If you’ve wanted to dip your toe in the pond of forex, or foreign exchange trading, you’re one of tens of thousands of people who have considered this option for investing.  When you trade, you’re trading one currency against another.  As those currencies rise and fall against each other, profits can be made – or lost – on the “spread” between the two currencies, as determined by the bid and ask prices.

Where most beginners go astray is in entering the market without a well thought-out and well-designed strategy in place.  Either that or the beginner spends the time developing the strategy, and then quickly jettisons it when the first large dip or rise in prices occurs. 

A strategy can help you keep the monster of greed at bay, which has been the downfall of many investors.  If you’ve designed your strategy to dovetail with your personal investing style and goals, and you’ve studied the markets to find the currencies that suit you best, then you have a strong plan that will lead you toward steady returns.

Yes, it’s tempting to listen to the tales of stellar returns, but those, like the tales of jackpot winners, are often enriched for dramatic effect.  The trader whose strategy earns him or her steady 8% or 10% returns never makes it to the cover of a magazine, but does emerge as a very wealthy investor over time.

Because the ability to trade is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, your strategy should also include a plan for trading times.  Look at your schedule.  How often can you devote time to studying the market and trading?  If you don’t have too much time, consider a long-term approach with slow, steady gains.  Or consider managed trading, where you present a market manager with your strategy and let that person do the worrying and trading for you.

I have to attend the Eurogamer Expo at Brompton Hall, Earls Court from 1-3 October which has it all, whether you want to play the biggest games of the year before they come out, talk to developers and publishers about getting a job in the industry, or check out presentations from the likes of Valve and Quantic Dream. This specialist exhibition is the UK’s biggest dedicated video games event and if you have never been and are at all interested in games you should get along.

I have no problems about being at the event, but what does concern me, not just for this, but other events that I have to attend is finding the right sort of Hotel in London whilst I am away. I am not looking for a swanky hotel, but after I have been at a business meeting or discussing our products with potential customers all day, I need a place where I can relax and be totally refreshed for the next day. The same of course applies if I am going to London for a weekend away, you will all know how tiring it can be taking in all the sights of the capital and the last thing that you need is a second rate hotel to spend the night in.

I am lucky in this respect as I have been put onto a great Hotel finding site which is called simonseeks.com which will find just the right sort of accommodation that is right for you and your budget. Simonseeks is a bit like the YouTube of travel because every day, new travel guides are uploaded, telling you about the best places to stay, the tastiest places to eat, the unmissable things to do, and much more, not just for London but worldwide.

I’m sure we all remember the days, many years ago it would seem, since some of us used our thumbs to triple tap a text message on mobile phones. Now Nokia’s bringing it back with the phone that comes with both a touch screen and a numerical 12-button keypad.

I came across an announcement that we received in the office today about the new Nokia X3, which it would seem, is a retro variation of Nokia’s old-school signature candybar-style device with the top two-thirds dedicated to a touch screen, while the lower third has a keypad and I have to say that I do like having the best of both worlds.

The phone is being called “Nokia’s first ‘Touch and Type,” implying that there could be more of these hybrid phones coming to market. The combination of texting and touching sends a pretty clear message to a potential user. If QWERTY keyboards and new input technologies like Swype make your head swim, this is the phone for you. According to spokesperson Mary McDowell, Nokia’s EVP of Mobile Phones, backs up the concept with research. In an interview she commented that people still like to text in the manner that they used to using fast handed one thumb and they want to maintain their speedy edge for SMS, chat and instant messaging – yet enjoy the benefits of touch as well. I have to say that I never really mastered the technique myself!

From the initial reports it would seem that the new Nokia is expected to be initially available for around £90 with various pay as you go deals (or £129 SIM-free), the Nokia X3 is clearly aiming for the cash-conscious music phone buyer after a smart-looking device, pitching it squarely against the likes of the others I have looked at the Sony Ericsson W395 comes to mind.

