Tutorial Forex PDF Formatted

Tutorial Forex PDF Formatted

How To Manage Your Executive Resume

If you’re an executive, your resume can be a marketing vehicle of immense consequence, but only if it’s managed effectively. That means it must convey your career story accurately and compellingly, and must be delivered into the right headhunter’s hands at the right time.
But don’t be alarmed if it’s been a while since you last updated your resume. Whether you’ve already taken a headhunter’s call(BusinessWeek, 09/13/2007) or are hoping to be referred to one, what matters is that you have an accurate record of your employment history and professional accomplishments from which to create your new resume. (Of course, that requires that you to do some record-keeping along the way so you can put together a resume fairly easily and quickly when called upon to do so.)

Before you start writing (if you’re lucky, an enterprising headhunter has offered to write it for you and merely wants you to answer his questions), think about what you’re trying to achieve. Where exactly do you want to go next? What kind of senior-management position will most effectively leverage your education, experience, skills, and leadership abilities? And what do you believe you’re really capable of doing?

Be Straightforward and Honest

Once you’ve answered these and other end-game questions to your own satisfaction, you can begin to craft a compelling resume that communicates your experience and smarts in a way that may appeal to the executive headhunter.

Having a good grasp of the general direction you’d like to see your career move in is essential, not only to help identify the recruiter(s) who might plug you into the best opportunities but also to differentiate yours from the dozens of resume your target headhunter(s) already has on hand. The best way to identify those targets is to ask trusted friends, colleagues, and other confidants who may have already built relationships with key headhunters or who may know the most influential among them.

Despite your considerable accomplishments and the insertion of some catchy action words to highlight results that you’ve helped deliver, your new resume may strike you as being rather homogenous. Don’t worry if that’s the case. Even the most polished, professional resume can’t convey the full fabric and substance of your leadership experience. What it can and should do is package your unique story in a way that is easy to read, appealing in tone, and truly reflects what you’ve already done. At this stage of your interaction with a headhunter it’s most important to prepare a straightforward, honest, and chronological retelling of where you’ve been, what you’ve done, and how you see your new career objective.

You want to make it easy for the reader to single out your most critical experiences and responsibilities in a way that mirrors and reinforces the two or three key elevator speech messages that you — or someone you know — used to get the headhunter’s attention. Here are some tips to make your resume and cover letter as appealing as possible:

COVER LETTER: This is the audition that will determine whether the headhunter adds your name either to a short-list of leading candidates for a current or future search or decides not to take the relationship further. Points awarded for clarity and brevity. It should never exceed one page. Be sure to accommodate ample white space as opposed to cramming too much text into your cover letter.

RSUM: Put your experience first, in reverse chronological order so the headhunter can easily reconstruct your most recent career moves and understand the choices that guided your ascent into senior management.

– Focus on the results you’ve delivered. But don’t stretch or oversell. Keep it accurate and honest, or pay the consequences at a later date.

– Keep it to two pages in Microsoft (NasdaqGS:MSFT – News) Word or Adobe Acrobat PDF format.

– Avoid the temptation to distribute your new executive resume to a broader audience than the headhunter who is now courting you as a candidate. Don’t post your executive resume on a public Web site or database. Once it’s out there, you lose control over it. Even though many of the sites and databases have safeguards against your current employer seeing your resume, information spreads fast in today’s networked world.

– Do not send it unsolicited to other headhunters. If you’re lucky, anyone you send it to unsolicited won’t even read it. But if they do, you’ve risked exposing yourself as an active job seeker, one who will be assumed, perhaps unfairly, to be in some kind of career peril.

Your resume is your calling card, your first impression. Take care that it makes a positive first impression thanks to attention to detail, an honest and straightforward accounting of your experience, careful handling, and a measure of discretion with regard to message, style, and audience.

Thriving Careers Start Earlier Than You Think

Parents, how many studies do you need to read about how little good grades matter before you stop overloading your kids with homework?

Time magazine reports that homework is wasting kids’ time on a number of levels, and in his book “The Homework Myth,” Alfie Kohn rails against the massive amount of family time that’s lost to homework. Finally, Harris Cooper, who studies homework at Duke University, found that too much of it can be counter-productive to learning.

