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Forex Accounts What You Should Know

June 30th, 2009

Until recently trading currency was completely done by big financial institutions. The huge popularity of internet and Forex Trading Systems had altered this. Forex mini accounts are perfect for abobody who is a newbie in currency trading. You have to be very wealthy or really certain to start directly with a standard currency trading account if you are a small trader. A mini account allows an individual to trade without risking big amont money and this makes it an incredible opportunity for lots of men and women.

Here is an informative tutorial on forex mini accounts with very good detials.

Mini forex trading accounts commonly let you to do the trading with omly 1/10th of the usual size of the lot. This usually means 10,000 units of currency in the place of usual 100K lot size.
Yes, you don’t have to have that much in your trading account. You know forex trading works with leverage. In case you are using 100 times leverage then you just need $100 to manage $10k in your forex mini account or $1K to control $100K with a standard trading account.

Hundred dollars or 100 units of other currency per trade is all you need to beging trading and that is the reason the mini forex account is so popular.

The size of the pip is also normally smaller in a mini forex account. pips are units in which we will measure your gains, losses and costs (the spread). Their dollar value can differ depending on the currency pair that you are trading, the lot size and other features of yourforex broker, but a usual standard pip size is Ten dollars and forex mini accounts pip size is one dollar.
A number of currency trading brokers are now quoting prices to 5 decimal places which theoretically would make one pip 0.00001 of the quoted price, though let us continue to use the standard four decimal place pip for this example.

Hence in case you have a standard forex account you may have to commit $1K on each trade, to trade lots of $100K and calculate your profits in $ten units.
In case you have a forex mini account you can expect to commit $100 on each trade, for trading lots of $10K and calculate your gains in $one units.

You can also place stop losses so that you don’t have to risk all of the money that is committed for trading. However your losses will be calculated in terms of pips so these too will be 10 times bigger with the standard trading account.

If you make lot of profits and your investment grows, you might be interested in trading greater amounts. It is possible to do this in your mini trading account by trading multiple lot simultaneously. Therefore if you wish to trade a standard lot size you would just trade ten mini lots. But this would be a hard job without the help of software like Forex Autopilot.

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Time to Trade Foreign Exchange

June 26th, 2009

So which is the best day to trade? Read this excellent guide about Forex Trading Times. Unlike stock trading, the currency exchange market is open round the clock during the 5 days in a week. However this doesn’t imply that the currency trading market is enjoying the same number of trades or price changes throughout these days. There is much more business on the currency trading markets at specific times of a day and normally, the best times to trade are when the markets are most active.
The 2 leading trading floors for forex trading are UK and the US markets. Though the UK does not use the euro, a good number countries in EU are within one hour time difference from the Great Britain, as is the Swiss market. US time zones also include Canada. So between the US and UK sessions cover the largest part of the key currencies that are exchanged.
The Great Britain foreign exchange center starts at 8.00 UTC and closes at 16.00 UTC. The currencies that are primarily involved during this market are the euro (EUR), British pound (GBP) and US dollar (USD) which is involved in the majority of currency exchanges.
The US session begins at 13.00 UTC (8.00 EST) and ends at 22.00 UTC (17.00 EST). The most traded currencies during this times are USD, EUR, GBP, AUD (Australian dollar), JPY (Japanese yen) and CAD (Canadian dollar).

The busiest trading time, as you can see, is during the 3 hours when the US and UK sessions overlap and the trades are live in both London and USA. This phase runs from 13.00 to 16.00 UTC (8.00 to 11.00 EST).

Trades who like to let the orders run over a number of days or would like to utilize a program similar to Forex Derivative it may not make much of a difference to know the peak hours on the forex markets. But if you are doing day currency exchange where you will open and close a trade within a few minutes, you will find most opportunities coming up during the peak sessions. And many a times doing the trade by yourself during this session can beat the Forex Autopilot which is the best trading robot.

If you are dealing with cross rate, i.e. a currency pairs that do not consist the US dollar, you might have another session when the currency trading centers in those 2 countries are open for business.
Imagine if you were forex trading in AUD/JPY you will see that trading was busiest during the Asian session. The Japan and Aussie trading hours are pretty close and on a day when trading was anticipated you might find some money making trades during the overlap. However, generally speaking this is a slow moving trading session for just about all currencies.
Therefore the best time for most traders is during that 3 hour time period in the early hours in the US and the afternoon in the UK and Europe, when the forex markets are open on both sides of the Atlantic. Business can be frantic during those hours, there is maximum liquidity and the currencies are volatile. A number of important economy news is released during this period too, particularly toward the starting. So this time period is the best currency trading times if you want to make quick cash.

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Learn about Forex Pips. A Tutorail

June 19th, 2009

Here is an first-rate Forex Pips tutoral from a cool forex website.
When you begin researching for currency trading site online, you will quickly spot references to the currency trading pip. Your gains and losses will be considered in pips. Something else that is measured in pips is the forex spread, the variation between the bid and ask prices which is the major cost of FX trading and how the forex brokers create their money. Hence it is clearly highly  important to learn what is a forex pip.

