The recent furore over the Swiss National Bank’s former chairman is not just about banker behaviour – it is also focusing debate once again on banking secrecy.

At the heart of the affair is the leaking of confidential bank data detailing foreign currency exchange transactions by Philipp Hildebrand’s family in breach of Swiss banking secrecy laws.

Zurich police last week opened criminal investigations into two Swiss People’s Party cantonal parliamentarians allegedly involved in the transmission of the data to third parties.

And party vice president Christoph Blocher, who has made no secret of his involvement in alerting the government to suspicions about Hildebrand’s private financial activities, was also interviewed by the police about his role in the affair.

Read the full story at SwissInfo.ch.

I am currently re-reading "Mastering Foreign Exchange & Currency Options" by Francesca Taylor.

You probably already know that we will shortly launch a new FX Options section on Forexturtle and this is one of the books I read a couple of years ago when I first thought about offering FX options advice to our website.

I read almost 50 books and came to the conclusion that Taylor's book was one of the few I would take with me if I was ever stuck on a desert island. I covers such diverse topics as technical analysis, Spot, Futures, Options, hedging, and a comprehensive history of both economics and Forex necessary to understand the market. Of the books I have read, it is the best practical guide to understanding how banks, hedge funds and corporations arrange their currency hedging, minimizing their risk and increasing their opportunity for unlimited profit.

It's about 380 pages and written in a style that even trading beginners can appreciate. You can download a sample chapter or get a copy from FT Press.

Buy "Mastering Foreign Exchange & Currency Options".

This month, we are featuring Psych Yourself Rich, by Farnoosh Torabi. A nationally recognized author, Farnoosh's work has been featured in Money, Entrepreneur, and many other national magazines. She is the money coach for Credit.com, financial expert for LearnVest.com, and contributor at MoneyWatch.com.

In Psych Yourself Rich, Farnoosh shows how to develop the mindset, discipline, and habits to grow wealth and achieve your goals on your own terms--without fear, anxiety, misery, or too much sacrifice. Assets that can be invaluable to any Forex trader.

Farnoosh combines the latest approaches in behavioral psychology with a disciplined attitude to help you psych yourself into a place of financial well being. You’ll learn how to build a healthy view of money, investing, wealth, and aspirations...get beyond “lend-and-spend” to a deeper, more holistic view of money...discover why “he who dies with the most stuff” doesn’t win. Then, you’ll map out a personal plan based on what you really care about in life--and learn how to get in gear, move forward, and transform your plans and dreams into reality.

You can get a copy of Psych Yourself Rich at FT Press.

The long-awaited release of MetaTrader 5 is just around the corner and, believe me, it will be well worth the wait. There is no upgrade path from MetaQuotes' MetaTrader 4 trading platform to MetaTrader 5.  MT5 is a brand new platform and expert advisors, custom indicators, scripts or autotrading robots that run on MT4 will not be compatible with MT5.  

MT5 has a new integrated development environment called MQL5 which includes MetaEditor 5, MetaTrader 5 Strategy Tester and MetaQuotes Language 5 (MQL5).  



Execution speed is everything when developing autotrading scripts that sometimes need to crunch huge amounts of data in conjunction with real-time price movements. The new MQL5 boasts up to 20 times faster execution speed than the current MQL4 language that is used to develop custom EAs and indicators for MetaTrader 4.  

MetaQuotes has made significant improvements and enhancements in MQL5 over MQL4 that autotrader developers will probably appreciate much more than the average trader but will ultimately benefit the retail trader just as much.  MetaQuotes has made MQL5 an object oriented language which, for programmers, makes the development of EAs quicker, easier and more flexible. The MQL5 programming environment incorporates intellisense which, as most techies would agree, speeds up the development process.  It also has a built-in debugger for testing.

MetaTrader 5 Strategy Tester is the built-in test harness for expert advisors.  It enables a programmer to stress test a newly developed EA on historical data before releasing it to a real trading environment. Strategy Tester features a "beefed-up" reporting facility that not only detects weak points in an EA under development, but also compares its test results to other EAs. This makes for more accurate and efficient code and therefore, better autotraders.  The expert advisors and custom indicators produced by MT5 will be faster, more accurate, and more profitable.

Next, and interview with Stanislav Starikov, the chief developer for both MQL4 and MQL5.