The Benefits of Forex Trading

Every investment has an element of risk, even online currency trading. However, trading on the Forex market definitely has some advantages. If you are new to the market, these benefits may actually surprise you.

Open 24 Hours

The Forex market is open 24 hours a day throughout the business week. It is open 24 hours a day because it is a worldwide market. The trading starts when the markets open in Australia on Sunday evening and close when the markets in New York close on Friday evening.

Low Transaction Cost

The typical cost per transaction is actually built into the price of the currency. In online currency trading, this is called the spread. Basically, the spread is the difference between the selling and buying price.

Leverage

Forex traders can use leverage when making their trades. This basically allows traders to use more money in their trades than what they actually have in their Forex account. This can be a great way to build your portfolio and profits when used carefully.

High Liquidity

In online currency trading, traders are allowed to move large amounts of money in and out of foreign currencies in virtually no time. With this liquidity, there is also minimal price movement. This is why Forex is so attractive to so many investors.

So Much Potential

The Forex market allows for so much profit potential as a result of the rising and falling prices, and because there is no restriction limit for directional trading. So, if you believe a currency pair is going to jump in value, you can buy it right away or wait.

The Basics of Trading Psychology

When you decide to make the leap into online currency trading, things will definitely change. Your whole psychology will change, in fact. So, what is trading psychology?

Trading psychology is the perception, or idea, that you have when you are actively engaged in online currency trading (or any kind of trading). Your trading psychology really comes to light when you are using your own money in the market, which definitely make things more exciting. Once you start to use your own money, you may feel nervous, indecisiveness, or have any range of other feelings: welcome to the world of trading psychology.

Trading psychology will definitely affect your trading. It influences your judgment while you are trading. There are emotions that can actually ruin your trading experience. The emotions that are likely to have a negative effect on your trading are fear and greed. Fear can make you miss out on some of the best trades, while greed can influence you to overtrade.

If you are going to engage in online currency trading, you need to learn how to beat your emotions. How do you handle your emotions when trading Forex? The best way to combat your feelings when making investments is to make a trading plan and sticking to it. Part of any good trading plan is well thought out, managing both the risks and helping you to stay in for as long as you can handle.

Safe Online Currency Trading

Though you may have read article after article about the benefits of online currency trading, it is absolutely essential that you understand that there is a level of risk involved. Follow these guidelines to minimise risks.

Set Limitations

Forex experts recommend that small investors or those new to the market should set limits on their trading. This should ideally be no more than a few percentage points of their overall portfolio. Limitations are intended to protect investors from a devastating loss.

Hedging Your Bets

One of the biggest risks that Forex traders take is overtrading. This often happens when investors trade a position that is just too big compared with the size of their account. Experts recommend never putting more than 5% or 10% of an entire account balance into a single trade. Overtrading often comes with a lack of online currency trading plans.

Limits are Important

Safe online currency trading definitely comes with limits. An excellent way to limit the damage you can incur is to set up stop loss orders that automatically exit the trade when a certain price level is hit.

Be Wary of Trading Programmes

If you are new to the Forex market, it is a good idea to avoid automatic trading platforms. This is especially true of those that promise huge gains in a short period of time. Safe online currency trading also comes with education. If you have never traded in the Forex market before, it might serve you well to do as much research as possible, start small, and perhaps even use a mock account for a while before dipping into your real money.

HY Markets

Company Information

HY Markets is based in London. It is registered with, and regulated by, the UK’s Financial Services Authority (FSA). HY Markets has 30 years trading experience. This large forex broker prides itself on giving its clients fast and direct access to the market.

HY Markets is part of Henyep Group. Henyep Group is a global conglomerate with companies in the financial services, property, education and charity sectors. It is present in 20 countries around the world.

Trading Platforms

HY Markets offers trading platforms that can be accessed online, through a desktop application and with a mobile telephone. Each of the platforms has a number of bespoke products, including live-feed price data, charts, up-to-date news and market commentary.

