Mike Norman — Traders Were Wrong to Sell the Russian Currency

Most people are not familiar with MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) and even those who have heard of it or who claim to understand it tend to dismiss it as some kind of fringe economics.

However, MMT is not at all some kind of fringe economics. MMT concisely describes the functioning of our monetary system, a system that for the past 45 years has been pretty much based on free-floating exchange rates, where countries issue their own, non-convertible currency. When I say non-convertible I mean not convertible at some fixed rate for gold or some other currency.

I'm an economist by education, but I was taught all the wrong stuff in college. I started getting into MMT 14 years ago, and since then I have been a proponent and teacher of it.

My understanding of MMT has allowed me to avoid the forecasting pitfalls that we saw from most mainstream economists. They were all stuck in the gold standard or things like loanable funds theory, and still are. That's why they wrongly saw the dollar crashing and inflation and interest rates skyrocketing when the Fed started to engage in all of its extraordinary measures during the Great Financial Crash.

In addition, they have been avowed deficit "hawks" (which has been hurting economies everywhere) and predicting debt crises in Japan, credit bubbles in China and "stimulus" that never seems to come from the negative interest rates in Europe.

I was never on board with any of those things. In fact I was the opposite; not just to be different, but because I knew what the effects of those policies would be under our current monetary regime. It was not guesswork for me; it was simply a level of understanding.

If you want an example of MMT in action, I will give you one right now. Look no further than the action taken by the Russian central bank last week.….

The Street — Real Money
Traders Were Wrong to Sell the Russian Currency

Mike Norman

Here's a conservative Forex trading system I developed, on track to return 60% annually.

This is a super conservative forex trading system that I developed for those who are very risk averse and want to sleep at night.

This is an algorithmic system that is very easy to implement and takes about 20 minutes per day of your time. After that you pretty much leave it alone and let it run. (It does not trade pegged currencies.)

The system will never take more than a 1% loss on any trade. Over the past four months it has executed 167 trades (roughly 42 trades per month) and has returned 18%, on track to deliver close to 60% return for the year.

Not bad.

By the way, the FX broker I use and the one I tell my students to use is fine

For those of you who have taken my Forex course in the past and many of you probably currently trade,  you know that the broker I use, Oanda, has gotten through this act of institutional terror by the SNB relatively unscathed. It's a testament to a great company and a testament to my course and the information I provide. I know that is not being humble, but I probably saved lots of people a lot of money and headaches.

Here is Oanda's statement:

In the wake of unprecedented market events this morning, OANDA demonstrated its ongoing commitment to doing right by its clients. Despite suffering losses and vanishing liquidity in the institutional hedging market, OANDA remained true to its 14-year legacy of transparency, integrity and fairness to our clients. OANDA did not re-quote or amend any CHF cross client trades. We even took the further step of forgiving all negative client balances that were caused when clients could not close out their positions fast enough*.
Client inquiries are being handled normally and those making withdrawals and deposits are able to do so as normal.

OANDA is proud of its strong reputation for fairness and integrity. We thank our customers for their continued loyalty and welcome new traders who want to experience outstanding service and execution.

Very nice.