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"Faith
In The Market"
A Profile of Bernadette Addison
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Her Christianity has seen Bernadette Addison through some
challenging times and helped her bring up a family while maintaining
her career. Larry Levy talks to a woman of many parts.
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Bernadette Addison
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She’s brought up four children, held down a
full-time job and kept busy trading commodities and forex. Some day
soon, Bernadette Addison hopes to give up her IT job and trade
full-time from home, giving a fair proportion of the proceeds to her
church.
When Bernadette was 11, her mother converted to
the Church of Jesus Christ and she was baptised along with her
sister and two younger brothers. Shortly afterwards, her father
walked out of the family home and never returned.
‘Overnight I had to grow up,’ recalls
Bernadette. Her mother had to work and support the family and
Bernadette took on many of the domestic responsibilities. She was
also galvanised from being a middle-of the road student to top of
her class overnight. |
After studying at Columbia University in New
York, Bernadette qualified as a MCSA (Microsoft Certified Systems
Administrator) and held a string of network management, data
processing and IT jobs in a range of companies, including a
five-year stint at Swiss Re and four years at Chase Manhattan Bank.
Some of her jobs took her around the world.
Bernadette has always embraced change and
self-improvement. Not really a social type, she likes to think
things out and will often be by herself. In 1999 her brother Sean
O’Connor introduced his sister to trading.
These days Bernadette employs three software
packages and two data feeds to facilitate her trading style. She
uses VantagePoint (VP) software for trade signals. Her primary
technique is to wait for a crossover of the VP predicted short-term
Average (PTS) over the real short-term average on ‘faster’ markets,
including currency trades such as pound/dollar, euro/dollar/ and
Canadian dollar/US Dollar. Bernadette uses the crossover of the VP
predicted medium-term average (PTM) and real medium-term average for
‘slower’ markets such as wheat and corn.
She prefers intra-day to daily trades on
currencies due to the overnight risk on US time, where the
currencies can often make significant moves five hours ahead during
the London morning.
She uses trend lines combined with Fibonacci
retracement levels and pivot point techniques to trade forex. ‘I use
the trend-line breaks for likely direction combined with the various
pivot point and Fibonacci levels to give me my precise entry, target
and stop-loss levels,’ she explains. Her cash forex trading and data
feed come from forex market leader FXCM.
Two major lessons Bernadette has learned the
hard way on her road to success are to cut your losses quick – ‘a
$500 loss is better than a $5,000 loss – and that patience is a
virtue:. ‘Don’t be trigger happy. Wait for that trade,’ she says.
Throughout her career (and this includes
trading) her faith has driven her and the Addison family spends
Sundays church. Bernadette married Kirby soon after graduation and
inherited his two young children, Jason and Kirby junior. Since then
they have had two girls, Kirsten and Alicia, who are now 14 and 15
respectively.
Kirby junior, now 21, is in the US Army – about
to be posted to Iraq. Bernadette’s husband is now an assistant
pastor and is looking to open a local church in their neighbourhood
in New Jersey.
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