Well the major reason is quite simply that the rich have the capacity to invest their money into assets and investments that will make their money grow over time, whereas the poorer people in society don’t have this option.

The wealthier members of society can invest their hard earned cash into the stock market, property, or even into starting up or buying their own business. They can essentially make their money work for them and increase their wealth all the time. They don’t need to worry about finding a high-paying job or climbing up the career ladder, they can simply use their money to make more money.

To demonstrate this let’s take as an example a man who owns a $500,000 house outright and has $1,000,000 in a bank account.

Historically we know that house prices on average double every 7 years, so just by doing absolutely nothing he could probably increase his wealth by $500,000 just by doing nothing for 7-10 years.

In addition he would probably want to invest his $1,000,000 in order to make it grow, so let’s say he invested it in a very conservative mutual fund that generated a modest return of 10% a year on average. In this case he would be increasing his net worth by a cool $100,000 a year and if he compounded his returns he would have made far more than this each year. All this was achieved with absolutely no effort needed from himself.

Even if he’d invested all his money into a standard 5% savings account he still could have earned $50,000 a year and after ten years with compounding his $1,000,000 would now be worth $1,628,894, a return of nearly 63% over 10 years.

Of course he could have achieved much more than this by investing in businesses, or actively buying shares or property, for example, but as you can see if you have a decent sum of money you can quite easily build a large income for yourself and make your money grow without actually having to work for a living.

Contrast this with a man who earns say $15,000 a year in a job and rents his own property. In this case he is probably spending all his income on rent and living expenses and will have no disposable income to save or invest, and even if he does he’s unlikely to be able to get rich from doing so.

He doesn’t have the capacity to make his money work for him because he needs most of it to just get by, and of course over a number of years he won’t benefit from any long-term increases in property prices because he is renting his own place, so he won’t increase his wealth this way either.

His best hope is to work his way up the career ladder or raise enough money to be able to start his own business and hope it becomes successful, but this is not easy and definitely not something everyone can achieve.

For most poor people who are living from paycheck to paycheck, it is really hard just to survive let alone get richer, and although they may not necessarily get poorer in real terms, ie their income doesn’t go down, with the effects of inflation over a number of years they are essentially becoming poorer because the cost of living is going up.

Is this fair? No of course not, but it’s part of the western society and unfortunately a sad fact of life. The only consolation is that there are lots of opportunities out there for people from all backgrounds but in most cases it’s essentially true that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

First of all you obviously need to be completely familiar with the rules of the game so learn them off by heart and practice on the practice tables online for play money until you’ve learnt all the intricacies of the game.

When you feel you are ready, you can start playing at the real money tables. I always suggest starting off playing at the low-stakes tables in order to minimise your initial losses, but you should be aware that in many ways it can be harder playing at these tables because the play is so loose.

For example, it’s quite easy to bluff a good player, but bad players will often keep betting. Also the poker fish at the lower stakes tables can be very unpredictable and therefore difficult to read.

As you gain more and more experience you should see a gradual improvement in your play, but this alone will rarely get you to the top. To help you achieve this aim you should educate yourself as much as possible by reading poker tips and strategies from poker professionals. Whether it’s poker books or simply forums and websites, there’s plenty of good quality information out there if you’re prepared to look for it.

Try and learn from the best, ie those players who have reached the very top, so I’m thinking here of people like Phil Hellmuth, Doyle Brunson, Dan Harrington, David Sklansky, etc. This way you will learn some invaluable tips and strategies that will help improve your own game.

By gaining experience and constantly educating yourself you should improve over time and should hopefully start consistently making money from poker. The next step is to focus your efforts on only playing one type of game, and really try and master that particular game. This is much easier than dabbling in different forms of poker and playing different variants of the game all the time.

Of course not everyone will become a poker pro by following these simple steps outlined in this article, but by gaining experience and learning as much as you can about the game, including top tips and strategies used by the professional players, you are giving yourself every chance of becoming a good enough player to make a regular income from playing poker.

The common opinion amongst non-traders is that forex trading is hugely exciting with vast sums of money to be won and lost every day, with the potential to really strike it rich, but in reality this isn’t really the case.

Sure it can be exciting at times when, for example, a currency pair moves 50 or 100 points in your favour in a matter of minutes and you’re sitting on a huge profit, but this type of occurrence doesn’t happen all the time. Far from it in fact.

There are times when you can be sitting at your computer for hours on end trying to find a trading position to take, and can sometimes spend the whole day without entering a single trade. In fact sometimes during particularly volatile times and conversely in very quiet times when the markets are moving sideways, it’s often best to sit on your hands and not take a position.