We just love going to Spain for our holidays, often we have been known to take an Easy Jet flight for a long weekend, hiring an apartment on the internet before we go, lovely to get a little Spanish sun, wine and food don’t you think? In all the years that I have been going to Spain I have to say that I have never ever been to a bull fight, somehow it just did not appeal to me. I have been round a couple of bull rings during the day on visitor tours and looked at the museums there, what is not in question is that the Spanish do, or perhaps I should did, love their bull fights, not any more in Barcelona though!

Surprisingly the Catalonia parliament in Barcelona has voted for a ban in a move that rejects a hallmark of traditionalist in a region with its own language and culture. I have been to Barcelona and it is a fascinating city which once boasted three bull rings, but tastes have obviously changed and it looks as there soon to be none. I know from my visits that bullfighting in Barcelona is not as popular as it is in Madrid, or even Andalusia in the south, but the Catalans along with those from the Basque region has the most self-rule among Spain’s semi-autonomous regions, running its own police force and having a say over a wide range of other issues. Could this be the beginning of the end for bullfighting throughout the rest of Spain?

You would never walk into a shop and buy the first thing that you see on the shelf, unless of course it was something that you had been looking for in other shops, but even so the store could have something better! More and more of us are buying our products online, I hardly ever go into a shop nowadays except of course to pick up some grocery on the way home, but usually with both people working more of us do our weekly grocery shopping on the “net” for delivery at a time convenient to us.

Web shopping has become an immense market, in fact, there are companies that I know that do not even have a business premises, just an online shop with which to do business. These sites have been setup in response to the growing demands of us the consumers. The choice obtainable is, in general, very good but it often involves lots of time spent at the computer “shopping” around for the best deal or the item of choice, ok if you have lots of time, which I do not.

Just imagine that you want to find the best broadband deals, trawling through the different companies, or telephoning around can be a mind numbing experience. Perhaps like me you want to buy a new mobile ‘phone do you go round all the mobile suppliers in the shopping centre or like me go to a price comparison site where you can get all the information at the click of the mouse? In recent years a number of these sites have cropped up with the aim of putting together cost information of a variety of sites in to an easy to read list. With cost comparison sites you do not just get a list of prices but customer reviews which can prove vital when making your choice. The 21st century is with us!

If you are like me you will have been delighted to hear the news this morning that the proposed strike by thousands of airport workers has been resolved after operator BAA agreed to a new pay deal for its staff. The proposed action would have not just have affected me in my business travel, but hundreds of thousands of holidaymakers who faced travel chaos over the August Bank Holiday after more than 6,000 union members voted for a walkout in protest at a one per cent pay offer. The airports that would have been affected were Heathrow, Stansted, Southampton, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen airports, workers will now be urged to accept the deal, according to a union spokesman.

We do not know the details of the settlement but if you were going on a cruise and stay holiday to the Caribbean, it would almost certainly have involved flying from Heathrow or Glasgow. Holiday makers going on a trip to an apartment or hotel in Spain or Majorca may not have had their holiday spoiled if they were flying from an airport not affected. What could have made it worse of course would have been to have flown out this week, only to find that you could not fly back in! Common sense has prevailed; let’s hope that BA can sort out their dispute as well.

Customers now need reassurance that they will not see problems further down the road and it is time that the split-up of the BAA monopoly at London and in Scotland is resolved once and for all. When will the sale of Stansted and Edinburgh or Glasgow International go through and help to prevent consumers being held hostage to one union in the future?

I know it’s an old chestnut but it just gets me really angry when the long suffering motorist, which most of us are, is treated as a “milch cow” not just by governments in the form of high fuel taxes and revenue raisers such as the speed camera, but now by councils. Not only do we have the recent threat of private companies operating speed cameras, but we now have councils putting up the cost of parking or introducing charges where none existed before. Some have also increased the times during which charges apply so as to increase revenue.

