The LCHF diet is very much like the Atkins diet, or any other low carb diet that you have heard of but without costing you a lot of money.

In fact, you do not need to buy any new literature, nor do you need a personal trainer. What you need is to focus. Below follows a brief and precise list of what you need to know and what results you can expect using the LCHF diet to lose weight.

Losing Weight With the Low Carb High Fat (LCHF) Diet

So, let’s cut to the chase. What kind of weight loss can you expect from using the LCHF diet? All of these data depends on a lot of circumstances but in general, if you weigh around 180 pounds, you can expect to shed at least 10 pounds in two weeks’ time.

Can it really be true? Yes.

So, you might be wondering, how do I lose 10 pounds in two weeks? Well, by shifting your diet to exclude carbs. It doesn’t come with too much trouble, though the first couple of days can feel tiresome and you may experience fatigue and dizziness. It goes without saying that before you try any diet you should consult with your physician if you are worried. Please make sure you read through the disclaimer of this site as well.

Day 1 – 3: Your diet should consist of meat, eggs, fish, and vegetables. Please note that potatoes are NOT vegetables. You must exclude potatoes, rice, pasta. Basically, when you feel yourself only eating the main course, and not the customary side dish, you know you are doing it right.

During these first days you will probably drop as much as 3-4 pounds. This is because your body is now ridding itself of all excess water that was tied up by carbs.

During the first three days you will also feel dizziness and can also experience a not so nice taste in your mouth. This is because the body is reacting to not getting carbs, starting a process in your body called ketosis.

Day 4 – 14: Albeit a bit boring, you will find that the last 10 days of the diet is vastly easier to get through than the first three. This is because your body is now burning fat where it used to burn carbs. You will probably see about half a pound drop a day. Don’t worry if you stand still 2-3 days in the middle of this diet. It is perfectly normal. You will continue to see how the scale shows a smaller and smaller figure as the days go by.

So, after 14 days you will have lost up to 10 pounds, if you started on 180 pounds. Losing weight easily is actually possible with this method, since your sense of hunger stays very low during the entire course of the diet. Good luck!

The RSI indicator uses the closing prices of completed trading periods to determine who owns the momentum in the market. It assumes that prices close higher in strong market periods (bull markets), and lower in weaker periods (bears owning the scene) and computes this as a ratio of the number of higher closes to the lower closes during a certain period of time, most commonly used is the period of 14 days.

Most stock charts packages out there today include the RSI indicator. Here is how it is calculated manually.

RSI = (100 – (100 / (1 + RS)))

Seems simple enough, but the RS part need to be calculated first.

RS = 14-day EMA of upday closing gains / 14-day EMA of downday closing losses

EMA stands for Exponential Moving Average and is used to smooth out an average of a series of values. So what we want to do here is to take a 14 day exponential moving average of the upticks days and downtick days respectively. This is typically done by taking the latest 100 tradingdays, going through them and finding out which ones of the where updays and downdays respectively, and then calculate the moving average using 14 days as parameter. Note! To calculate EMA, see this article. It’s quite easy.

Applying the RS in the first RSI formula, will give you a value between 0 and 100.

The real challenge with Relative Strength Index is to know what boundaries apply for when a market is overbought and oversold respectively. This is the real trick and usually only comes to you after having studied a market thoroughly. Then, and only then, do you know where it usually turns and can thereby learn to recognize when a new turn is coming.

Common rule of thumb levels for RSI are 20 for oversold and 80 for overbought, but that is just as a rule of thumb and will inevitably vary between markets and stocks.

We have deliberately narrowed it down to these two candidates as the other players in the Xen based, unmanaged hosting space is simply not in the same league as these two. This is our opinion after having spent time with more than 10 Xen based hosts in this market space.

We’ll be looking at the performance, the availability of OS + Software, Support, Communities, the dashboards, and the pricing structures.

Please note that we are not affiliated with either of these two companies.

Slicehost – a Firsthand Experience

Getting started with Slicehost is very easy. We went about this by first testing the availability of the community and the willingness to answer so called newbie questions. We tried their online chat – which has a very nice and intuitive interface – as well as the IRC channel and our questions were answered promptly, even enthusiastically, in all except one case. There was no one, not even when we asked the three Slicehost representatives, who could answer our question on why Slicehost only offers 64-bit versions of all their setups.