This certainly isn’t exciting and is a good example of why forex trading is not always that exhilarating. In addition there are times when you can have a losing trade, or worst still a losing streak where several trades go against you, and therefore not only have you not made any money, but you’ve actually lost money. Trust me, it’s not a great feeling going into the weekend knowing you’ve actually lost money during the last week.

There’s also the fact that forex trading is an extremely lonely profession if you’re working from home. The lack of social interaction during the day is really noticeable, particularly if you are a naturally sociable person, and I would suggest that this aspect alone means that forex trading is not for everyone.

However on the opposite side of the coin, forex trading provides an obtainable means to become very wealthy thanks to leverage and compounding, so if you can become a successful trader the rewards can more than compensate for the loneliness and occasional periods of boredom and inactivity.

Forex trading has provided me with a very good income since 2001, but like anything it takes real dedication and hard work, and you need to learn how to consistently generate profits from your trading and develop your own strategy, but it’s definitely possible, as thousands of other successful traders have discovered.

As you can guess from the title of this article, there are essentially four different types of technical indicator and they are as follows:

1.Trend indicators.

MACD, Parabolic SAR and the various moving averages are a few examples of trend indicators and they can all be used to identify a trend. It’s widely argued that you should only trade with the trend so all of these indicators will help you to take the decision out of your hands, and therefore dictate which way you should be trading. Your only decision now is at what level to enter the trade.

2.Momentum indicators.

These types of indicators are essentially oscillating indicators and are most useful for determining overbought and oversold positions and can be very useful in signalling the start of a new trend. Examples include RSI, Stochastics and CCI.

3.Volume indicators.

As the name suggests, these types of indicators show the volume of trades behind a particualr price movement which can be extremely beneficial because a price movement backed up by high volume is a much stronger signal than a price movement based on low volume. Examples here include Chaikin Money Flow, Force Index, Money Flow Index and Ease Of Movement.

4.Volatility indicators.

Volatility indicators generally use ranges to show the behaviour of the price and the volume behind any movements. This is useful because any dramatic change in behaviour can provide a good entry signal. Common examples include Bollinger Bands, Average True Range and Envelopes.

So there you have the four different types of technical indicators available to you. Which ones you use is entirely up to you, but it’s generally advised that you have at least one type of each in order to provide additional confirmation for entering a trade.

Trading forex using technical analysis is all about probabilities in that when you enter a long position, for example, you want all of your chosen signals to be signalling an upwards movement, therefore indicating a high probability of an upwards movement taking place.

If you use a strict stop loss policy and use these different types of indicators to confirm positions, then over time this high probability trading method should provide you with more winners than losers in the long run.

A mistake a lot of new players make is they see a large sign up bonus offer like ’free $600 sign up bonus!’ and interpret this as meaning that all you have to do is open an account and you will receive a nice fat $600 in your account.

Unfortunately it’s not as easy as this. With offers like this, of course they’re not scamming you, they will give you the $600, but there are generally conditions to this offer. For instance you may have to match this offer with your initial deposit, so you would have to put $600 into your account yourself when opening an account, or you would have to generate $600 for the poker room in rake before they will give you the money.

If online poker rooms threw vast sums of money at every customer that joined they would soon be out of business so they have got to protect their own interests as well. After all their goal is to lure you in with an attractive offer, and then profit from your business in future months and years through you playing at their site and generating lots of rake and paying lots of entry fees to tournaments.

The worst type of customer for them are the people who open an account, take their bonus, and never play at their site again, which is why a lot of sign up bonuses have conditions attached to them.

So if you hear about people saying that they make loads of money going around signing up to various different poker rooms just for the sign up bonus, and think you could do the same, then be aware that it’s not that easy.

Yes you definitely can make profits doing this but you have to be a very competent poker player in the first place to be able to pocket the sign up bonuses without being out of pocket yourself. For example, a lot of sites will require you to generate a certain amount of rake or play a certain number of hands to clear the bonus. If this is the case then you will obviously need to be at break even point at worst in order to claim the maximum bonus available.

So always read the terms and conditions when you sign up to a poker room just for the sign up bonus because poker rooms aren’t in the business of giving away free money. There are nearly always conditions attached, but if you are a good solid poker player then these bonuses are relatively easy to clear.

Well in theory you don’t even need to start off with any money at all to become wildly successful. In theory you could do what a lot of new players do when they sign up to an online poker site, and that’s taking part in freeroll tournaments.

This is a great way of getting tournament experience and is also a way of building up your bankroll because a lot of these tournaments offer some prize money for reaching the latter stages of these tournaments, even if the amounts are relatively small.

Over time as you become a more accomplished tournament player, you will hopefully have built up a bankroll and you can then either continue playing freerolls or make the step up to real money cash games and tournaments.

By taking part in these real money games you can potentially grow your bankroll a lot quicker simply because there’s more money to be won.

