How to choose a forex broker?

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With almost a $4 trillion average daily turnover in the global foreign exchange market and many technical and fundamental techniques to help you predict the market, forex is a great way to make money in the comfort of your own home.

But with hundreds of forex brokers out there how to you know which one to choose? Here are some key points you should consider:

MT4 and Streamster Platforms

Platforms
Trading forex online is performed through a platform. One of the most internationally recognized and widely used platforms is MetaTrader 4 (known as MT4). MT4 allows many currency pairs, indexes, commodities and other futures to be traded, and assist traders by performing technical analysis at the click of a button.

Trade on mobile, tablet and PC

However if you are new to trading then a simplified platform may be more useful. AGEA provides an excellent platform, Streamster. Like MT4, Streamster beside forex offers many CFDs (indexes, commodities) but has the advantage of being more user friendly, requires no deposit (some company require thousands of dollars in deposits to use MT4) and you get a $5 reward to trade with immediately.

Furthermore, you can trade using your android phone or tablet PC!

No deposit and $5 free reward

Deposits (Investment needed)
As mentioned above, many companies require deposits when opening a live trading account. The reason for this is to protect the Company if you start losing heavily. Most MT4 accounts require a deposit of around $500.

At AGEA, however, you can open an MT4 account from as little as $10! There are three different levels of accounts; even the top account – Standard – requires only a $100 deposit. And remember Streamster requires no deposit!

Charges
Most likely you are trading not for fun but to make money. The higher you’re trading costs are, the harder it will be for you to make profit, so charges are a key factor when choosing a broker.

Forex brokers generally only charge commission on Straight-Through-Processing (STP) accounts. This is where your trade is passed onto another broker and the introducing broker just receives a commission.

AGEA has institution-level low spreads

However on other accounts (such as AGEA’s Streamster, MT4 Cent and MT4 Standard) no commissions are charged. One of the key areas, therefore, that differentiates brokers is the spreads. Spreads are the different between the bid and ask price of an instrument. Let say you buy an instrument and sell at exactly the same ask price, you would still make a small loss as the broker will make the bid price slightly lower than the ask price.

AGEA has institution-level low spreads on MT4 because we do not add any commission or mark-ups to the prime brokerage rates, and we choose the brokerage with the lowest spreads.

Virtual Desk
It is important that you practice trading before you go live, especially if you are new to trading. Most brokers will provide you with a virtual desk with virtual money for you to trade with, so you get to trade without the risk of losing money. But, of course, you also can’t make money just by trading on the virtual desk – except at AGEA!

Win $100 trading on AGEA’s Virtual Desk – No investment required!

AGEA runs a competition which rewards the trader who makes the highest virtual profit on the virtual Streamster desk. The reward is $100 and can be used to trade on your live desk or withdrawn.

All traders receive $5 when they open an account with AGEA to trade on the live desk, so again you could make money without investing any!

24 hour, multilingual support

Support
Whether you are technology pro or not, you may sometimes need some help. AGEA has a dedicated, high quality, 24 hour, multilingual online support channels. You can chat directly with one of their assistants at any time and they will be sure to help you in any way they can.

Conclusion
If you are serious about making money then you need to reduce your costs and make sure you have the right tools to learn and to trade.

AGEA offers a multitude of platform accounts, learning tools, and full time support all at institutionally low prices!

New to forex? Learn more at AGEA!

Introduction To Forex

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Buying and Selling

Financial market is a mechanism that allows people to easily buy and sell (trade) market instruments at low transaction costs and at prices that reflect efficient markets. Financial markets have evolved significantly over several hundred years and are undergoing constant innovation to improve liquidity.

If you believe value of a market instrument is going to increase, then you would buy the instrument and at one point in the future you would sell it for a higher price. This is the basic motivation for trading on financial markets.

Orders and Positions

When you want to open a position you need to place an “entry” order. If and when the entry order executes, the position becomes “open” and starts its life on the market. At some point in the future, you will place an “exit” order to “close” the position. A position can be “long” (entry order is to buy and exit order is to sell an instrument) or “short” (entry order is to sell and exit order is to buy an instrument).

At the point when you place your entry order, you need to define price level at which you want to buy or sell certain instrument. You also need to specify type of the order and quantity of the instrument you want to trade. There are 3 order types:

Market Order

Placing a market order means that you will buy at the current “ask” (or “offer”) price, or sell at the current “bid” price, whatever that price currently is. For example, suppose you are buying a market instrument and its current market price is 129.34 / 129.38. This means a participant in the market is willing to buy the instrument from you at 129.34 and / or sell it to you at 129.38.

Stop Order

Initiating a trade with a stop order means that you will only open a position if the market moves in the direction you are anticipating. For example, if an instrument is trading at 129.34 / 129.38 and you believe it will move higher, you could place a stop order to buy at 129.48. This means that the order will only be executed if ask price in the market moves up to 129.48. The advantage is that if you are wrong and the market moves straight down, you will not have bought (because 129.48 will never have been reached). The disadvantage is that 129.48 is clearly a less attractive rate at which to buy than 129.38. Opening a position with a stop order is usually appropriate if you wish to trade only with strong market momentum in a particular direction.

Limit Order

A limit order is an order to buy below the current price, or sell above the current price. For example, if an instrument is trading at 129.34 / 129.38 and you believe the market will rise, you could place a limit order to buy at 129.28. If executed, this will give you a long position at 129.28, which is 10 pips better than if you had just used a market order. The disadvantage of the limit order is that if the instrument moves straight up from 129.34 / 129.38 your limit at 129.28 will never be filled and you will miss out on the profit opportunity even though your view on the direction was correct. Opening a position with a limit order is usually appropriate if you believe that the market will remain in a range before moving in your anticipated direction, allowing the order to be filled first.

For both entry and exit orders you can specify price levels at which you want them to be executed. You have to specify entry levels when you place you entry order, while most trading systems would allow you to specify exit levels at any time.

Calculating Profit

The objective of trading is to buy a market instrument and later sell the same market instrument for a higher price. In case of margin trading, trader can also sell a market instrument first and later buy the same market instrument for a lower price. Either way, trader has to close position in order to lock in the profit.

Let us assume that you open a long position by buying a market instrument for 129.38 (quantity of 10000) and few hours after that, you close the position by selling it for 129.52 (same quantity of 10000). These two trades would bring you profit of (129.52 – 129.38) * 10000 = 1400.

We can also say that these two trades would bring you 14 “points” profit. A “point” is the smallest increment in an instrument’s price. For the instrument in the above example, one point is 0.01 and for an instrument denominated with 4 decimals, one point would be 0.0001. Expressing position profits in points is often very useful for quick calculations and estimates.

One point, from the example position above, would bring you 0.01 * 10000 = 100 profit, denominated in the same currency the market instrument is denominated in.

In case of Forex, currency pair denomination will be in the counter currency (JPY is the counter or quote currency in the USD/JPY pair) and you may need additional currency conversion to get profit calculated in the currency your trading account is denominated in.

Join with Marketiva (AGEA), Get Reward $5 (Real Money) and $10,000 (Virtual), Start trading with as little as $1.