What to Do With Your Weekends

How to Spend Your Weekends

The best traders don’t take weekends off. Yes, most markets are not active, but this doesn’t mean nothing happens during these two days. Currency markets are always active during these times, and the executives of companies are still making decisions and announcements that will affect stock prices and the indices that carry them. And the farmers, miners, weather conditions, and everything else that affects the prices of commodities are still active. And for these reasons, you need to be paying attention to them. What they do will impact where prices go Monday morning, and when every other professional in the industry is prepared and you are not, you’ll be left behind.

You don’t need to do a ton of research, but you do need to be aware of major issues. Did IBM announce a merger with another company? Is there a shortage of workers in Australia to extract gold from their mines, and decreasing availability? What about currencies? Is the Bank of Japan making a major move that will bump up the yen and drive down other major currencies? There are tons of these little questions to think about, and if something worthwhile does happen, you need to be able to evaluate the type of impact that it will have and then be prepared to act. This means making sure your trading accounts are where they’re supposed to be, that you have the proper news coming to you, and that you are able to evaluate everything in a non-biased manner so that you can not only act, but act in the correct way.

What’s the best way to do this? Simplifying things is going to save you time and energy. It might take some time to set these things up, such as condensing your news to a single reading source by having things stream live to your desktop. It could involve having an alert system automatically linked to your phone so that you get texts when something happens. This allows you to be on the go and get on with the things you need to do, all while being informed on current events that affect you financially. Having a smartphone with a mobile trading app can help a lot in these instances, too. You obviously won’t be able to reference things as quickly from a phone, but with a data connection, you can still make trades if you have the info you need to act and you’ve done all of the prep work beforehand.

One of the easiest ways to consolidate your trading is through binary options. Here, you can trade stocks, indices, commodities, and Forex pairs all from the same broker, all from a single account. It cuts down on the amount of money you need to have in the market, and it places all of your data on a single site. It’s a very easy way to keep tabs on the markets, too, since many binary brokers now provide you with educational resources and updates/commentary on what certain markets are doing. It’s not always the most in depth information, but it’s a perfect supplement to what you already know if you happen to be away from your computer for a bit.

Setting things up like this should not be done during your normal trading hours. Yes, this is work related, but if you do it when you should be monitoring the Dow, for example, you put yourself at risk of missing out on opportunities to make money. There are 24 hours in the day, and seven days in the week, and not all of them are dedicated to directly trading. Using the weekends to take care of catching up on news, setting things up on the technical side, and evaluating new broker opportunities is a great way to give yourself an extra edge.