Many councils are looking toward the motorist to raise revenues as a response to their budgets decreasing as they are hit by government imposed cuts, but why the long suffering motorist yet again? As I travel around the country and talk to people I have found that even residents in some areas are now are being forced to purchase expensive permits for the first time ever. Of course the local governments have said this extra revenue will be reinvested in road safety, but we have heard all that before! This is, according to motoring organisations, effectively a tax on the motorist and I know that small businesses may also be affected as people avoid coming into areas that charge too much. Just why is it that when someone wants to make money the first unoriginal thought that pops into everyone’s head is ‘how can we get this off the motorist?’

To me, I think that parking charges are effectively a tax on motorists when they should be about managing space effectively and allowing drivers to visit areas to shop and do business. Drivers are being ripped off at the pumps, ripped off by parking, and it affects the whole economy.

If you search around twitter as I do you will pick up all sorts of gems of information and the latest that I came across was from none other than Microsoft whose hardware division created a Twitter account on 26th July and have never made any secret of the fact that it wants to go head to head with the Apple iPad. It came as no surprise to find that it has begun a series of tantalising pictures of a forthcoming product, which some have speculated could be a tablet computer. It’s surely only a matter of time before Microsoft unleashes its iPad killer on the world, whether it can truly challenge Apple’s device remains to be seen.

They are not the only company showing interest in manufacturing product to compete with the iPad, BlackBerry, is working on a tablet computer of its own, and is expected to be om sale by Christmas. Hot on the heels of the Samsung Galaxy S could come the Galaxy Tab, a tablet-style computer from the Korean manufacturer that runs the Google Android operating system. Given Samsung’s computing pedigree, the Tab could turn out to be a real gem.  I understand that Dell is in the market as well with android based tablet is little bigger than a Smartphone, but is designed for mobile data consumption rather than making calls on the move. Not to be left out dear old BT is working on its own tablet-style computer, likely to be a cross between a mini PC and “the telephone of the future”.

I am currently helping my friend choose flowers for her upcoming wedding it’s not going to be an extravagant affair so the flower choices need to be simple but still very pretty and quite traditional. I never realised that there were so many options for wedding flowers Glasgow, or how much time, thought and preparations went into them. Not only do you have to think about colour choices, to make sure they go with your colour scheme but also the types of plants, as some are not available all year round.

Luckily because this wedding will be just at the end of summer, many great British varieties are available which look much more traditional, the colour scheme is pale blue and white so I have been looking into flowers that fit that. Which is harder than you may think and on top of that there are so many varieties of flower and foliage which is used to ‘pad’ out arrangements.

The number of different arrangements needed for wedding flowers Glasgow varies to what you want, for example for the ceremony you can have the brides bouquet and even smaller ones for the bridesmaids. The groom, groomsmen, ushers and immediate family members can also have flowers for their lapels and that’s before you start to think whether you need any to decorate where the ceremony will be held. Then you need to also think about where the reception will be held, decorations and arrangement for the tables and around, there’s is so much I never even thought!

The foreign exchange market is commonly known as forex. Put simply, it is the trading of one currency for another.

As a market, forex is one of the largest in the world. Forex traders tend to fall into two categories, those seeking to exchange their currency into another for business purposes and forex currency traders. These traders are skilled individuals who monitor market trends and speculate on the exchange rates in order to take advantage of any fluctuations in currency exchange rates.

In the Forex markets, currencies are traded against each other. The information is expressed in a standard XXX/YYY format. The XXX denotes the one unit of currency expressed in terms of the YYY ISO 4217 international three-letter code. An example of this is EUR/USD which expresses the cost of one euro in US dollars.

The foreign exchange is an over the counter market which operates 24 hours a day with trading taking place between forex brokers, individuals, bank-to-bank and broker-to-bank. The advantage of this 24 hour availability is that traders have the ability to react to events in the market as soon as they occur. The market is popular with independent speculators who can take advantage of the 24 hour trading period by trading outside of their normal working hours.

There is, as with all markets, a bid/offer spread, which explains the difference between the buying price of currency and the selling price. The bid/offer spread will vary depending on whether the trading is between, say, a market trader and wholesale customer as opposed to a broker trading with a retail customer.