Signing up was a breeze, paying $20 for their most basic plan with 256MB ram, 10GB storage and 100 GB bandwidth. The dashboard is very clear and intuitive and comes with mobile apps as well, so you can restart your slice if need be from your iphone. Nice, and not half as unnecessary as you might first think.

You get to choose between a number of OS’s ranging from Ubuntu 9.10, Debian Lenny (5.0) to CentOS, Gentoo and Fedora. As mentioned earlier, only the 64-bit installations are available which is quite noticeable in the memory footprint. This is the first negative aspect we come across at Slicehost.

Support and Community at Slicehost

All basic processes, such as seting up your slice for the first time, setting up IP-tables, installing MySQL, PHP, and Apache, or even Nginx, is very well documented at the article repository at Slicehost. It’s nearly impossible to go wrong and you are quite quickly up and running by just following the available walkthroughs. Very nice.

Questions in need of immediate attention, albeit not critical, are swiftly answered by the community available on IRC. The forums are made up of a Vanilla Forums software installation, which is really sub-par from any and all angles, and not terribly active either. vBulletin is standard and would really have been to prefer here. It’s in no way a dealbreaker for us since there are so many other ways of getting help when you get stuck.

As mentioned earlier, the Slicehost support is very eager to help. They answer quickly and promptly and have a very professional attitude. All pluses there.

Hardware, Uptime, and Performance at Slicehost

A Xen based VPS is really the best you can get, given that the underlying hardware is good. With Slicehost, you get a very stable and good performance. Although, when compared to Linode, the server could feel just a tad snappier. Linode made us nearly gasp, while Slicehost was more of a “Nice, it’s really responsive and fast”.

BYTE UNIX Benchmarks (Version 4.1-wht.2)
System -- Linux NNN GNU/Linux
/dev/sda1              9805144    505864   8801216   6% / 

Dhrystone 2 using register variables        376783.7 15418279.0      409.2
Double-Precision Whetstone                      83.1     1123.6      135.2
Execl Throughput                               188.3     3249.3      172.6
File Copy 1024 bufsize 2000 maxblocks         2672.0   119098.0      445.7
File Copy 256 bufsize 500 maxblocks           1077.0    34802.0      323.1
File Read 4096 bufsize 8000 maxblocks        15382.0   916381.0      595.7
Pipe Throughput                             111814.6   960661.8       85.9
Pipe-based Context Switching                 15448.6   254661.7      164.8
Process Creation                               569.3     7911.5      139.0
Shell Scripts (8 concurrent)                    44.8     1226.8      273.8
System Call Overhead                        114433.5  1051339.6       91.9
                                                                 =========
     FINAL SCORE                                                     212.8


As you will see, Linode has better figures, but these aren’t bad. A Slicehost basic slice will definitely host between 5-10 “normal” wordpress sites, or 3-5 Joomla sites with traffic ranging between 5,000 – 15,000 pageviews / day in total.

The uptime during our testing – which lasted 30 days- was impeccable. Zero downtime, without the slightest hiccup.

When testing the slice with some simulated traffic, it got a peak load figure in TOP on 11.14 which is very good. Some of the non Xen based VPS’s we’ve tried this with have gone to 40 and then become unresponsive. This did not happen here.

The hardware seems OK but how CPU’s are handled and shared among the slices is still somewhat of a mystery. However, it didn’t pose a problem to us during the testing.

All in all, the performance and uptime meets our expectations.

Linode – Review and Firsthand Experience

Let’s face it. The first impression at Linode is not as good as with Slicehost. It simply feels like the “cousin from the countryside” with a little less appeal to the eye. Don’t let that fool you for a minute. Our testing showed Linode to be very tough to beat; in any of the tested areas.

Signing up was easy and every bit as simple as with Slicehost, with people who seems married to the Linode IRC channel answering even what must be the most annoying newbie questions we could think of. Kudos to the people on the Linode IRC channel for that.

We chose the basic Linode 360 plan with 360 MB RAM, 200 GB Bandwidth, and 16 GB Disk space. Linode basically has the same plethora of OS’s to choose from as Slicehost with the added benefit of having 32-bit versions for all of them, as well as 64-bit. As we cannot find any valid reason to go with 64-bit at this point in time, it saves us nearly 50% of RAM in idle mode for a Debian Lenny installation. It sits in our Linode on just 18 MB RAM tied up. Nice. Very nice.

