By Rob Booker - Forex Magnates

MT4 is a monster. It’s a powerhouse. It’s not the best technology. It’s not the easiest to use out of the box. But it’s the leader, and when you are the leader, you just keep getting bigger. An axiom about competition is that once you are a leader, your very leadership position reinforces the position itself. MT4′s popularity outweighs its clunkiness.

When I worked at a broker, I was in a management meeting where the CEO unveiled plans to launch a new trading platform. It was smooth. It could run on Macs, PCs, and Linux. It could load apps. This was all the way back in 2008. It never got off the ground. MT4 was just too popular.MT4 is stable and supported by a large network of developers. It’s supported by a large number of brokers. It is indisputably the leader for forex trading. It’s not going away.

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May 1, 2014 (Investorideas.com Mining stocks newswire) When one thinks of Switzerland, banking comes to mind easily but gold doesn't as much. After all, the relationship between Switzerland and gold is more ancient than the one with paper bank deposits. Certain bankers from Geneva, such as Lombard Odier and Pictet, started in 1800 and have more than 200 years of history. Back then, paper money didn't exist yet and deposits consisted mainly of gold and silver. Today, still, a full two-thirds of the world's gold goes through Switzerland and, in an average year, it refines grossly 70% of the world's gold. Six of the gold refiners on the LBMA Good Delivery list make for 90% of global volume, and four of those are in Switzerland. Up until 1992, the Swiss franc's 40% backing by gold was written in the country's Constitution. When Switzerland became a member of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) it had to abandon this backing by gold. Today, Swiss citizens have asked for a referendum to be called in order to get back to that backing.

By Scott Welsh

“Only if you are willing to take all of your money, rip it into tiny pieces, make cupcakes with one piece of money inside each cupcake and then eat all of the cupcakes.”

–James Altucher, when answering the question, “Should I daytrade?”

Several years ago, one of my highly-ranked students was trying to decide on where to go to college. Even though she had won state titles and had a good ranking, tennis pros in town said that she’d never play big-time tennis because she was too small and played too defensively. At the same time, I would consistently overhear parents telling each other that my student didn’t play the “big game”, the only game that works in college tennis. A local Big Ten coach even told her she was stupid to consider Northwestern (ranked in the top 5 in the nation) because she’d never even make their lineup.

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US Federal Reserve Open Market Committee Minutes Excerpts

FOMC Excerpts

• “Information received since the Federal Open Market Committee met in March indicates that growth in economic activity has picked up recently, after having slowed sharply during the Winter in part because of adverse weather conditions.”
• “Labor market indicators were mixed but on balance showed further improvement.”
• “The unemployment rate, however, remains elevated.”
• “Household spending appears to be rising more quickly.”

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