Matters of the wage gap and
surrounding controversies have roared over the course of history. The issue is
an emotive topic in the world of contemporary business. While others justify
the need for that due to intrinsic gender differences, others have lambasted
this gap as it is discriminatory. The controversies are not about to end any
time soon, especially with the ever-growing complexity of the job market.
Globally, on average working males are paid higher than working females.
According to statistics in the US, females earn twenty-cent less for every
dollar a man earns. While this wage difference is seen as discrimination
against women, others argue that it is due to reasonable production factors.
The gender wage gap is determined by factors like differences in employment
choices between men and women, the disparity in work experience, education level
between both genders, and differences in the physical demands of jobs.
Employment choices vary
between women and men generally. Women, most of the time, choose flexible jobs
so that they can accommodate their motherhood/parenting responsibilities.
Unlike men, women will generally prefer not to work overtime out of preference
so as to spend more time with their families. This is especially in women who
have families and children. In terms of
overtime and extra work, men generally are flexible and will push beyond the
normal limits. As a result, it is okay for the wage bill to be higher in men as
compared to women. This cuts across developed and developing countries, and is
a common issue in the corporate sector.
For long, the corporate sector
has been male-dominated. The female empowerment drive has recently tried to
turn this tide, but the truth is that in the corporate sector, men outnumber
women, especially in executive and managerial positions. Gender equality in
the workplace is pushing to change these statistics and it will be expected
that in the future, the top managers and executives will have a 50/50 balance. As a
result of this gender disparity ion hiring and in managerial positions, it is
therefore normal to have a gender wage gap. Even in the lower cadres of
employment, men will generally dominate women in numbers. This is especially in
careers like engineering and fieldwork. The number disparity also translates to
a wage disparity.
Intrinsic physical and
physiological differences between men and women also determine career choices.
As a result, men will take roles that need intense physical strength and
manliness. It is not abnormal to get more men in the field, of engineering and in
the construction industry. This does not in any way allude to the fact that
women cannot work in these sectors. But generally, men will dominate some
sectors due to physical strength. Some careers will also favor women over men,
and even in some careers that do not necessarily depend on physicality, men may
take on some roles at a higher rate than women may. For instance, in medicine,
orthopedic surgeons have a male preponderance, as it requires strength and
power generally. Labor-intensive careers will attract more men and as a result,
the wage disparity between men and women in the job market is justified.
Moreover, these jobs that demand more will obviously pay and compensate more. Therefore,
an employed nurse who is a female earns less than an employed construction worker.
In conclusion, gender
wage disparity exists not because of intentional discrimination against women
but due to the fundamentals of production factors that run society. The kind of
wage disparity along the gender line is therefore appropriate. It will take
women doing this labor-intensive and physically draining jobs at an equal rate
as men for the wages to be equal. However, we also need gender equality in top
managerial and corporate positions so that women can also have a chance at
earning equally
There are several criminal defense lawyers available to assist clients facing criminal charges. True, criminal defense is a popular branch of the legal profession. Assessing your financial situation is the first step in locating the best criminal defense attorney. Following that, you'll need to collect suggestions and schedule meetings.
Consider the financial implications. The greatest criminal defense lawyers may charge up to $1,000 per hour, while inexperienced practitioners might expect to earn about $500 per hour. As a consequence, hiring the greatest legal team in the nation for your trial would cost several million dollars. If you lack that amount of money, you should prioritize obtaining the finest legal counsel possible.
Determine the budget for your defense. There are more considerations to consider, including the following: This is the maximum sentence that you might face if convicted. There are various reasons why you may not want to invest your family's funds on the finest available legal counsel if you are not going to jail or have a clean criminal record and are likely to get probation.
The family's intangible assets. How much cash and other liquid assets (bonds or stocks) do you have on hand? Is there anything that you could part with? You must determine how much money you can spend on defense at the maximum level.
How adamant you are about going to trial. Trial preparation takes a significant time commitment. Attorneys are obliged to conduct a second investigation of the material, interview witnesses, prepare exhibits, and address pre-trial motions. A lawyer's preparation for a trial may take up to 500 hours. All parties should be acquainted with the public defender system. You may be eligible to a public defender depending on your financial condition. The United States Constitution guarantees the right to counsel to anybody facing a sentence of more than six months in prison for a criminal offense. As a consequence, you must be in financial necessity to retain the services of a public defender. [2]
To be considered for the post of defender, applicants must complete a financial disclosure form. Request for the application should be made during your first court appearance. Acquire the necessary papers and submit the application as soon as feasible. After examining your information, the court will determine whether or not to assign a public defender.
Even if you fulfill all qualifying standards, you may be denied the right to "choose" your public defender. Due to a public defender office overflow, your case will be allocated to the next available public defender. You have the right to terminate your public defender's services if you are dissatisfied with their performance. You may, however, be eligible for limited legal aid, such as access to a law library or standby legal advice. Additionally, you may be obligated to take safeguards to ensure your safety.
