Hi everyone, Have been interested in trading foreign exchange for a while but haven't really gotten my head around it. Started a couple of demo accounts on online trading sites but I think cos it wasn't real money I didn't try learning hard enough hehe. So just wondering if people can help me out where to find good info about how it all works? So much info out there no idea where to start. Looking for peoples recommendations for a good trading site and some links on tutorials or info how to start trading. Sorry if this sounds like I want it all on a silver platter - just want to narrow the field a bit.
If you wanna play with PAPER might as well trade Silver CFDs - at least you are more in touch with the silver market than with the forex. You get leverage with CFDs too.
Cool - thanks for the advice - Just looking at this website http://www.igmarkets.com.au Seems to offer alot of help and looks like a good place to trade? Got any experience with that or know of a better place to start off? They don't seem to require a $$ minimum to open an account and start trading
I'm not into trading forex atm, but Oanda.com have the tightest spreads I've found, and they publish their orders/positions data. The XAG/USD pair is silver.
No experience, I was interested during the boom times prior to GFC, not as much with Forex but with Options - but never ended up doing it. But Forex is probably the last derivative market id recommend. id rather do options & cfds.
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
CFD's look like the go just have a lot of learning to do - but I figure I spend enough time on the internet might as well try and make some money out of it
Anyway this is probably off topic now. Will look into CFD's as it seems like a better option for me. Thanks for the advice.
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.
I actively trade forex at the moment. There are many ways to trade the fx market, and you need to find a system that works for you and suits your personality style. I personally did not like CFD's, and only dabbled in them a very short while before I decided it was not for me. There is a wealth of information on the internet but not all of it is good and/or useful. The fx market does not need to be complicated and a simpler approach is often easier and far more profitable. I would not say I am a consistently profitable trader and I am only learning myself still, and envision I will be learning for a while longer yet. The comment about trading demo accounts is correct and while they are good to get familiarity with a platform or the market, I would generally avoid them. You cannot learn if you do not have skin in the game as the saying goes. You do not need to start with massive sums of money a few hundred is all you need. Back to the internet thing, There are countless people on the net trying to learn forex and countless people offering scams with promises of get rich quick. Avoid these. knowing from experience I would avoid robots or programs and a 'holy grail'. I spent 6 months writing my own program that worked brilliantly on a back test, before demo testing it live for 6 months having it not work as well in a live scenario. If I had approached the markets first off with a realistic attitude instead of looking for shortcuts or programming it myself, I imagine I would be far more profitable today, but its all part of the fx experience I guess. So many people have had to go through this first, which is sad. Hope that helps. I won't recommend a broker publicly but if you want a suggestion pm me and I will be more than happy to suggest the broker that I use that is Asic regulated and has accounts in AUD. edit: just re-read bigbens posts and +1 to the things said there. I predominately look at the dailys and 4hour chart although sometimes I will take setups off the hourly if it is strong. Occasionally I will drill down to the 15min chart to fine tune an entry that has been based on a 4hour signal, but I never rely on any signal generated by chart lower than the hourly by itself.
There are too many places you can find info. Take Google, Investopedia, BabyPips for a change. I, for one,actually tried to find a broker that gives out video training on forex.
Check out eToro's radical social fx trading platform, Open Book, here: www.etoro.com.au - works for me - You'll get a 10% bonus to your equity account after sign-up/first deposit too. Search 'eToro Copy Trader' on YouTube for info on how it all works. x
3 pips spread on currency pairs is nish thesedays mate on decent contract sizes - and besides you're paying for the OpenBook/WebTrader/CopyTrade platform - it's unique - which is why I use it - it's like no other platform you've seen before.
I'll take your word for, I know nothing about Forex trading. Just one question though, how do you trade Forex when there's no volume data?
If you're not a short term trader, but have a long term view, a Citibank Global currency account could be the go. Fee free and tight spread. Can set up accounts in multiple currencies and transfer between them as your view changes. I initially got mine as my NAB account came with a 4% transfer fee on international purchases along with a wide spread. My Citibank account is linked to a debit card and automatically uses the appropriate currency account for the transaction with no foreign transaction fee.
