The following is a good artical about the stop loss setting, and I want to share with you.

Decide How Tightly To Set Your Stop Loss Order
Provided By Ultimate Trading Systems
Several Considerations For Setting Your Stop Loss Order

The most important question about setting your stop loss order is how tightly you should set them - how close to the price where you entered the position or, for a trailing stop loss order, how close to the current price. This is a general decision you’ll make before you figure out exactly what price will be your stop trigger. How tightly to set a stop loss order depends on several factors:

* How much you’re willing to lose on a single trade. Our rule is that you should never lose more than 2 percent of your trading capital on any one trade.

* How risky you believe the trade is. If you think the trade is a sure winner and market conditions are favorable, you may give the position more room to move down before triggering a stop loss order. If you think it’s got only a fair chance of working out, or if the position has serious potential to drop, set a tight stop loss order, or don’t make the trade at all.

* How volatile the position is. If the position routinely moves up and down in a range of 15 percent or more over the course of the day, even when it’s not really going anywhere definite, you can’t set a tight stop loss order. If you do, you’ll be taken out of the position by the position’s normal volatility. If the position is choppy but too risky to trade without a tight stop loss order, maybe you’d better look for a better position to trade.

* How cheap the position is. When a position is inexpensive, even the smallest decimal price movement will be fairly large in percentage terms. This means a tight stop loss order may be knocked out more easily. It also means that if your broker has a rule that you can’t set a stop loss order closer than .25 below the current bid, you may not be able to set a tight stop loss order until the price moves up.

* How much money you have in the position. You should consider this in conjunction with the rule that you should never lose more than 2 percent of your capital on any one trade. If you have a large amount of money in a position, 2 percent may be much more than you’re willing to lose. If so, you should set your stop loss order accordingly. If your account is small and you’re not well diversified, a 2 percent stop loss order may be so tight that you may stop out immediately. If this is the case, you should think seriously about whether you have enough money to trade.

* Market conditions - If the market is trending sharply upwards, a tight stop loss order may not be necessary. If you’re trying to go long in a bearish market, a tight stop loss order is absolutely necessary. If the market is choppy - if it has no clear direction or if it’s full of nervousness and fear - use a tight stop loss order, and ask yourself whether you should be trading at all that day.

* The time frame for the trade - On a quick day trade, a tight stop loss order is a good idea. On a position you expect to hold for a week or two for a trend play, a tight stop loss order may or may not be a good idea depending on other factors you’re aware of.

* If you have reason to be confident that the position will move upward even if it swings around a bit first, it doesn’t make sense to set a tight stop loss order because you’ll just stop out as it swings. If you think it might possibly move up but will definitely drop if it slips below a certain price, then a tight stop loss order is a must.

Which of these considerations is most important? Since no two trades are the same, different factors will dominate on different trades. Think about all of them on every trade. If you don’t, you’ll miss something important.

Your job is to exercise good trading judgment and figure out what makes sense for each trade. This is where the “art” of setting a stop loss order comes in.

Posting frequency:
Posting frequency is rather high, about 10-15 new messages and 3-4 new threads appear every day (except for holiday time).
The forum has 1,235 threads and 2,316 posts. These figures are rather strange, because the number of thread is enormous, but the number of posts is rather small in comparison with threads.

Users:

There are 2,074 registered users on the forum. About 1/3 of this users is active.
The forum has very useful statistics on the right of the front page. Visitors may learn about the most active users, the newest user, new threads and posts, the title of a thread with the most posts and so forth. Amazingly, there is nothing about the most users ever online.

Moderation:

It is impossible to tell anything about moderators, because their nicknames are not mentioned anywhere. But they might exist, because someone is definitely moderating the forum – there is practically no spam (and no premoderation). Becides, online users are divided into “users and moderators”.

Structure:

The forumsections and subsections. They are “ForexForum.NET - The Worlds leading Forex Forum”: “Current Market Sentiment and daily forex trade recommendation”, “EUR USD, GBP USD, USD CHF” (Technical Analysis, Forecast Theories, Economic / Political Discussions), “Other Currencies” (Cross Currencies, CHF/JPY, EUR/JPY, EUR/GBP, CAD, AUD, ZAR and other currencies), “Financial Associations” (Non Profit Associations / Discussions), “FX Articles” (Technical Analysis, Forecast Theories, Economic / Political Discussions), “Forex Forecast” (Forecast theories, Technical Forecast, Forecast software). Then comes “Forex Industry Discussions” with “General Topics” (General Forex Industry Discussions, Other forex related posts), Tips, “Online Training Institutes and discussions” (Online training, Caurses, Websites and software helping with forextraining), “Events” (Upcoming forex events), Software, “Corporate Services” (Fund management, Hedge Funds, Other Financial Institudes and usefull services). Next comes “Forex General Discussions with “Forex Consulting” (Accounting, Legal Services and other services), “Forex News” (General News, Discussions), “Forex Postitions / Recruitment” (Positions, jobs and Forex Contracts, Traders) and “Other” with “Technical” and “Chat - General”.

Advantages:
The forum is active.
The structure is rather smart.

copied from: http://www.forum-ratings.com/forexforum/

Yesterday, I found the GBP is keeping decreasing, so I shorted GBP/USD. The buy in price is at 1.4768, and I set take profit at 1.4550, and stop loss at 1.4900. After about half day, it gave me 218 pips profit. Of course, it is only 2.18 USDs because of my trade size, but it is still a good start, isn’t it?