Ascertain who the authorities are. There are perhaps a dozen criminal attorneys that specialize in a specific area of the law. If you're facing a DUI charge, for instance, you may choose to retain the services of a DUI attorney. On the other hand, some attorneys focus only on severe offenses such as murder and burglary. Others are only focused with sexual assault cases. It is critical to ascertain what is being stated about you. You may be charged with a single offense, such as driving while intoxicated (DUI). Other offenses include drug possession, assault, and burglary, all of which may result in criminal prosecution. It is critical to understand the full scope of the claims before contacting a lawyer. Examine your charging documentation to determine the offenses for which you have been charged. Consider if a plea bargain is the best course of action. You may enter a plea of guilty to the charge, which will reduce your fees. If you engage an attorney, you are not obligated to have them prepare for trial (unless your plea bargain falls through). Accepting a plea agreement may result in more career chances for you, since you can afford a higher hourly rate. Additionally, you should seek out a lawyer who has experience negotiating plea deals. Plea bargaining is a learned talent that may be enhanced.
Clients
want good quality on time at a considerably lower price in any profession most
of the time. For instance, in a civil engineering profession, a customer at
first can present you to work on a structural drawing. Then, after agreeing on charges,
they may later request your services for occupation hazard analysis at no cost.
As a professional, how do you deal with such a customer?
Your
first goal as an expert is to be professional at all costs, even when dealing
with stubborn clients. As such, effective communication can be employed as a tool
of choice so that you do not end up quarreling with customers or even getting
hurt or complaining of lower pay and much work.
With
emotional intelligence skills, you can politely tell him that the amount offered
is way below, and he needs to add money commensurate with the added tasks.
Here
is a sample you can always fall back to.
Dear
customer/ Client
I
am full of thanks for the opportunity to work on your order. However, after
checking the paper details keenly, I noticed that the academic level you had
paid for does not correspond to the complexity of the assignment.
Significantly, the paper requires knowledge on complex mathematical
calculations which are too long, characteristics of the level much higher.
Hence to comply with all the instructions, I will require additional payment. I
am eagerly looking forward to hearing from you
They pretty much teach you the same thing. Technical analysis (introduced below) and how to make a fortune. Surely, they contain valuable information and some are very good, but I recommend you to disregard the ones that mention “get rich” or “guaranteed profits” or show a Lamborghini picture in their presentations.
Now, before you start out in FOREX trading (or trading in general), consider the below no-no’s so that you start out on the right track:
Falling into emotional and cognitive traps.
There are emotional and cognitive biases that can hurt our results pretty badly. Here are a few selected ones:
Conservatism is when a trader is slow to react to new information and places too much weight on base rates. The way to deal with this bias to force one’s self to be skeptical of her basic analysis and to be always dynamic and ready for change. The market does not look too far into the past.
Confirmation bias is when the trader focuses on positive information and dismisses negative information. This is by far one of the most common ones and it is actually a normal state of mind that leads to overconfidence. By positive information, I mean the ones that seem to support the trader’s initial view. So, if the trader is bullish, she will only look at positive news on the security and disregard any bad news on the company.
Hindsight bias makes the inflicted overestimate her past accuracy and can lead to excessive risk taking. The majority of predictions are made with hindsight. This means that we can all look at past charts and conclude that the future direction was to predict. Most back-tests also suffer from what is known as look-ahead bias which is the hindsight equivalent of a systematic machine strategy. It is simply defined as the fact of including data that happened after the prediction point making it unrealistic.
Availability bias is about selecting investments based on how easily their memories are retrieved.
Loss aversion is by far the most common emotional bias that exists and it is the act of cutting gains too soon and losses too late out of fear of missing out. The best way to remedy this is to stick to a fixed risk-reward ratio and to automate the position-closing mechanism.
Overconfidence means holding concentrated positions and it generally results in trading excessively. A good streak does not mean that it will always be the case and thus, the trader must always follow procedures and ensure he does not stray from the strategy.
We have to make sure to keep our emotions under control by automating our risk management procedures.
Not sticking to your plan.
When you design you trading strategy and risk management system, you have to stick to it. Otherwise, you will not be able to properly evaluate your performance. Discipline is paramount with trading and the more disciplined you are to your trading system, the more you’re likely to succeed. A plan is what validates your choice to trade and consistency is what will make you improve over time.
Of course, if your system needs tweaking or improvements then it is absolutely normal to do so, however, doing so frequently will hurt your results over time. Make sure you make all reasonable efforts to create a robust system that is reviewed periodically and not before every trade you take.
Following other people’s recommendations.
