FXCM Launches New Educational Video Site

US broker FXCM announced a new educational website for forex traders today. FXCM Digital Expo is separate from their existing DailyFX portal, and makes available over 40 videos recorded at FXCM’s Forex Trading Expo in Las Vegas.  Apart from simply viewing the videos on the new web site you can also download them free of charge using iTunes. The slides used during the original presentations can be downloaded too.

The headline categories on the home page are "Beginners", which includes introductory material on the usual suspects such as Fibonacci and Elliott Wave, along with an "Advanced" section. The headline act in here is "Advanced Elliott Wave" which I hastily skipped, but there is also mention of Trading System Design and APIs. Those two videos are in fact part of the "Automated Trading" section of the new site, and given my own interest in such matters I decided to have a good look through that section.

Whilst those videos don't go into a great deal of depth, they do seem to me to provide a newcomer to automated trading with some sound, albeit brief, advice. Here's my list of FXCM's automated trading bullet points that are worth thinking about:

• Develop a Portfolio of Trading Systems
• Build Trading Systems that fit your Trading Style
• Build Trading Systems that fit your Risk-Taking Profile
• Make your Trading Systems Simple, and Modular
• Avoid Over-Optimization or Curve Fitting
• Do Lots of Live-Testing and not just Backtesting
• Continuously Improve Your Trading Systems

So far so good, but the problem then is that when it comes down to actually doing all that and more in practice, the video advice on how to go about building a profitable portfolio of automated trading systems, and hence a successful trading business, seems to run out. In particular sound advice on how to go about optimization is sadly lacking. Maybe FXCM are working on an "Expert" series of videos, or maybe that sort of stuff is not best taught or learned through the medium of video? Nonetheless if you do like learning from videos, and those bullet points above don't sound like common sense to you at the moment, then it will be worth your while to go through that section of FXCM's new video site in some detail.