Ambition, self-confidence, and goal-setting are better indicators of adult-life success than doing well in school. So instead of harping on homework and test scores and insipid parental competitions over childhood metrics, help your children learn the skills that really make a difference in their future success or failure:

1. Teach your kids to persevere.

Persistence is what gets us what we want in life, and persistence without the risk of failure is not persistence — it’s monotony.

Some people think persistence is perfection, but perfection isn’t rewarded in the workplace — it’s penalized. So don’t teach your children to be perfect, teach them to try things that are very hard and not likely to go well. Then watch them overcome their fear of failure and try anyway.

You know that parental instinct to tell your kids everything will be all right, and that failure isn’t really failure? It’s not realistic, because persistence is moving forward even when you recognize that the odds are bad. So teach your kids to recognize bad odds, and help them move forward regardless.

2. Teach your kids to make decisions without doing all the research.

We all know we need goals, but most adults are hindered by their inability to commit to something big and meaningful. After all, how do you know what’s best for you to be doing at any given time? You don’t. We never know what’s best for us, because we’re limited in our knowledge. But we have to take action anyway.

Teaching your child to set a goal — even if it’s not perfect — is a great tool, because making a decision with imperfect information is a key to adult life. You can’t teach a kid to shoot for perfect decisions, because there aren’t any. But you can teach your child how to take action in the face of the unknown.

(One of my favorite discussions about this sort of decision-making is on the blog Mind Your Decisions by Presh Talwalker, who writes a feature called “Game Theory Tuesdays.” Game theory helps people make better choices in situations of “interactive decision-making” — that is, in situations where each person’s action affects the outcome for the whole group.)

3. Make yourself a positive thinker so you can teach it to your kids.

The biggest indicator of how happy someone is in adult life is how positive their outlook is. Adults can change their outlook with practice, and parents can help their children learn and practice positive thinking.

You can start by training yourself to talk to your children in terms of the good things they do. In his upcoming book “The Kazdin Method for Parenting the Defiant Child,” Yale psychologist Alan Kazdin helps parents focus on the positives in their children’s behavior instead of the negatives. If you always focus on the bad behavior instead of the good behavior, your child will learn to do that for herself. Kazdin advises, for example, to say, “You did a great job cleaning your room — don’t forget to put the clothes in the hamper” instead of “You’re not done — there are still clothes on the floor.”

Did your child do something good? Make a big deal out of it, because as an adult, if you can’t focus on your achievements it’s unlikely that you’ll have any.

4. Teach your kids frugality.

A parent’s instinct is to provide as much as possible for their kids. This probably worked very well in the prehistoric era, when children would freeze to death if they didn’t get enough animal skins. Now that we’re dealing in iPods rather than skins, the need to provide isn’t so urgent.

The best way to learn how much you can live without is to live without it. I was forced, by a series of crazy circumstances, to learn how to live without almost all my possessions. I thought I needed so much more stuff than I really did.

It was a great lesson for me, and it made me realize that the only way to teach frugal living is to force it. If you impose frugal living on your kids, perhaps artificially, you end up giving them the freedom to focus on a future career for reasons more important than the stuff they can buy with their salary.

5. Know your own limitations.

Your children are growing up in an environment much different from the one you grew up in. The rules are different, and the measures for success are different.

So don’t find yourself stuck in old ways of thinking. Challenge your own assumptions first, in order to give your child the strongest foundation for adult life.

For those of you with older kids, here’s a list that will help you give advice during the college years.

This Is Your Brain on Money

One afternoon on his way to lunch, New Yorker Jason Zweig found a roll of bills on the sidewalk that totaled $300.

He subsequently picked up the restaurant check for his office mates, took his girlfriend out to dinner, and splurged on some books, music, and a few classy ties. When all was said and done, he’d blown $430 — or $130 more than his lucky strike.

Eager Spenders

Researchers have found that an unexpected windfall makes people more eager to spend than an expected one, as Zweig discovered in writing his new book, “Your Money and Your Brain: How the New Science of Neuroeconomics Can Help Make You Rich.”