I cannot stress enough how much this practice leads to capital loss. The problem does not just lie with the bad recommendations or scams, it lies with the fact that every trader has a different risk and holding period profile. Here’s a bunch of reasons why following signals and recommendations is a bad thing:
Scammers that claim 80–90% accuracy on their signals: Let’s face it, there is an abundance of scammers that want you to join their paying service and promise you astronomical profits and accuracy with their signals. Never believe this, no matter which screen capture they show you (I can easily make a fake demo trading account in a few minutes and then show you incredible profit then claim I can always do this). Take this seriously if you want to preserve your capital. Think about it, if these signal providers were so amazing in getting an accuracy that dwarves the big hedge funds and even the great Jim Simmons of Renaissance, then why aren’t they using their own signals to get rich? Why are they clinging to your $9.99 per month?
Different risk profile: Traders and investors can range between risk-averse and risk-seekers and as such, you are likely to be given a signal/recommendation that does not suit your profile.
Different holding period: The recommendation can have an expected time horizon of 1–2 years while you have a maximum of 1 month patience to hold the trade. Not to mention that some trades such as FX have costs over time.
Conflict of interests: This is self-explanatory. Ethical behavior and the absence of conflict-of-interest is key to providing good research and recommendations. Unfortunately, this is not the case in many retail and professional opinions.
You have to be very careful here and only use your own research. Signals and recommendations should not be taken as investment advice, they are simply the opinion of other people, and other people are not always right.
Using excessive leverage.
Leverage is a way to magnify profits but it is a double-edged sword as it can also magnify losses. Leverage is simply using borrowed funds to increase your position size that is naturally unobtainable through your current funds. If we use it wisely (i.e. not excessively and by respecting proper risk management practices), then leverage can help us achieve our goals quicker, but many traders are so tempted by the size of expected profits through huge leverage that they forget the equally huge expected losses.
FX retail trading generally has leverage from 50:1 to 400:1 which many would consider the latter as excessive. The most common leverage is the 100:1. Let’s explain that in a simple way.
Consider a standard lot on USDCAD of $100,000 that requires you to deposit 1% of margin. This means you have to post $1,000 in order to access $100,000. Hence a 100:1 leverage. The profits and losses are calculated on a $100,000 basis but you only have a capital of $1,000 to play with which means that profits can be high but that also losses can be devastating.
—————Now, What is Technical Analysis?—————-
Many try to involve it in pseudo-scientific practices. Technical analysis relies on Psychology, Maths, Statistics, and a bit of Fibonacci Ratios. It doesn’t predict markets using Saturn’s position relative to the Sun.
Technical analysis in layman’s terms is when you look at a chart, add some lines and calculations to it and try to project the future direction of the price, it is what retail brokers are promoting in their marketing techniques. It assumes that all you need for the future is historical data. Among other assumptions, technical analysis suggests that markets are not efficient (thus the ability to project the future from the past). The market efficiency hypothesis is the technical analyst’s greatest enemy as one of its principles is that in the weak form of efficiency, you cannot earn excess returns from technical analysis. Hence, technical analysis gets shot down at the very first level, and in the second level, fundamental analysis gets its share of the beating. It is fair to assume that at some point in the future, markets have no choice but to be efficient, let’s just hope now that we have enough time to take advantage of the fact that we are still able to use some techniques that enable us to extract some decent returns, and if we’re really good, more than decent returns, otherwise known as alpha.
Calculating autocorrelations of price returns in order to check whether there is a form of predictability shows that most financial returns data exhibit no significant autocorrelation (also called serial correlation), which in turn means that the past values have no predictive power. This theory is highly debatable and has many valid points but for us, alpha seekers, we are not very concerned with it. We remain focused on generating strategies, back-testing them in a correct way, and constantly updating them. The three main principles of Technical analysis are:
History tends to repeat itself.
The market discounts everything.
Prices move in trends.
It mainly originated from Japan, although it is also stated that it came from Amsterdam. With that being said, let us discover this wonderful must-have skill.
CHARTING ANALYSIS
The asset’s direction on a timeline axis can be threefold:
Uptrend: prices are making higher highs.
Downtrend: prices are making lower lows.
Range: prices fluctuate around the same level for extended periods of time.
Charting is the most basic technical tool. It relies on psychological levels that certain buyers observe carefully. Prices tend to stall while reaching a resistance level and can reverse afterwards. A support level is where a falling price may rebound on and eventually goes upwards. A trend line can be trending up or down and is the same as a support or a resistance except that it is not perfectly horizontal. Two trend lines engulfing the price chart (one from the below and one from the top) are referred to as a channel which can be up-trending or down-trending. These tools, if mastered, can be extremely powerful. It is worth noting that these levels work better at higher time intervals, for example a resistance level at an hourly time frame might work much better if on a daily time frame that same level is also acting as a resistance. A decent framework is to start through a top-down approach by charting on a monthly, then weekly, and finally daily time frame and see whether they confirm each other or not. A red flag should be raised when on a weekly level you find a support zone while simultaneously it is acting as a resistance level on a daily time frame. In that case, either adjust your trading horizon or wait for better confirmation. Acting on the levels should only be done with a lot of conviction and not just a hunch that the weekly may overwhelm the daily time frame.
