Education Only Takes You So Far

I have a double major in finance and accounting and I’ve taken close to 25 graduate hours of course work in both areas of study. Plus I have a Masters in International tax and financial planning.

Experience Far Out Weighs Education

With that disclaimer, I can unequivocably state that even though I’ve studied the principles associated with trading futures, derivatives and various forms of options, I have no experience in actual trading. Years ago before I actually started trading stocks, I gained a great deal of experience and practice trading stocks in a simulated fashion. In fact I first was exposed to this concept in sixth grade before Internet Stock trading had even been considered. We used a simple old-fashioned newspaper to track stocks and trying come up with an investment portfolio strategy.

Learning to Invest From Simulations

Years later when I was in college and studying finance and accounting, the Internet Stock boom of the 90s was just cranking up and I picked up a great deal of experience trading stocks through fictional portfolios on several different systems. That experience gave me the knowledge and confidence to trade the real thing online with my own money and do it effectively.

I’ve studied options and futures and currency markets in great detail especially from the perspective of an accountant attempting to track and account for valuations of these assets, however it wasn’t until recently that I found a service that provides some very interesting online tutorials and trading simulations that investors can utilize to hone their trading skills and prepare for advanced trading mechanisms.

FOREX Simulations through Global Futures Exchange & Trading Co

Global Futures Exchange & Trading Company offers an arsenal of tools that investors can utilize to engage in forex trading and other forms of derivative or options trading. I was especially impressed with their tools for the relative novice (and I use the word novice here rather loosely to refer to people that have a good deal of education in this area as well as a good deal of experience trading stocks or bonds and possibly commodities as well, but like myself no experience in FOREX trading.)

They offer five differentonline simulation tools that you can runto learn your way aroundthese markets and the way they work online.In addition they also provide a number of tutorials, video courses, and other courses that you can take in order to be guided through this market.

I am definitely a proponent of the benefits of learning from simulations. If you are new to Forex trading and you are looking for the knowledge necessary to proceedin these markets, I would highly recommend combining your study and analysis with the simulation programthat can help youbut the big pictureto workin a simulated model.With simulations it’s always important to go back and analyze the results and test the variables.

Simulations can also be worthwhile for seasoned investors that are looking to test drive a new system or service that they have not worked with in the past. You would not want to buy a Ferari without test driving it first only to learn too late that you don’t even fit into the car!

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Companies that establish new online e-Commerce solutions need to insure that their online store and shopping cart presence will provide their customers and visitors with a sense of assurance, safety and above all credibility.  This means that it is rare these days for a company to attempt to create their own shopping cart solution without using tools and solutions created by experts in the area. 

There are just too many levels of complexity to cover without working with a company that has more experience providing solid solutions.  Our sponsor Ashop.com provides shopping cart software solutions that can enable companies to establish a highly optimized and validated e-commerce solution that will give your customers the sense of security they need to complete a transaction.  Their recent press release also describes their ability to provide you with the ability to create streamlined layouts and designs that will generate a sticky layout capable of walking a visitor from the landing page to the check out page. 

Further more their solutions offer many other capabilities including affiliate program management tools such that websites around the world can be leverage to help sell your products or services through your shopping cart.  Ashops offer these solutions for a setup price that is under $100 and a monthly service licensing fee that is also $100! 

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Over the next few months I will be transitioning the Maven Mapper’s Information blog from this terrific and free host on Bloggers Blogspot to the Sofdtuit Partners domain.

Softduit Partners is owned by Maven Mapper’s Chief Editor, Brett Bumeter.  Softduit will consolidate Maven Mapper’s along with a number of other online properties under the Softduit umbrella.

The new location will be at

http://www.softduit.com/MavenMappersInformation/

This transition will not happen rapidly as Maven Mapper’s Information has a number of obligations and there is still much to be done to improve the future Maven home and template.

Here is a current thumbnail of the future design.  Sometime soon the background will be updated with multiple Mind Map views. 

We encourage you to check out the new site.  You will notice buttons at the top of the blog that you can click to change the background yourself!

Technorati tags: Maven Mapper’s Information, Blog Move

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Ever wonder how websites protect themselves from a denial of service attack?

Gigenet provides real time Denial of Service prevention and mitigation services for your website, your servers and your IP network. 

Their product ProxyShield DDoS Protection provides the benefit of not having to change hosts or servers.  A company simply reroutes their DNS to through Gigenet’s Proxyshield, which proceeds to screen out potential traffic resulting from a DoS and allowing normal traffic into your system so that your company and website can continue to function.

Preventing DoS downtime is a very important.  A company with $25 million in revenues stands to lose $68,493 a day in lost sales and productivity if a Denial of Service is not prevented.

They have stopped some famous attacks on Joker.com and MillionDollarHomepage.com and can provide you similar protection.  They guarantee it or provide the service free.

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For the last couple of months my inbox has been plagued with with these annoying faux stock alert image spam emails. They are these annoying emails that are text based on the surface but come with an image that shows up when the email is previewed and they are Spam!

In looking for a solution to the problem, I came across a service that specializes in fighting this specific type of spam. Borderware provides MXtreme anti image spam software to help combat this spam.

Spammers alter the images slightly so that the spam and the image will pass through normal filters more readily. Their solution reviews over 30 different attributes of the image and compares those attributes against similar attributes in multiple other messages that have been indexed to detect the spam and filter it out before it litters up your inbox.

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