Online Forex Broker - How to Recognize The One That You Need
Monday, January 4th, 2010Online forex broker is a firm that accomodate traders with online trading platform to buy or sell foreign currencies. By using these brokers services, a trader can access the 24 hours forex market. In this manner, picking the right broker becomes very vital phase if you want to participate in forex global trading.
By standard, these brokers are gain money through the difference between buy and sell price. For example: EUR/USD bid price is 1.4613 and ask price is 1.4616. If a trader makes entry to the market at that time he can either buy at price 1.4616 (ask) or sell at price 1.4613 (bid). In this case the spread is 4616-4613=3 pips.
An online forex broker will apply different spread for different currencies, so make sure you check this information on their website, especially the currency pair that you have interest in. Common currency pairs such as EUR/USD, GBP/USD, or EUR/CHF usually have low spread; about 2-4 pips. However, other currency pairs such as EUR/CAD, GBP/CAD, or GBP/NZD have spread from 6-17 pips.
Although most of forex brokers make their incomes through spread, there are also brokers that charge commission fee per trade in addition to their profit from spread. This fee is charged per lot. One lot equal to 10,000 units of currency; for example: 10,000 units are equal to USD 10,000; EUR 10,000; GBP 10,000; etc.
So, do you need $10,000 in order to enter forex trading? No; the current forex market is using leverage system. A 200:1 leverage means that you only have to deposit 10,000 / 200 = $50 in order to trade 10,000 units or one lot. In other words, if you use a forex broker that charges per lot, you will see missing from your profit each time you trade.
When you decide to use an online forex broker, you will gain access to their online trading platform. These platform will give you access to live price, chart, news, put take profit or stop loss order, execute a trade, and various other resources to support your everyday trading.
Based from various testimonials, not every trader can get used to a particular trading platform, so it is a good idea to test it first in a demo account for at least a week or so. I suggest you try a few trading platforms at once and see which one fit you the best. Remember to pay attention to how quick the platform executes your order.
Opening a practice account has other uses too. If you are an experienced trader and have certain strategies, you might want to test if the platform supports it or not; for example: hedging.
Hedge a trade is have buy and sell trades in the same currency open simultaneously. This method can be utilized by a trader to lock any loss trades that he has.
Example: a trader buy EUR at 1.4815, then the price dropped to 1.4785. Instead of closing the lose trade, he sell EUR for 1.4785 and thus lock the loss at 30 pips. Then he waits the market movements and hopes to avoid loss by closing the two positions at the right price. This strategy is very risky and most traders will just go for the stop loss order.
However, if you are a novice and still learning, I suggest to check eToro Review; they have very unique trading platform and system that designed to support anyone who are still learning to get better understanding of forex trading.
So here are what to check on an online forex broker:
1. How they gain their compensation; is it through spread? Or is it by spread and commission? Check the spread for your preferable currency pairs and if they charge commission, check the commission rate per lot.
2. Test the trading platform to make sure you are comfortable with the interface, has various resource to support your trades, execute your order in an instant, and the server doesn’t down too often.
3. If you have particular strategies that not commonly used, check if the trading platform supports the strategies or not.
4. If you are a forex robot user, check via live chat or email to make sure that they allow it. You can do this quickly by utilizing the live chat feature. There are some very good robots at the market currently and you may decide to use one of them someday, so I suggest you take the one that allows it.
Selecting the right online forex broker doesn’t has to be a complicated process; just test their platform and use the live chat feature to ask the rest of the questions. If you are a forex robot user or have plan to use it in the future, I suggest you to read 4XP Review as it is one of credible forex broker that allows forex robot.
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