In the book, Zweig, a senior writer at Money magazine and editor of the revised edition of Benjamin Graham’s classic “The Intelligent Investor,” examines the psychological, neurological, and biological phenomena that drive foolish financial behavior.

“It’s very important for people to realize that this is not a study by very smart people of how stupid the rest of us are,” says Zweig. “If you talk to the researchers, they make the exact same mistakes that they spend their careers documenting.”

Here are five ways your brain can trick you into making financial blunders, and how to avoid them:

1. Familiarity breeds admiration, not contempt.

Psychological research shows that we’re attracted to the familiar, Zweig says. A simple test proves his point: Take a digital photo of yourself, and using photography-manipulation software, flip it to the reverse image so that if it was shot from the left, it now looks as if it was taken from the right.

“You’ll have a strong preference for one of those images and not the other — because one is your mirror image, the other is the image that people see when they look at you,” says Zweig. “Whenever a stock, an industry, a market, a country, or an investing theme is familiar, you’ll like it better. But familiarity is very dangerous.”

One example: More than 5 million Americans have at least 60 percent of their 401(k) savings in the stock of the company where they work. Investment advisors recommend holding no more than 5 percent.

On the other hand, what about the famous advice of legendary Fidelity fund manager Peter Lynch, to invest in what you know? “That’s not what Peter Lynch said,” Zweig says. “He did invest in Chrysler after getting a minivan, but he didn’t invest only because he liked the minivan — he researched the stock. If he hadn’t liked what he saw when he researched the company, he wouldn’t have bought the stock.”

Whenever you feel an investment is a no-brainer, stop and write down 8 to 10 different reasons why you must be right, Zweig advises. If you find after three or four that you can’t think of any more, think twice before buying.

2. The pattern you swear you see is probably an illusion.

The brain is built to detect patterns, even when confronted with an arbitrary occurrence. “A small streak of random luck looks to us like part of a longer pattern of reliable foresight,” Zweig writes.

After someone learns a set of circumstances through which they made money, the brain will fire up with the pleasure chemical dopamine when those conditions occur again. “If you see something once, then twice, you automatically, involuntarily expect it a third time,” Zweig says.

“You associate a signal with a result — ‘when I listen to that guy on CNBC and I do what he tells me, I make money.’ If that happens to you twice, and if you see him again on TV, dopamine is released, and you’ll buy what he recommends because just seeing him will give you a good feeling. The intensity of expectation really gets you into trouble.”

Investors relying on technical analysis tend to succumb to this problem. “As soon as a stock seems to conform to a pattern that has made money before, an ‘I-got-it’ effect kicks in, making investors feel sure they know what’s coming next — regardless of whether there’s any objective reason to believe they do,” Zweig explains. Even sophisticated investors tend to hire money managers who are on a three-year hot streak.

Zweig says one way to prevent your brain from reacting to these “three-peats” is to use dollar-cost averaging — investing the same amount every month in a fund or stock that’s part of as larger long-term strategy based on your goals.

3. Everything is relative.

The brain will hook onto a number and then compare subsequent figures to the initial one, a phenomenon known as “anchoring and adjustment.” It’s why real estate agents tend to show a potential buyer the most expensive house first, because subsequent ones will seem inexpensive; and why mutual fund companies nearly always launch new funds at a “cheap” price of $10 a share.

The solution? Avoid the numbers. Zweig quotes Warren Buffett, who says he always likes to look at investments without knowing the price, “because if you see the price, it automatically has some influence on you.”

4. Tune out the play-by-play.

If you’re someone who obsessively monitors the prices of your holdings, watch out. Several studies by Princeton Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and other researchers have found that the more often people watch an investment move up and down, the more likely they are to trade in and out short-term — and the less likely they are to earn a high return over the long term.

“If owning stocks is a long-term project for you,” Kahneman tells Zweig, “following their changes constantly is a very, very bad idea. It’s the worst possible thing you can do, because people are so sensitive to short-term losses. If you count your money every day, you’ll be miserable.”

5. Beware of group-think.

“When the market gets really greedy or really fearful, basically everyone’s brain starts to work the same way,” says Zweig. “That’s why many people buy high and sell low.”