Support and Community at Linode

While Linodes article repository is not as impressive as the one at Slicehost, the Linode Dashboard has Slicehost beaten hands down. We’d wager that even the greenest of newbies would feel well at home in this excellent dashboard. You handle anything from DNS Zones to a virtual SSH client. Sure, this is available at Slicehost as well, but so much better and thought through user experience at Linode.

Support answers questions quite promptly and quite thoroughly. Slicehost gave us more of the royal treatment in this area, but it is in no means a dealbreaker for Linode.

The community forums is based on phpbb. It feels very ‘inside baseball’ and initiated. Not as many newbie questions here to find answers for as with the forums over at Slicehost. The forum software doesn’t really give you any encouragement to start a thread either. Could be a lot better, but just as in the case for Slicehost, you get your answers fast and promptly from Support or IRC.

Hardware, Uptime, and Performance at Linode

We had a hunch already when having run the installations and seen the thorough setup of the Linode Dashboard that it would be something totally different than what we’d seen before at other VPS’ including Slicehost. We were not disappointed.

BYTE UNIX Benchmarks (Version 4.1-wht.2)
System -- Linux NNN GNU/Linux /dev/xvda 16384952    420060  15469440   3% / 

     FINAL SCORE                                                     290.2

Simply put, Linode is the fastest VPS host we’ve had the pleasure of test running.

Slicehost was very good. Linode is in another division. The console even feels snappier. We were simply blown away.Our figures tells the story as well.

The uptime was impeccable. 30 days out of 30 with no glitches.

A basic linode 360 will without a doubt host 10-15 wordpress sites or 7-10 Joomla sites having between 20,000 – 30,000 pageviews / day in total.

When testing our linode with some simulated traffic, it got a peak load figure in TOP on 6.14 which is outstanding. As mentioned in the Slicehost review, some of the non Xen based VPS’s we’ve tried this with have gone to 40 and then become unresponsive. This did not happen here.

All in all the uptime and performance of Linode exceeds our expectations.

Conclusions

If you have read through the above reviews of Slicehost and Linode, it will come as no surprise that we’ll chose Linode as the winner here. Slicehost is by no means bad, not at all, it’s just that Linode –currently – is better.

What is very good – in both of these cases – and quite unique, is that with these very basic setups you get very potent virtual machines to host basically production ready apps. This is far from the case with most other VPS offerings out there. What is often neglected is the fact that a basic setup has so little CPU, and is hosted on a very busy machine, so it almost feels unresponsive in comparison to Slicehost and Linode based VPS.

We can warmly recommend both Slicehost and Linode. Slicehost may be the winner in the “responsive support” category. Linode takes the prize in almost all other categories including performance and value for money.

Please note that we are not in any way affiliated with either Slicehost or Linode. This is a subjective review and we advise you to test both these companies before settling with any of them. We take no responsibility in the accuracy of the above figures.

Here is how to calculate it manually which also adds to the understanding on how it works.

In this example we shall calculate EMA for a the price of a stock. We want a 22 day EMA which is a common enough time frame for a long EMA.

The formula for calculating EMA is as follows:

EMA = Price(t) * k + EMA(y) * (1 – k)

t = today, y = yesterday, N = number of days in EMA, k = 2/(N+1)

Use the following steps to calculate a 22 day EMA:

1) Start by calculating k for the given timeframe. 2 / (22 + 1) = 0,0869

2) Add the closing prices for the first 22 days together and divide them by 22.

3) You’re now ready to start getting the first EMA day by taking the following day’s (day 23) closing price multiplied by k, then multiply the previous day’s moving average by (1-k) and add the two.

4) Do step 3 over and over for each day that follows to get the full range of EMA.

This can of course be put into Excel or some other spreadsheet software to make the process of calculating EMA semi-automatic.

To give you an algorithmic view on how this can be accomplished, see below.

public float CalculateEMA(float todaysPrice, float numberOfDays, float EMAYesterday){
float k = 2 / (numberOfDays + 1);
return todaysPrice * k + EMAYesterday * (1 – k);
}

This method would typically be called from a loop through your data, looking something like this:

foreach (DailyRecord sdr in DataRecords){
//call the EMA calculation
ema = Formulas.EMA(sdr.Close, numberOfDays, yesterdayEMA);

//put the calculated ema in an array
m_emaSeries.Items.Add(sdr.TradingDate, ema);

//make sure yesterdayEMA gets filled with the EMA we used this time around
yesterdayEMA = ema;
}

Note that this is psuedo code. You would typically need to send the yesterday CLOSE value as yesterdayEMA until the yesterdayEMA is calculated from today’s EMA. That’s happening only after the loop has run more days than the number of days you have calculated your EMA for.