Account Types

There are three basic account types to choose from. The mini account is intended for relatively low-risk traders. It is typically used for low-sum or low frequency trading. The minimum trading sum is $50 (USD). The standard account is intended for traders seeking low spreads and small contract sizes. The minimum trading sum is $750. The premium account is meant for traders seeking a high risk, high reward environment. It has a maximum leverage of 200:1. The minimum trading sum is $2,500. The premium account comes with 24 hour customer service and has the most sophisticated precision dealing tools.

Start Trading

You can start trading with HY Markets after completing an online application form, funding your trading account and receiving an email confirmation of your login and account details.

GCI Trading

Overview

GCI Financial, better known simply as GCI, specialises in online forex brokerage. As well as being a long standing forex broker, offering client services since 2002, GCI has trading accounts dealing in shares, indices, futures and contracts-for-difference (CFD). More than 10,000 traders use GCI from around the world, including individual traders, fund managers and financial sector companies.

Recommendations

GCI has been frequently recommended and/or reviewed in leading financial sector publications and websites. Some of these include the Financial Times, Treasury Management and FX Week. In addition, GCI’s own analysis has featured in Reuters despatches and on the Multex.com site.

Benefits

GCI’s mission is to offer its clients top products for a low cost and with low margins. It has a secure back office fund administration and aims to provide products with potentially high profits. The key benefits of trading with GCI are its free commissions, leading trading software, swift trade executions, 24-hour customer service and quality trading tools such as real-time charts, free forex signals and bespoke analysis.

One of the major advantages of using GCI is that it guarantees that risk is restricted to the initial deposit sum. This applies even to leveraged trades.

GCI Accounts

GCI frequently offers bonus margins for new clients. You can choose from an ICTS forex, CFD/share trading or MetaTrader account. The minimum account opening sum is $2000. You can also open a free practice account, which allows you to experience the market free of charge. Practice accounts have $50,000 in virtual money.

Finotec

About Finotec

Finotec is a derivative and forex broker. It is a division of Finotec Trading Incorporated, one of the pioneers of online forex trading. Finotec first started offering online trading services in 1998. Finotec has clients around the world. Its main trading branches are in London (Finotec Trading UK), New York (Finotec Group Incorporated) and Limassol in Cyprus (Finotec Trading-Global Financial Trading Centre).

Finotec account holders can trade on the foreign currency exchange, commodity and equity markets. It also offers contracts-for-difference (CFD) trading.

What are the Benefits of Finotec Trading?

There are several benefits of trading with Finotec. Its offers leverage of up to 200:1. Leverage works by allowing traders to open positions with a nominal deposit sum, which is then magnified into a much larger stake.

The Finotec platform allows trading of up to 70 currency pairs (e.g. the US Dollar and the British Pound: USD/GBP) and a variety of commodities, stock and CFDs at the same time. The user interface is easy to understand. Selling, buying and placing stop orders can be done with one-click transactions.

Trading tools include real-time charts, a streaming news service, an online or telephone help service and optional SMS alerts.

Account Types

You can open a demo account to experience the real-time environment of the foreign currency exchange market and the Finotec trading platform. A sum of $100,000 is offered in virtual money, allowing you to place dummy trades and track their progress. A mini account is aimed at traders with relatively low trading budgets or those who wish to test their trading skills. A standard account is aimed at experienced traders.

eToro

eToro’s Investment Network

eToro is one of the largest forex brokers in the world. eToro has in excess of 1.5 million account holders in more than 130 countries, with an average 2000 new accounts opened every day. eToro is registered with the Cypriot Securities & Exchange Commission (CySEC). It is registered and regulated by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) in the UK.

Trading Features

Typical leverage ratios that you can trade with at eToro are 1:2, 1:5, 1:10, 1:25, 1:50, 1:100, 1:200 and 1:400. The minimum deposit to start trading with is US $50. Some of the key benefits of trading with eToro are the commission free deposits and commission free forex trading.

Traders can also get help from online chat support staff, guided forex trading tutorials and live training sessions. Economic news updates, charts and technical analysis are the other common tools to help traders navigate forex and monitor their own trades.

Account holders have full, real-time and direct control of their trading platforms. These can be accessed online or downloaded as desktop applications.