A New York University researcher performed MRI scans on subjects as they watched the Clint Eastwood film “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” “Throughout most of the movie, the brain scans were all over the map,” says Zweig. “Then there’s a scene in which Clint Eastwood blows the bad guy’s head off. Everyone had the same reaction — fear and alarm. The lesson is that, at emotional turning points, people think alike.”

To avoid following the herd, set your own financial policies and rules, and stick by them.

“Try to determine what your long-term goals are, put a really good financial plan in place, and follow it,” says Zweig. “The worst imaginable thing you can do is listen to Pied Pipers who tell you ‘here are seven tricks to beat the pros at the game.’ That game will make you miserable.”

Stocks Plunge; Dow Down More Than 360

Stocks Plummet Amid Lackluster Profit Reports, Credit Concerns on Black Monday Anniversary

The Dow Jones industrial average dropped more than 360 points Friday — the anniversary of the Black Monday crash 20 year ago — as renewed credit concerns, lackluster corporate earnings and rising oil prices spooked investors.

The market turned sharply lower in late afternoon when Standard & Poor’s again reduced its ratings on residential mortgage-backed securities. The latest reduction, on more than 1,400 types of securities, added to investors unease about credit quality.

In addition, mixed results from Dow components Caterpillar Inc., Honeywell Inc., and 3M Co. gave investors little incentive to take chances on the market. And oil prices added to investors’ list of concerns after briefly moving above the psychological barrier of $90 per barrel for the first time.

In one bright spot, Google Inc. reported stronger-than-expected profits, drawing a number of analyst upgrades.

“I was not surprised there was some correction, given our expectation that earnings growth was going to fall short of expectations,” said Alan Gayle, senior investment strategist, director of asset allocation for Trusco Capital Management.

“I think stock analysts were slow to incorporate the impact of the subprime crisis on third-quarter earnings,” he added.

According to preliminary calculations, the Dow fell 366.94, or 2.64 percent, to 13,522.02. The Dow was down for the fifth straight session.

Broader stock indicators also fell. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index fell 39.45, or 2.56 percent, to 1,500.63, and the Nasdaq composite index dropped 74.15, or 2.65 percent, to 2,725.16. The Nasdaq fell below the noteworthy technical level of 2,750, adding to selling pressure.

Friday’s pullback pales in comparison to what traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange had to contend with 20 years ago. On Oct. 19, 1987 — Black Monday — the Dow plunged 23 percent amid concerns about interest rates and slowing economic growth. A decline of similar proportion given the market’s current levels would mean a drop of some 3,000 points.

A decline Friday in the NYSE composite index proved steep enough, however, to trigger trading curbs, which puts restrictions on certain types of sell orders. These protections were set up in part in response to Black Monday.

Bonds prices rose again Friday, extending a rally to an unusual five sessions. The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note, which moves inversely to the price, fell to 4.40 percent from 4.50 percent late Thursday. The dollar was mixed against other major currencies, while gold prices fell.

After touching $90.07 overnight, light, sweet crude fell 87 cents to settle at $88.60 on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Prices have spiked due amid forces such as a weak dollar and thin supplies at a key Midwest oil terminal.

“Investors are starting to get concerned about both the pace of the U.S. economy and the pace of earnings growth,” said Art Hogan, chief market strategist at Jefferies & Co.

“We’ve got a multitude of earnings that are less than optimal in spaces outside the financials,” he said.

Hogan noted that for much of the week investors focused on results from banks, which saw profits drop on souring mortgage loans and tight credit markets. But seeing weakness Friday in industrial company earnings reports increased their nervousness.

Caterpillar, one of the world’s largest construction equipment makers, fell $4.09, or 5.3 percent, to $73.57 after its third-quarter earnings rose 21 percent but fell short of Wall Street’s expectations. In addition, the company lowered its full-year forecast.

Honeywell International Inc., the diversified manufacturer, turned in a 14 percent increase in its third-quarter earnings. The company raised its forecast for full-year earnings to the high end of its previously targeted range. An analyst, however, described profit margins at the company’s transportation and automation and controls segments as disappointing. The stock declined $2.37, or 3.9 percent, to $58.32.