For a 22 day EMA, it’s only on the 23 time in the loop and thereafter that the yesterdayEMA = ema is valid. This is no big deal, since you will need data from at least 100 trading days for a 22 day EMA to be valid.

MetaStock is one of the oldest software applications for stock charting and technical analysis out there. It’s now at version 10 and has gotten most of the necessities of what can be expected from a stock trading software application.

Wealth-Lab is, relative to MetaStock, a newcomer on the block. It calls itself the ultimate trading system development platform. Together with the web representation of all of its function, it presents an impressive set of functionality for proffesional as well as enthusiastic amateurs of technical analysis.

Stock Trading and system trading software is traditionally not good looking. One would imagine the user interface of a trading application to be impressive and very savvy.  That is unfortunately not the case. Both MetaStock and Wealth-Lab has Windows 3.1-like toolbars, and where Wealth Lab may be very good for trading system development, it certainly could do with a UI overhaul.

Indicators, Trading Systems, and Back Tests

MetaStock trading software is based on indicators, providing the user its own meta language to develop your own technical analysis indicators. It’s quite OK in this area and for someone who wants a trading software package with a lot of built in Trading Systems for back tests and indicators, MetaStock does alright.

Wealth-Lab takes technical nerdry to meet technical analysis with its Trading Software with the same name. Being fully developed in Delphi, it uses the core language of Pascal for anyone who wants to develop a Trading System. Indicators are not regarded in the same fashion as you would be used to using MetaStock.

EOD-Trading vs. Day-Trading

Both trading software suites offer an End-of-day Trading version and MetaStock also offers a special Intra-day Trading Solution.

Community

When it comes to what Trading Software comes withthe most active community, Wealth-Lab wins this hands down. With a very active community, along with having all functions of the windows platform trading application, Wealth-Lab Trading Software provides a web worthy of a price, had their been any for dedicated followers.

Conclusion: Trading Software Comparisons

Deciding who comes out on top comparing the two Trading Software applications Wealth Lab and Equis MetaStock comes down to how computer savvy you are, and how much amateur software-look-and-feel you can take.

If you like a standard package with most basic support for the beginner technical analyst to the enthusiastic amateur trader, MetaStock might be for you.

If you are as enthusiastic about your Trading as you are with your computer and programming, Wealth-Lab will be the trading software for you.

The MetaStock software for technical analysis brings more than 10 years of experience of building charting software for traders. With support for building your own system for trading, the scanning system called MetaStock Explorer, and Expert Advisor to help you interpret the trading signals you get, it’s comprehensive enough to cover the basic needs of a beginning trader.

MetaStock comes with over 150 indicators together with the possibility to build custom indicators for technical analysis. It allows for extensive back testing of your own trading systems with its MetaStock Enhanced System Tester.

MetaStock support technical analysis for trader’s in stocks, futures, and forex trading.

MetaStock Review and Opinions

The Good MetaStock adds built in trading signal support and decent explanations for traders who are just starting out trading. The back testing using MetaStock Enhanced System Tester is very easy. It’s quite simple adding your own indicators or tweaking the existing technical analysis indicators. Although we didn’t try it for forex, it should be working for both forex, stocks, and futures, just as promised.

The not so good Compared to many other back testing capable charting software out there, MetaStock falls a bit short in speed and in displaying the results of your back tested trading systems. The UI still lacks trader savvy in our opinion, and it could have even better built in support for traders who want to use a quote source online.

The bottom line MetaStock has been around for a long time for a reason. Any trader, whether it’s forex or stocks or derivative trading should be able to benefit from it. If you want extensive back testing of your own developed trading systems, or portfolio testing you might want to look elsewhere.

No matter what charting software you choose, we wish you good luck on your trading. Feel free to contact us if you have any opinions on this MetaStock review or want to write your own reviews.

Most private savings strategies can be said to be buy-and-hold strategies.

The term is mostly used in combination with trying out trading systems using some kind of technical analysis software.

The oppositoe of buy-and-hold is short term based trading such as swing-, momentum-, or contrarian trading, all part of day or near day trading strategies.