One thing to bear in mind though. You have to slowly advance to the next stages of your poker career otherwise you’re in danger of blowing your bankroll completely and having to start again from scratch.

Everyone goes through bad patches, even the pros, so make sure that as soon as you have built up a decent sum of money, you only risk a small percentage of this amount entering tournaments or taking part in cash games. In poker money management is everything if you are going to successfully grow your bankroll over time.

As your bankroll grows you can take part in higher stakes games and grow your money faster if you’re successful, but always make sure you don’t risk more than you can afford to lose, and allow for a possible losing streak, so you have more than enough money to hopefully recover.

The internet has of course produced many of these rags to riches stories, simply because online poker is so convenient and you can play 24 hours a day if you so wished honing your skills as much as you want.

You only have to look at Chris Ferguson, one of the top poker pros, who has recently been attempting to turn nothing into $10,000. He began by playing in the freeroll tournaments and amazingly he’s managed to not only achieve this goal but do even better than this. Starting off last year, his current balance stands at just under $23,000 at the time of writing.

There are many others who have achieved similar success so it’s definitely possible for people to make a lot of money from poker starting out with very little, or even nothing in some cases.

Before I address that question, let me start off by talking about data releases in more detail. As a trader the first thing you should do every day is consult an economic calendar to see what releases are scheduled for the forthcoming day. This will allow you to determine when you should be out of a trade if you don’t want to trade through them, or when to turn your computer on and be ready to trade if you do wish to trade them.

The best economic calendar in my opinion is at Forex Factory as this tells you not only what releases are scheduled for the day, but also the predicted and actual figures for each release, plus the importance of each one and the effect that they may have on specific currency pairs.

Different data releases affect currencies in different ways. For example, interest rate decisions and non-farm payrolls have a major impact on dollar currencies whereas other less significant data releases will hardly have an effect at all and will remain little changed.

So it’s best to arm yourself with all this information and be fully prepared for any scheduled releases, but can you profit from them?

Well in my opinion I don’t think you can consistently make profits trading the news as soon as it’s released simply because it’s extremely difficult to predict how the market will react to any given news.

For example, sometimes you will get seemingly bullish figures and expect the currency to go up, but it will do the complete opposite. Other times it will go up initially and then reverse as analysts and traders digest the news.

It really is an extremely difficult way to trade the markets, particularly for the individual trader working alone. Trying to second guess the market is a very dangerous game.

In my opinion there are far easier ways to trade the forex markets using solid technical analysis methods. You don’t need to trade during those times when market-moving figures are announced because all they will do is distort any technical analysis and make it very difficult to enter a trade with confidence.

Furthermore I always believe it’s best to exit trades in advance of economic data releases simply because prices can move very fast and your stop losses may not get filled at the price you requested.

I’m sure there are people who can make profits from news releases, but in my experience it’s extremely difficult and akin to gambling in some instances.

Let’s start by looking at the best time of the year to buy a property. Obviously if you’re looking for a potential property, then you obviously want to get the lowest price possible. Therefore the best time of the year to buy is when the market is at it’s most quietest, ie when there are less potential buyers out there looking and competing for properties.

If there are fewer viewers looking at properties then there will obviously be fewer people bidding for them which means you are more likely to be able to get an offer accepted well below the asking price.

So when are the best times to buy?

Well the market is significantly quieter during the winter months, particularly during December and January so this is an excellent time to buy.

There are generally slightly fewer properties on the market at this time, but if you do see a house you like, then you are more likely to be able to pick up a bargain.

Another good time to buy, but to a slightly lesser extent, is during the holiday season, ie late July through to the end of August, when most potential buyers take a rest from looking at properties to concentrate on their holidays. In general though the winter months are the best time to buy.

Now let’s look at the best times of the year to sell a home. Here we are obviously looking to receive the best price possible so we ideally want to put the house on the market when the market is most buoyant, so there are lots of people viewing and competing for properties, which drives the prices higher.

After the lull of the winter months, the market tends to pick up again from March onwards, so this is the time when you should be thinking about putting your house up for sale. In general, the spring and summer months up until the holiday season starts are the best times to sell because this is when the buyers are out in force and competing hard with each other.

This is good news for you as you can often set your asking price a little bit higher than the true market value knowing that there’s a good chance that people will pay a slight premium and pay at or close to a higher asking price in order to fight off any other potential buyers.

The next best time to sell your house is during the autumn months when the kids are back at school and the holiday season is over, but the only problem is that if you don’t sell during this time, you have to try and find a buyer and get a good price in the long winter months when the market is quieter.

So to conclude, if you’re looking to buy then the best time to do so is during the winter months and late summer, and if you’re looking to sell then you should have your home on the market during the spring and summer months if you want to achieve a higher asking price.