3M, the maker of Scotch tape and Post-It Notes, said quarterly profit jumped 7 percent on strong growth across all regions, but sales missed expectations. The company raised its profit outlook for the full year. But the company announced plans to cut prices on its profitable films for LCD television screens. The stock fell $8.11, or 8.6 percent, to $86.62.

Wachovia Corp. fell $1.74, or 3.6 percent, to $46.40 after reporting third-quarter profits fell 10 percent due to write-downs related to difficult credit market conditions. The nation’s fourth largest bank signaled increasing credit troubles ahead and said there would be staff cuts.

Google rose $5.09 to $644.71 after the search engine leader said advertising spending lifted third-quarter profit by 46 percent.

Declining issues outnumbered advancers by more than 5 to 1 on the New York Stock Exchange, where volume came to 1.79 billion shares compared with 1.27 billion shares traded Thursday.

The Russell 2000 index of smaller companies fell 26.24, or 3.18 percent, to 798.79.

Overseas, Japan’s Nikkei stock average closed down 1.71 percent. Britain’s FTSE 100 fell 1.23 percent, Germany’s DAX index fell 0.47 percent, and France’s CAC-40 fell 0.46 percent.

New York Stock Exchange: http://www.nyse.com

Nasdaq Stock Market: http://www.nasdaq.com

UPDATE 4-Gold hits 28-year high, platinum peaks

The euro was up a third of one percent on the day at $1.4225 — closing in on record peaks hit recently at $1.4281.
Firm crude prices highlighted gold’s role as a hedge against oil-led inflation.

Both oil and gold were also supported by rising tension between Turkey and Iraq, with Turkey’s parliament expected to debate a request for autorisation for an incursion into northern Iraq to deal with separatist Kurdish Militants.

U.S. light, sweet crude for November delivery hit a record high of $85.30 per barrel. It was last trading up $1.16 at 84.86 [ID:nSP229995].

PLATINUM FLIES

Spot platinum hit a record $1,428 per ounce on Monday, having also been set or “fixed” in London at $1,426. It was last at $1,421.00/1,425.00, up sharply from $1,415.00/1,419.00 in late New York on Friday.

Speculative buying linked to worries over supply in key producer South Africa have pushed up prices and leasing, or lending, rates on the metal, with speculation that the market is set to turn in a deficit this year.

“Platinum continues to hold the most bullish forecast of the precious complex as already tight fundamentals could be made tighter still should South African mine workers strike,” said analyst James Moore of TheBullionDesk.com.

South Africa’s biggest mining union said on Friday it was preparing a strike notice which it hoped to submit to authorities this week to apply for a one-day protest against deaths and accidents at mines.

A national strike over safety, pending government approval, would be a first for the union. [ID:nL12134190]

“There is just not a glut of metal out there and that is supporting prices along with a weaker dollar. Prices above $1,400 I think are sustainable,” Calyon analyst Michael Widmer said.

In other bullion markets, the most active December COMEX gold futures contract jumped $7.9 to $761.7 an ounce, closing in on the contract high of $800

Benchmark August TOCOM gold futures ended at 2,882 yen a gram, up 42 yen or 1.5 percent from the previous close.

The contract earlier rose as high as 2,883 yen, the highest for any benchmark since Oct. 1984.

Palladium rose slightly to $378.00/382.00 an ounce, compared to $377.00/381.00 in New York on Friday, while silver hit its highest since the end of April at $14.00 . It was last at $13.89/13.94 an ounce up from $13.76/13.81. (Additional reporting by By Risa Maeda in Tokyo)

Earnings Will Be Focus on Wall Street

The third-quarter earnings begins in earnest this week, with investors hoping to learn how bad the damage was from the summer’s credit crunch, and how much better the coming quarters are likely to be.

The deluge of reports will include results from technology names such as Intel Corp., International Business Machines Corp. and Google Inc.; banks like Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of America Corp.; and industrial companies including Caterpillar Inc. and Honeywell.