The trend is your friend
In up-trends, buy the dips; in downtrends, sell bounces

 Marketiva is famous for its free 5 USDs register bonus, so it became my second forex trading account.

I found it was very slow for IE to open Marketiva website, and I tried Firefox to open it, and it was much faster. After filled the personal information in the first page, and it asked me to input a coupon code in the second page. I did not have one, and I was not sure if I can get free 5 USDs bonus without the code, or if I can get more with the code, so I searched in the Internet, and managed to find one.

After registration, I get 5 USDs real money, and 20000 USDs fake money. You can try its trading software with the fake money. Clients need to download a software called streamster to do the trading, which means you can not do the trading at a computer without this software.

After installed the software, I found with marketiva, you can trade forex, funding, indexes, and commodities. It is quite interesting. However, when I checked its deposit option, and withdraw charge, I think I will not deposit any money on it. They only accept four deposit options: Wire transfer, webmoney, liberty reserve, and e-dinar. Also, the minimum withdraw charge is 7 USDs. So you can not withdraw your free 5 USDs.

Summary: easy to open an account, no document required, and 5 USDs free money. However, trading software is needed, and the deposit option is not convenient.

Total score: 7 out of 10

Before the end of 2008, Easy-Forex provided an special offer: get 20% of rebate of the first deposit if you open an account with them. So I opened my account before that and have got the rebate.

Open an account with Easy-Forex is easy. It only took me about 5 minutes to do that. During the registration, you do not need deposit. But if you want to trade right after register, you can deposit with your credit card. You also can deposit your money with Paypal, but it will take a couple of days. I deposited 250 USDs with my credit card.

After openned an accout, one of the easy-forex account service manager contactted me with e-mail first, and ask me to send some document ID to verify my account. They also gave me a call and asked me if I need a free training. I said no. Maybe I should say Yes, and can report how is their free training.

Before verify your account, you has a limit of deposit. Normally, it is a few hundreds USDs. To verify your account, you need send them a scanned copy  your ID (passport or driving license, etc.), a bill with your address, and your credit card (they will suggest you to hide some digits, they only want to see your name).

After verified my account, I received my rebate, 50 USDs. Now there are 300 USDs in my account now.

Summary: It is easy and quick to open an account, make deposit, and start to trading (in 5 minutes!). However, you need to verify your account before you want to withdraw money.
Total score: 9 out of 10

Note: The money will be paid by PayPal, if you do not have an PayPal account, please open one. It is free and very useful.

I found the forex market is a quite interesting investment area, high payback but also with high risks. As it said in one forex platform website, “Please note that Forex trading (OTC Trading) involves substantial risk of loss, and may not be suitable for everyone.” I want to have a try in 2009, and hopefully, I will find out if I am suitable for this game.

There are so many forex trading platforms in the market now,and I really do not know which one I should use. There are also lots of reviews about forex platforms, but after read some of them, I am still now sure which one is better. Some of those reviews are paid reviews, and I do not think they are fair enough.

So here is my plan in 2009. I will try to open account with some of major forex platform, and write down my experience with them. For example, is it easy to open an account and withdraw money (most important for most investors), how is the customer support, and how is the trading platform, etc. They will be independent reviews, and hope they will be helpful for all of the visitors.

Accounts have been openned so far:

From my point of view, GBP is the weakest currency among the main currencies in 2008. In the end of 2008, GBP reaches it’s record low to almost all main currencies.

Let’s have a look. At the beginning of 2008, the exchange rate of GBP to main currencies were:
GBP/USD=2.0040
EUR/GBP = 0.7364
GBP/AUD=2.2534
GBP/JPY = 216.55
GBP/CNY = 14.50

In the end of 2008, they are:
GBP/USD = 1.4426, devaluation 28.0%
EUR/GBP = 0.9760, devaluation 24.5%
GBP/AUD = 2.0870, devaluation 7.4%
GBP/JPY = 130.20, devaluation 39.9%
GBP/CNY = 9.97, devaluation 31.2%

I can not calculate the average devaluation of GBP in 2008, but the estimation will be about 30%!

Although the price in UK does not change a lot, I still feel I lost 30% of my savings, and my salary decreased 30% (because I always convert them to Chinese Yuan (CNY))! If I could estimate the exchange rate change of GBP at the beginning of 2008, I would change all of my savings to USD, JPY or CNY. How much I could save!

2008 has gone, and what will happen in 2009?

He started his English blog from August 2007, and he try to translate some of his Chinese blogs to English. I found an useful blog from there. It is about the security of WordPress, and I will summarize it here.

1. Upgrade Wordpress to latest version.

2. Hide the WordPress Version by change the tag in the header.php

3. Create a new administrator username - Every hacker knows Wordpress has a user “admin” with god-like administration privileges.

4. Create a complicated password

5. Prevent Directory Listing

6. Protect Your WP-Admin Folder

7. Protect From Search Engines

8. Install Login Lockdown WordPress Plugin - This plugin records the IP address and timestamp of every failed WordPress login attempt.

9. Install WordPress Database Backup Plugin.

10. Install Wordpress Security Scan Plugin.

For the orginal English version, please visit Moonlight’s blog: http://www.moon-blog.com/2008/11/top-ten-wordpress-security-tips.html

They replied to me soon, and told me how I can get those credits. They sent me two links for Yahoo and Miva. By clicking these two links, I can get my credits quite easily (need deposit 5 USDs to get 50 USDs Miva credit). However, for google credit, it is not “free” actually. I have to deposit non-refundable $5 first, and then I can get 25$ credit.

I still do not know how to use those credits now. If you know, please let me know.