Exponential Moving average is together with its simple counterpart (MA) considered to be one of the most common Indicators in nearly any technical analysis software available in the market today. It’s a trend following indicator and is calculated like so:

EMA = Price(t) * k + EMA(y) * (1 – k)

t = today, y = yesterday, N = number of days in EMA, k = 2/(N+1)

For a complete walkthrough of how to calculate an EMA, see our EMA-walkthrough.

Exponential Moving Average is a trend following indicator.

Shorting is defined as an activity where one person borrows a certain number of stocks, sells them, and after a while buys them back to keep the difference in the price gotten when selling them and buying them back. Confusing? Here’s an example procedure for shorting stocks.

Shorting Example

1) Joe believes the market is about to take a down turn. He belives Goldman Sachs (GS) will drop in price and therefor borrows 1,000 shares from his online broker.

2) Joe immediately sells the stocks that he borrowed for $100 / share.

3) Joe receives the money – $100,000 minus commission.

4) One week later (doesn’t have to be a week, it can be 5 minutes or 10 weeks even) GS has dropped to $90 / share and Joe buys 1,000 shares of GS paying $90,000 + commission.

5) Joe gives back the GS shares he just bought to his online broker that lent him the stocks to begin with.

6) Joe have made a $10,000 – commission for two deals in profit from GS dropping from $100 to $90 per share. He also need to deduct a cost for borrowing the share to his broker.

So, the above procedure outlines what shorting stocks is all about; making money from a price reduction in a stock or index. However, the keywords to take note of here, before going out to your broker and wanting to short stocks are high risk and hidden costs. Let’s examine the costs on the transactions taking place in our example above.

In the example, Joe needs to pay commission twice and also need to pay interest rate for the borrowed stocks. So, more realistically, a profit for about $9,000 in total is more like it. So, in order to make any real money from shorting stocks, you need to have a good amount of money to begin with, to not get eaten by interest rates and commissions.

Alternatives to Shorting

We’ve concluded that shorting is risky business. If the market turns against you when in a short position, you get hit in more than one way since the interst rate on the borrowed stock is ticking away.

So what’s a regular joe to do?

Well, instead of trying to trade like a proffessional, you can take the safer track going with Exchange Traded Funds so called ETF’s that have gained hugely in populraity of late. There are ETF’s for both bulls and bears and with various leverage fitting your risk profile.

Now you should know what shorting means and how to go about it should you want to try it. Be careful though, shorting is very risky.

A buying signal is gotten from MACD when the MACD line crosses the 9-day trigger EMA. In turn, a sell signal is gotten from the reverse. It’s however always important to remember that an indicator showing good entries rarely shows good exits. If you find MACD to give you good entries, then you can almost be certain that you can find other indicators to help you find the best exits.

As stated above, MACD measures the difference between two EMAs. A positive MACD means that the 12-day EMA is above the 26-day EMA. If MACD is positive and rising, then the gap between the 12-day EMA and the 26-day EMA is increasing. This is considered bullish as the rate-of-change of the faster moving average is higher than the rate-of-change for the slower moving average.

Constructing a MACD is really quite simple, as soon as you know how to calculate moving averages.

For any given stock or underlying security:

1. Calculate a 12 day EMA of closing prices

2. Calculate a 26 day EMA of closing prices

3. Subtract the longer EMA in (2) from the shorter EMA in (1)

4. Calculate a 9 day EMA of the MACD line gotten in (3)

That’s it. You now have a MACD line (gotten from the subtraction in 3) and a 9-day EMA of the MACD line. In the image below, the MACD line is the thick black line, and the 9-day EMA of it is the red line.

When plotting the MACD, it usually comes with a histogram as well, as can be seen in the image.

This is gotten from subtracting the 9-day EMA line from the MACD-line. The slope of the MACD histogram shows what crowd is growing stronger. A rise in the histogram above zero shows bulls getting stronger, and vice versa.

When to Use MACD

MACD lines follow trends, so any time of trending sees very good results from using MACD as opposed to very choppy trending times, when it will likely cause for erroneous entry calls. It is especially good for determining when to enter a market.

How To Use MACD

As already stated, the crossovers of the MACD and the MACD 9-day EMA marks entries and exits. However, it’s also important to watch the histogram closely. When the histogram is in negative territory, but have turned upwards, it is usually good to keep an extra for possible early entries. Likewise, if the histogram plots a high bar above the rest, it shows how strong the bulls are and even if a minor decline is imminent it is probably not time to sell, since this has marked a very strong bullish sentiment for the underlying security.