At this point, Wall Street is anticipating a fairly weak third quarter overall, but it expects corporate growth to bounce back robustly in the fourth quarter. Any indication that companies aren’t rebounding as well as the market is hoping could derail the stock market, which has risen back into record territory.

Last week, the major stock indexes managed modest gains. The week was a bit rocky, but saw the Dow Jones industrial average and the Standard & Poor’s 500 index touch all-time highs. The Dow finished the week up 0.19 percent, the Standard & Poor’s 500 index ended up 0.27 percent and the Nasdaq composite index rose 0.91 percent.

The gains were fueled in part by the week’s economic data, which were mostly positive. On Friday, the Commerce Department said retail sales rose 0.6 percent in September from August — double the growth economists predicted — a day after some U.S. retailers reported sluggish demand in September.

“Good news on the consumer front tells us that while the economy is not out of the woods yet, a clearing is emerging,” said Bernard Baumohl, managing director at the Economic Outlook Group LLC, in a note.

“While I do expect more bad news to come out of the mortgage sector the next six months, the element of surprise is gone,” he wrote.

This week does bring some key economic gauges, which investors hope will suggest that the economy is still growing moderately and that inflation is under control.

The National Association of Home Builders releases its housing market index Tuesday. On Wednesday, the Labor Department releases its August reading on consumer prices; the Federal Reserve puts out its Beige Book on economic conditions around the country; and the Commerce Department reports on housing starts. And Thursday, the Conference Board releases its September index of leading economic indicators.

Meanwhile, Wall Street will be listening to speeches from some Fed officials during the week — including chairman Ben Bernanke, who is scheduled to speak at a St. Louis Fed conference on Friday. The markets are split on whether policy makers will lower interest rates again when they meet Oct. 30-31.

Most investors would like another rate reduction after the half-point cut made on Sept. 18. The Fed’s move helped loosen up the credit markets and restore confidence in the stock market.

But perhaps even more so, investors want to see that corporate America is still seeing profit growth despite the slowing economy.

Other major companies releasing third-quarter earnings this week include Johnson & Johnson, Yahoo Inc., Coca-Cola Co., Merrill Lynch, Advanced Micro Devices, Pfizer and McDonald’s Corp.

How Bad Credit Can Impact Your Life

The turbulent economy and tougher lending environment appears to have shut the door on credit opportunities for those with a dubious credit history.

However, in many instances, poor credit doesn’t necessarily knock you out of the credit pool. But it does mean you’ll need to be well prepared and informed when you go looking for a loan. In any case, you’re probably going to get less-desirable terms, and you’ll pay a little more than the average consumer because the lender is taking on a greater risk, thanks to your shaky financial record.

Here’s a chance to learn how lenders evaluate you and better understand a few of the tools they use to make their choices, such as your credit reports and credit scores; how to deal with lenders so you don’t get tricked into losing even more money; and how you can bypass some conventional routes to receiving credit.

Bankrate has selected seven areas where your credit history can have a big impact, explaining how bad credit can affect you and what you can do to make things better.

Some of the guidance provided, as well as the wise use of the credit you might ultimately receive, will create improvements to your history and boost your credit scores from bad to good. That means easier credit at a better price.

Last Words

Ok, Anda telah menyelesaikan tingkat pertama dari kelas forex kita. Belum siap bertrading namun sekarang Anda telah memiliki dasar pengetahuan forex yang mencukupi sebelum memulai sisi praktis dalam forex. Setidaknya Anda telah mengetahui resiko dan mekanisme perdagangan forex pada saat Anda melakukan aksi beli atau jual.

Quotes, Cara Membaca Harga Forex

Dunia forex tidak lepas dari Buy dan Sell (Beli dan Jual). Setiap trader memiliki kebebasan untuk melakukan salah satu aksi diatas yang menurutnya benar untuk memperoleh profit. Buy dapat juga dipadankan dengan Bid atau Long dan Sell dipadankan dengan Offer atau Short. Jadi jika Anda membaca sebuah artikel mengenai forex dan disana disebutkan istilah Bid atau Long, tidak perlu bingung karena kedua istilah tersebut sama artinya dengan Buy atau Beli.