The term PIP represents Percentage in Point (otherwise, price interest point). It is the least increment of changes in rates. It allows us to evaluate a climb or fall in currency values in percentage terms as a substitute of dollars and cents.

Why do we need to talk in pips? The purpose for this is clear. In the forex market there is no universal currency in which to state rates. The USD may be the most commonly traded currency but it is not involved in all trades. If you are are doing currency trading cross rates, i.e. two additional currencies such as EUR/GBP or any other grouping that does not involve USD, it would not make any sense at all to state your profits and losses in terms of USD. Instead, we require something that is a small percentage of the value of whatever currencies we are doing the trade with.

This means that the financial rate of a pip varies according to the currency pair. Even if you are utilizing the best forex software you have to have a sound knowledge about pips.

nearly all currencies are quoted to 4 decimal points. For illustration you might see the bid price for EUR/USD quoted at 1.3641 and ask price 1.3645. The difference (the spread) is 0.0004 or 4 pips. In this case a pip is 0.01% of a lot.

therefore if the lot size was $100,000, one pip would be worth US dollar10. For a lot size of $10,000, one pip would be US$1.

That is the value of pips when the US $ is the quote currency, i.e. EUR/USD , GBP/USD etc. But if the quote currency is changed, one pip is usually ten units of that currency (e.g. 10 euros or 10 pounds). Or in case your lot size is 10,000 units, one pip is 1 unit (1 euro or 1 pound).

The Japaense Yen is an exception which has a much lower unit value than most currencies (you get a lot of yen to the dollar). For this reason of this, the yen is usually quoted to the second decimal point. You might notice a price USD/JPY 110.12. In this instance one pip is 0.01 or 1% but in yen, not dollars. So the pip value is JPY 1000 which at that price would be worth US $11.012.

These figures can be confusing when you are just starting out. So it is better to start trading regularly with just one forex currency pair.

When you trade in one pair regularly daily you will soon get used to how much a pip means in terms of your actual profits and losses in your account. You will identify how much one pip is worth in dollars or in your own currency.

But when you are trading quite a few different currency pairs, you have to deal with pips of numerous values. If you get confused, you could be taking bigger risks than you intended or closing trades with less gains than you thought. It is much easier to deal with only one pair initially until you have a sound knowledge of trading practices and forex pip rates.

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Advantages of Foreign Exchange Market

June 12th, 2009

The forex market has numerous factors that make it only one of its kind. Forex has been described as the closest to pure competition that can exist, though the global financial institutions attempt to have a power over it and influence it. But what makes it so unique, and why you must believe that you have more chances of building wealth on the foreign exchange market than other methods of asset trading such as stock trading? Why do automatic forex trading techniques like Forex Megadroid reported to have built lot of money to many people? We are going to see.

Volume of Trade
The sum of dollars traded on the FX trading market every day is massive. The average daily turnover across the globe is around US $4 trillion, according to a survey in 2007 December by International Settlements Bank. The largest Fx trading center is London, followed by New York and Tokyo. But, the American dollar is the largest traded currency in the global forex market.

Liquidity
The liquidity of a commodity is its ability to covert to money without changing  its value. Foreign exchange is already money, hence it is more liquid than any other product. That means currencyit is very easy to trade.

A Global Market
Forex is not traded in a specific location but all over the world. This means that, though it is affected by national events in the biggest financial powers, the effects are balanced out. Foreign exchanges do not have absolute value: a currency’s value can only be measured in comparison with a different currency. So if one currency falls in value, another will rise.

Compare this with the stock exchange where it is possible for the value of every company’s stock to drop at the same time. All you can do in a major stock market crash is to withdraw your investment. But in FX trading, you can switch from the falling currency to the rising currency and still make money.

24 Hours Market
Currencies can be traded in anywhere in the world 24 hours a day, five days a week. The forex market opens at 22.00 hours UTC Sunday in Sydney, Australia, where it is Monday morning, and closes at USA in New York, where it is Friday afternoon. So any time of day or night you want to trade, you will have the opportunity, unless your only free time is on weekends.

Leverage
What is leverage?Leverage is where a small amount of asset can be used to control a larger amount. In forex trading, leverage is linked to the way of trading on margin. You invest a small amount in your forex broker account and your broker lends you the rest, so that you don’t have to put up the whole value of your position. Example, you could invest US$300 to control $3000.

In addition to this you also have the ability to trade in various forex pairs in the market. Currency trading offers more leverage than stock or futures trading. You might be able to manage up to 200 times your account balance, depending on the your broker. The more the leverage, higher is your chance of bigger profits, but of course, there is also the risk of bigger losses. In the beginning you will not necessarily want to opt for the maximum leverage on the Currency trading market.

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