fishball said:
You need to have a lot of money to get into Forex trading, the spreads alone would kill you if you weren't lol.
Wouldn't suggest going anywhere near Forex, try options/futures/CFDs/ETFs etc
Not really, a small amount of capital and good money managment is all thats needed.
Pixha IG markets is ok to use, you will need $1000 AU to start an account and after that i think you need about $200 in there minimum to keep it alive. Id suggest $5000 is a good place to start. There is also
www.easyforex.com.au which is easy to use and also has a web based trading platform, so you can load your account on any PC.
www.gft.com.au is another good one, has a charting programm which actually scans all the currency pairs and looks for patterns in all timeframes and lets you know how reliable each formation is, how long its expected to last ect, great tool to have!!!
Before you start getting demo accounts, beware of paper trading results, they do not reflect spreads/liquidity properly. When trading foreign currency you trade it in pairs as you probally already know. So if you think the Aussie dollar is going to strengthen you could go long the AUD:USD pair. Which means you have bought AUD and sold USD, and to end the trade you would sell the AUD and buy back the USD, hoping to profit off a rise in value of the AUD versus USD.
Most spreads on any given pair are two points ( called pips in the forex world ). So for a AUD:USD pair quote it would look like this.
AUD 1.0665/1.0667
Sell Buy
Its a very small spread, and for a $10k trade it would only roughly cost $2, there is no trade charge, just this spread commision. When trading currency pairs the standard size of a trade is called a 'lot', $100k of any given pair. However, most forex platforms now let you trade mini lots at a value of $10k each.
Forex is very hard to learn, id say harder than CFD's. It can be good to hedge other investments you own though. During the GFC the mining equiptment company CAT, made more money in forex than it did doing its actual primary business!
I talked to a farmer on his prospects of currency trading to offset his losses on the rising AUD, as it made his grain more expensive to export, he wanted to hedge $100k AUD so that any more rises in the AUD would mean he made profit on the trade and it equeled his losses on his grain price which he had to discount to get it sold.
Forex factory is an extremely good site to learn from, a forum of absolute geniuses. I followed a multi year thread of a guy trading the EUR:USD pair, basically going long the Euro and shorting the Dollar as it rose from 1.2 to 1.45. He done the classic buy the dips on the way up with a 50 pip stop loss. His excellent stratedgy during this however, was that in the event of the price going back down and hitting his stop loss, he would wait until the price finished going down even more, and would then open that position back up, so that when the trend continued back up, his original trade got picked back up with it.
He started at $300,00 in his account, hes an older guy so he has money, and turned it into a very large sum! He traded initially with 8 lots, so $800,000.
A typical forex margin is either 0.5% or 1%. So for you to hold a mini lot of $10k in value, youd only need $50 margin, very small!
Oh and also, view your charts in candlestick form, and dont go any lower than say the 10 minute timeframe, at this level and below the price is very volatile and inexperienced traders will get smashed. Most new ppl go to the 5 min and 1 min chart though, as it has alot of action and they get bored waiting for trade set ups, lol, i dont that when i started alot
Also dont trade because you fear you will miss out on profit, wait for your chosen signal to enter.
Hope that helps
All i can think of for now.
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