Linguistic Features

Accounts can be run in a number of different languages: Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.

Opening an Account

There are three easy steps to join eToro. First is an online registration. Second is to download the eToro trading platform to your computer. The third is to start trading by funding your account and placing an initial trading deposit.

Alpari

Alpari (UK) is a forex broker based in London. It is part of the Alpari group of companies, each of which provide online forex trading services. The Alpari group is based in more than 20 countries around the world, with offices in New York, Frankfurt, Mumbai, Moscow and Shanghai. In total, the group has in excess of 440,000 customers and more than $160 billion in trades (November 2010).

Alpari (UK) Ltd’s clients can trade forex, precious metals and contracts-for-difference (CFD). It is registered with, and regulated by, the UK’s Financial Services Authority (FSA). Alpari (UK) safeguards its client funds by keeping them separate from its own capital.

MT4

Alpari (UK) is one of the largest MetaTrader4 (MT4) brokers in the UK. MT4 is a leading forex trading platform around the world. It is designed to be as user-friendly as possible and has sophisticated charting tools. Alpari (UK)’s MT4 platform has a number of technical indicators, technical analysis software, and historical quotes for back testing.

Research Tools

Quality research tools provided by Alpari (UK) include the Alpari Squawk, a live audio market news service, and Autochartist, which is a sophisticated chart pattern recognition software.

Live Trading Accounts

Alpari (UK) clients can open Micro, Pro and Classic accounts. All three offer forex trading; the Classic account also offers CFD trading. The US Dollar (USD), British Pound (GBP), Euro (EUR), Japanese Yen (JPY) and Swiss Franc (CHF) are typical account currencies.

Tadawul FX Review: An Industry Leader

Tadawul FX is a Forex broker founded in Switzerland in 2006, though it has since relocated to Cyprus. They are licensed by the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission and also operate under frequent audit by Deloitte Ltd., which ensure that organisations fully comply with financial regulations. In a short span of time they have climbed to the top of the foreign exchange ladder, and now find themselves ranking on the shortlist of almost every reviewer’s compilation of the best Forex brokers. They were recently voted the Best Islamic Forex Provider of 2011 by World Finance magazine.

Tadawul FX operates mainly on MetaTrader 4, but they are one of the only Forex brokers that allow traders to test out the up-and-coming MetaTrader 5 beta on live accounts. This broker also provides account managers who are able to assist traders whenever they have issues or questions. Their offered 1:500 leverage is impressive for a brokerage of their size, and withdrawals and deposits are remarkably fast. Tadawul is part of the Investor Compensation Fund, which is an organisation set up by Cyprus’ central bank and guarantees all money entrusted to Tadawul.

Spreads with Tadawul hover around the industry average, starting at 1 pip. They allow hedging and scalping with no restrictions and provide customer support around the clock, five days a week. Their expressed dedication to social responsibility and integrity is just icing on the cake, making this Forex broker stand out as one of the foreign exchange market’s best and most respected leaders.

Interbank FX Review: Too Slow to be Viable

Interbank FX LLC is located in Salt Lake City, Utah, in the United States, and has been trading foreign currencies for close to ten years. They have a worldwide customer support system that serves over 35,000 clients in 140 different nations. Despite their broad customer base however, traders may want to overlook Interbank FX. Their trading platforms have many issues with connectivity that remain as of yet, unresolved.

Technical problems are plentiful at Interbank FX. Their servers often go down during peak trading hours and when the market becomes very volatile. This Forex broker only offers MetaTrader 4, which will surely be a disappointment for many traders who are looking for more substance and versatility in their pursuits. The benefits of using IBFX however come in the form of analysis and educational tools. There are several different pattern recognition programs that traders can use to predict where the Forex market is going, and consequently make informed decisions on how to profit from it. Featured on the website is a comprehensive demo account available for no charge, alongside eight different courses traders can take to better understand the industry.

Traders can begin using Interbank FX with a very modest initial deposit, but it is recommended that you pass this broker up. New accounts have a maximum leverage of just 1:50, and this combined with unresponsive platforms and withdrawal issues make registration with IBFX a risky endeavour.