Finding support and resistance levels can be of many ways:
Graphical: Simply tracing at least three points together gives you a support or resistance level.
Fibonacci: Retracements and projections are heavily used through Fibonacci retracements.
Pivot points: The simplest and most objective method is to calculate the support and resistance levels through Pivot points.
The below figure shows a support zone on the EURUSD pair. The 1.05 level has been acting as a very obvious and powerful support zone through empirical evidence and psychological observation. Regarding the second reason, some levels can be inferred with an adequate confidence interval if they are well-rounded. For example, an asset that trades between $70 — $120 might have something going on at exactly $100. It can be a powerful level of either support or resistance (depending on the position of the price relative to it), also a currency pair that trades between the range of 0.990 and 1.100 will probably have traders positioned at exactly 1.000.
A support level on EURUSD which clearly shows a tradable zone around 1.05. The zone is as technical as it is psychological. A level that has been respected at least three times is considered a strong level and has a high probability of changing the course of the price when encountered again.
The following figure shows a resistance zone on the same chart. The psychological and empirically evidenced level of 1.15 is acting as a good resistance level. Each time the price approaches that level, it stalls or reverses course completely.
Resistance level on EURUSD. As with the previous chart, the 1.15 level is also psychological and can be apparent to many market participants which adds further conviction to its success probability.
The next figure shows a channel (a price surrounded by two trend lines). This is the equivalent of having both a tilted support and a resistance level that engulf the price. Notice how the price has been contained for a period of time inside the channel. A powerful trading strategy would be to search for a double confirmation from a horizontal support/resistance as well as a reversal level from a channel.
Price channel on EURUSD that has been broken to the downside and provided a brief short opportunity before fundamentals most likely took the lead and pushed the trend upwards. Of course, even technically speaking, the 1.05 level is considered a major support zone.
LINES AND CANDLESTICKS
The two most common charts are line charts and candlestick charts. Both should be used together. We will omit discussions on bar charts due to their less-important features when compared to candlesticks. For example, when we are tracing supports and resistances, it is better to use line charts to accurately detect the closing prices that touch the lines (levels). After having done that, switching to a candlestick chart is a must, in order to understand the market behavior and search for candlestick patterns that could confirm or defer our views. Line charts are intuitive, it is what we get when we draw lines from the closing prices’ points in the time axis.
Candlesticks are a practical and easy way to understand the sentiment and the state of the market. Four basic information can be found when looking at a candle, the open price, the closing price, the high, and the low of the day (or week, month, etc.). Below is a simple representation of a bullish and a bearish candle.
Bullish candle in white and a bearish candle in black. The sticks on the above are the highs and the sticks from the below are the lows of the period.
One of the very first things we should do is identify the trend. Visually, it can be easy and by practice it will get easier but there is also a way to quantify this view. Moving averages help us determine the trend of the asset and to time our re-entries. How they work is pretty simple, imagine you have 20 datasets and you want to calculate a 4-period moving average. The way you do this is by simply taking the average of the first 4 values, then you will ditch the first value and calculate the average of the second value until the fifth value (hence, a 4-period average), and so on and so forth. The concept is pretty simple and is very helpful for certain trading strategies, especially automated ones. The major drawback of moving averages is that they are lagging, because they smooth out prices, they tend to recognize reversals a bit late. This is the same as forecasting the past and therefore not very helpful when used alone.
EURUSD chart with moving averages. When the short-term moving average (light grey) crosses the long-term moving average (dark grey) from the below, it is referred to as a golden cross and signals a bullish change. The other way around is called a dead cross and signals a bearish shift.
Another type of moving averages is the exponential moving average. It is generally better-suited for trading and has less lag as it gives more weight to the last values and thus emphasizing the present at the expense of the far past. It is up to the trader to decide which one fits his or her style although the simple moving average is the most common one. The two do not differ by much but sometimes they are the edge between buying and selling. They nevertheless, remain lagging indicators. They are also used for position accumulation, for instance, if you are long an asset, and it keeps going up until at some point it reverts back to test its moving average or a new support zone (after having been a resistance before being broken by the uptrend), then it may be a good buy re-entry point if you are still convinced by your long bias.
From left to right: 200-Day simple moving average, 200-Day exponential moving average.
Two moving averages can be used together to form a more adequate strategy. If the short-term moving average crosses the long-term moving average from the below, it can be seen as a buy signal and the beginning of an uptrend. However, moving averages are terrible in ranging markets, they provide no useful information as prices go right through them.
