By Winston Ng

Last week started off with waking up to the headline on the front page of The Straits Times screaming about the Greek debt fiasco. Now, if you happened to have missed the newspaper’s outburst, you would have heard it on the radio while travelling to work. Every radio station had an interview of some European expert commenting on the state of the Greek debts.

The funny thing was that it almost seemed like these debts were new to the trading community. The way they spoke about it, gave the impression to the layman that this was all unexpected. However, this is furthest from the truth! The debts of Greece have been dissected for so many weeks, that it had almost lost all its newsworthy excitement.

Nonetheless, it was quite disturbing that many print, radio and television media were talking about the slide in the Euros like it was a bad thing. I particularly felt sad for the person on the street who might feel disheartened by this market condition. And to make it worse, many financial programmes were chatting about how the market is going into a season of great bleeding, since the Dow Jones Index was also taking a major hit.

If you had no knowledge of what happened in the previous months, you might have been very spooked about the future of our markets. Fortunately, the fact is that the Dow Jones Index did climb non-stop for more than 10 weeks in the first quarter of this year. Thus, a profit taking correction is more than fair, and definitely long expected. Additionally, the Euro has been in a sideways holding pattern for a period of time; being rather resistant to the Greek issues. It was a matter of time before the markets spurt and react to the debt situation.

Thankfully, my day of gloom ended off very nicely, as I went to class and was greeted with a class full of students who were happily making money from the collapse of the Euros. They set up their standby positions the week earlier, and most of them were like me, waking up to profits in their brokerage accounts. It is definitely the most rewarding moment of my life to see that I have managed to help someone else break free from the psychological demons of the financial world. In this particular case, a whole class!

I would conclude by highlighting that the Forex market allows normal people to trade moves that are going up and moves that are going down in the market. This frees you from the typical construct that a falling market has to be a losing market; it can just as easily be your most profitable market. The essential difference is to always have your trading skill ready to capture these great moves that can happen suddenly.