Forex Trading and Investing

Archive for the ‘Beginning Forex’ Category

One essential that you must have when beginning currency exchange trading is an account with a forex trading broker. The broker is your link into the markets and will cover you to trade margins.

But how do you go about selecting a good one? Here are 5 points to take into account when you are shopping around for forex brokerage accounts.

1. Reliability

This operates on several levels. Firstly, of course, you want a broker that you can trust, who will not suddenly disappear from the internet along with all of your money. The forex market is broadly speaking unregulated, so there are a huge number of brokers and some are more trustworthy than others.

Your first step is to check that the broker is regulated. In the USA this means that you want a broker who is registered with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the National Futures Association (NFA). Look for a forex broker with a clean record in any complaints logged against them on the NFA site. Other countries have their own regulatory bodies.

Then you need to think about whether the broker’s platform is reliable. This is their software that you will connect with whenever you want to trade. If it is often offline, it is likely to cause problems for you. You could miss out on either opening or closing a trade at the best time. Check forex trading forums for feedback from users on this point, although be careful not to be swayed either way by a single individual who may have his own reasons for being strongly for or against a particular broker.

2. Services

The forex markets are open 24 hours from Sunday night to Friday afternoon EST. Check that your broker’s trading platform is available all of this time (most are) and that they offer 24 hour customer support on trading days too.

Check that they cover at least the seven major currencies USD, AUD, CAD, GBP, EUR, CHF, JPY. Again most will, but it is worth being sure.

A broker should offer you charts, technical analysis, and instant execution of your orders at the displayed price.

3. Costs

Forex brokers do not charge commission but make their money from the spread, which is the difference between the buy and sell prices on any currency pair. Spread can be anything from 1 pip or less, up to about 3 pips, depending on the broker and the pair.

The size of the slice taken by the spread can make the difference between profit and loss in your trading account in the long term so look closely at this. If you know which pairs you are likely to trade most often, the spread on those pairs will be more important to you than others. At the same time, do not be drawn in by a special offer that may not last long once you have committed your funds.

You also need to consider how much is the minimum that you can invest. Most new traders are best advised to start small, so look for a broker who will let you open an account with $250 or less.

4. Margins

Margin requirements can vary a great deal from broker to broker. A lower margin requirement means higher leverage, and higher leverage gives you greater profits or losses on the same fund size. So low margins seem great when you are doing well, but losses will be bigger if things go badly.

5. Lot size

Lot size can vary from one broker to another. Generally 100,000 units of currency is a standard lot, 10,000 is a mini lot, and 1,000 is a micro lot. Some brokers offer fractional lots which give you more power to set your own lot size. This could be a bonus or just an added complication.

There are other considerations including the interest paid on your margin account, rollover charges and other policies. However, these are the main points that you should be looking out for when choosing a forex trading broker.

The forex trailing stop is a stop that you can set in an expert advisor on the Metatrader 4 platform. It is pretty much what you might guess from the name: a stop loss that moves according to the current prices on the forex market. And a stop loss, of course, is a marker you set that will cause your MT4 expert advisor autopilot software (EA) to exit the trade when it goes against you to prevent you having any risk of a large loss.

But there are several things to be taken into account when you consider how to use the trailing stop. It is a little like a ratchet in that it can move up but not down. When you move into profit, it follows behind, moving up by the same number of pips that the market moved. But if the market falls, it stays where it is. So the market can rise and rise and you go on making more profit, but when it falls just a little way, the stop loss comes into effect and exits your trade with whatever profit or loss you made up until that point.

To give an example, you open a trade to go long. Of course at the moment of opening you are at point zero: 0 pips profit or loss. Let’s say you set your trailing stop at minus 30 pips. If you are unlucky and the forex market just falls and falls, the stop loss will kick in and close the trade for you at 30 pips down. But if the market rises, the stop loss will rise with it.

So when the market is 20 pips in your favor, your stop will have moved to 30 pips below that. If the market then falls and the price hits the stop, the EA would get you out with a loss of just 10 pips.

If the market rises to 40, the stop moves up to 10 above zero. You then have a guaranteed profit of 10 pips. In fact as soon as the market rises by the same number of pips as your trailing stop (in this case 30) you cannot lose.

Sure you could monitor the markets and operate this strategy yourself, but there is a risk of you failing to make your exit at the right moment and taking a greater loss than you planned, or having to exit a trade while the market is still rising because you have to sleep or whatever. So as long as you can leave MT4 running, an EA on autopilot relieves a lot of the pressure that would otherwise be on you in this situation.

The volatility of the market is the main factor in deciding where to set the trailing stop. You do not want to take a heavy loss but at the same time you do not want to have the stop triggered by random fluctuations in the market. A forex trailing stop that is too close to the starting price will be triggered so often that you could end up making constant small losses.

What is currency trading? It is something that sounds quite simple and many people speak about it as if the meaning is obvious, but not everybody knows what it really is and how it works.

Currency trading is also known as forex trading. Forex (sometimes written FX) is short for foreign exchange.

You probably know that the value of each country’s currency goes up and down according to how well the country is doing compared with others. So for example, the value of the Canadian dollar against the US dollar will be higher or lower depending on reports of the Canadian and US economies. The same thing happens with all other currencies.

Currency values are constantly changing, so a trader can easily deal in them to make a profit. He or she can buy when a currency is worth less and sell when it is worth more, just as a stock trader would do.

The difference is that where stocks have only one value, their value on the stock exchange, a currency has different values compared with each of the other currencies. So for example the Canadian dollar might rise in relation to the US dollar but at the same time it could fall in relation to the Japanese Yen, if the Yen rose even higher.

Principles Of Currency Trading

Most forex market trading is margin trading. This means that instead of buying the whole value of the currency, you can invest in only a percentage. This allows a small deposit to control larger amounts. The principle of it is that a currency is very unlikely to change in value by more than a certain percentage of its value.

To simplify trading, currencies are traded in what is called pips, or price interest point system. These are the units of trading. They give a standard for comparison as the currency values change relative to each other. So you will hear traders talk of a currency gaining or falling by a certain number of pips, rather than talking in dollar terms.

How To Make A Profit With Currency Trading

In order to make a profit with currency trading, you need to have some idea of the likely movements of currencies. This knowledge can be gained by analyzing the markets or by applying a system that experienced traders have figured out from their own analysis.

If you are a beginner it is probably better to be receiving your information and analysis from somebody with more experience at first. You can pick up a lot of different systems online and watch how each one does, or you can work with an automated system. These are known as expert advisers or forex robots, and they will make the trades for you when the time is right according to the settings that you have programmed.

If you use an automated forex system you do not need to know what is currency trading in so much detail, although as with all things, the more you know the more success you are likely to have.