...
Tickeron's Paper Trades are the best way to start trading on paper without losing money. Paper Trades can be used as a testing environment for ideas generated using other products. You can review your gains or losses and adjust your trading style, risk-free. Paper Trades are available for 4,000 stocks, 1,000 ETFs, 30,000 mutual funds, 500 cryptocurrencies, and 100 Forex pairs. From any Tickeron, product page, click the Paper Trades button to extract your trade ideas and test them using Paper Trades. The system will run a record of the securities you want to buy and sell, and will generate the modeled outcome. The more Paper Trades you make, the more statistics Tickeron will generate for you to determine your trading style and preferences. Continue reading...
Simply put, insider trading is the crime of trading in a company’s stock based on information not available to the general public. According to the efficient market theory, any publicly available information is immediately "priced-in" to a stock, so any article you might find in a news publication is not going to give you a competitive advantage for a stock's future price movements. Insider trading tips give an unfair advantage to the holder of the information, since the market has not had a chance to react to it yet. Of course, insider trading is illegal and several notorious cases have been well-publicized, like that of Martha Stewart. She was jailed. Continue reading...
Accommodation Trading is when two traders enter into a non-competitive trade agreement which disregards the current market price for the securities being traded. The primary reason to engage in accommodation trading is for an investor to avoid taxes by harvesting more losses than actually occurred. One investor will buy shares from another investor for a price significantly below the market value so that the selling investor can report more losses. The partners will typically agree to allow the selling party to buy the shares back later at the same price. Continue reading...
Active trading is the pursuit of returns in excess of market benchmarks. Investors are advised to have a diverse portfolio, to hedge against the risk of seeing future financial plans devastated due to significant losses in one holding. When attempting to diversify, investors will hear from the increasingly popular camp which believes that the best strategy is to use only passive index funds, which follow indexes using computer algorithms and have low expense ratios. Continue reading...
Relative Strength Index (RSI) is a momentum oscillator developed by Welles Wilder. In the RSI, the average gains and average losses over a specific time period (such as 14 days) are divided to calculate the Relative Strength, then normalized into the Relative Strength Index (RSI), which is range bound between 0 and 100. The RSI typically fluctuates between values of 70 and 30, with higher numbers indicating more momentum. According to this indicator, a security with an RSI over 70 (out of 100) can be considered overbought, while a security with an RSI under 30 (out of 100) can be considered oversold. Continue reading...
Trading models are emotionless systems for decision-making in trading that can be automated or just used for reference. They tend to have logical parameters, such as “if x, then y” which can use popular trading indicators to implement a strategy that might only be used in certain conditions. Trading models are strategies employed with a specific design. Different trading models will use different technical indicators or types of charts to define and search for certain conditions in which a strategy can be used. Once the conditions are met, the model provides the decision-making logic that is intended to carry out a profitable trade without guesswork or emotion. Continue reading...
Intraday trading means opening and closing a position, or buying and selling (or short-selling and covering) a security within the same trading day. Intraday traders are active during market hours, buying, selling, shorting, and so forth, to capitalize on the movements of the markets during the day, and they primarily trade positions which are opened and closed during the same day. Intraday traders use technical indicators to find inefficiencies or price fluctuations that they believe will correct. Continue reading...
Swing trading is active trading that is not frequent enough to be categorized as day-trading but generally follows short-term trends. Swing trading can describe long or short positions traded on upswings and downswings of a security or index, and these positions are generally held from one day to two weeks. Generally, these are going to be momentum investments which are entered into after there seems to be confirmation of a trend, and the positions are closed out when there seems to be confirmation that the trend has ended. Continue reading...
Moving average envelopes and trading bands help traders filter their decisions to trade. These tools set thresholds on the amount of movement above and below a moving average to trigger a decision to trade (or at least prompt further consideration by the trader). A moving average envelope often takes a moving average line for a security or index and duplicates it, moving one line a certain percentage above and one a certain percentage below (the distance may depend on volatility levels). Price fluctuations in a security then might trigger a decision to sell when the price hits the upper band, or a decision buy when the price hits the lower band. If it crosses the bands it might be seen as a new trend. Continue reading...
Technical analysis is a method of evaluating the worth and probable future direction of security prices using charts and data concerning prices and volume. This is the counterpart to fundamental analysis, which looks at the physical operations of a company and their place in the market to determine value. Those who practice technical analysis are sometimes called “quants” or chartists because they believe that the most important information about a security will be found in the data on the price, volume, and the moving averages and volatility associated with them. Continue reading...
Day traders, by definition, trade on a very short-term time frame, seeking to generate profits by opening and closing positions hour-by-hour and having the majority of their positions closed by the end of the day. Short-term profits and income are the goals with most day-traders, and the term is used more and more for “amateur” traders who trade from home and treat it as their primary occupation without being part of a brokerage firm. Day trading has become more and more prevalent for independent, non-affiliated investors who trade from their computers at home for hours a day. Continue reading...
If you buy and sell securities, you may qualify for tax status as a ‘trader,’ which importantly may qualify you for certain business tax breaks. The rules governing this status can be confusing, however, making it difficult to determine whether you qualify as a trader, investor, or dealer. Let’s take a closer look at the qualifications for traders as defined by the IRS, as well as how to report income and expenses if qualified. Continue reading...
Bollinger Bands were developed by famous trader John Bollinger as a technical analysis tool to discern the likely trading range of a security. A Bollinger Band is typically two standard deviations from a moving average line, both above and below the average. Standard deviation is another word for the average volatility of a price over a length of time. It is typical for a trader looking up the historical price chart for a security to compare it to a moving average line. Continue reading...
The Accumulation/Distribution Indicator (originally called the Cumulative Money Flow Line) tracks cash flow into or out of a security and correlates the cash flow changes to changes in the security price. By following the trading volume into or out of a security, it establishes the degree of correlation between this trading volume and the price of the security. Accumulation/distribution is designed to reveal divergences in price trends (specifically between stock price and trading volume). These divergences indicate the degree to which a security may be overbought or oversold at a given time. Continue reading...
On-Balance Volume (OBV) is a popular leading indicator introduced in the 1960s by Joe Granville. OBV is a line built using differences between daily trading volume – in Granville’s estimation, the major driver of market behavior – adding the difference on days that the market or stock moves up and subtracting the difference on days when the market or stock moves down. It looks for instances of rising volume that should correlate with price movement, but price movement has not occurred; additionally, OBV can be used to confirm lag. Continue reading...
A momentum indicator allows for a quick comparison of a security’s current price relative to its past prices using a flexible time period, allowing traders to decide the parameters. The formula to calculate momentum is M = V – Vx (where V is the current price and Vx is the closing price from x number of days ago). A current price in excess of past price is a positive momentum indicator; a lower current price represents negative momentum. Continue reading...