Foreign Exchange Tutorial: Quick and Easy

Your first foreign exchange tutorial will cover the basics of what you need to do to get started with forex trading. The aim, of course, is to have you making money by predicting the rise and fall of one currency against another and opening and closing your trades at the right moment.

It takes time to learn to be a successful forex trader but you can cut corners if you have a good introductory program that covers everything you need to know. This includes:

• understanding the principles of currency trading including managing your account, trading margins, and allowing for the cost of the spread.

• technical analysis: discovering how to recognize trends in the markets, the different types of charts and how to interpret them so that you can profit from market movements.

• fundamental analysis: understanding what to do in the face of major national or international economic events that are likely to impact on currency values.

• finding out how to minimize your risk and protect your trades with stops.

• developing the power to apply your system without allowing losses or emotions such as fear to throw you off balance and affect your chances of earning long term profits.

A good place to pick up hints and tips can be a forex trading online forum. There are many of these on the internet and members will comment about all kinds of issues relating to the market and their own trading. This can be a great place to go if you have questions.
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Forex Managed Accounts: What are The Risks?

Forex managed accounts present an attractive opportunity for people who want to make money from the lucrative currency trading markets but cannot or do not want to learn to trade for themselves. With a managed account you do not have to do any trading at all. Instead, you entrust your fund to the management company who will act for you.

There are two basic types of forex managed accounts;

1. Standard Accounts

With this type of account, your money is kept in your brokerage account in your own name and the manager simply has control over it so that they can trade with it. You can see how much is there and how it is doing at all times. It remains your money.

You have to accept the risk that even a skilled account manager cannot predict the markets 100% and you may have to take some losses. Still, if you are a beginner, he is likely to do better with your money than you would yourself, so it is just a question of whether he can do well enough to cover his fees and make you a good profit.
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How to Find a Forex Trading Broker

One essential that you must have when beginning currency exchange trading is an account with a forex trading broker. The broker is your link into the markets and will cover you to trade margins.

But how do you go about selecting a good one? Here are 5 points to take into account when you are shopping around for forex brokerage accounts.

1. Reliability

This operates on several levels. Firstly, of course, you want a broker that you can trust, who will not suddenly disappear from the internet along with all of your money. The forex market is broadly speaking unregulated, so there are a huge number of brokers and some are more trustworthy than others.

Your first step is to check that the broker is regulated. In the USA this means that you want a broker who is registered with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the National Futures Association (NFA). Look for a forex broker with a clean record in any complaints logged against them on the NFA site. Other countries have their own regulatory bodies.
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Using The Forex Trailing Stop With MT4

The forex trailing stop is a stop that you can set in an expert advisor on the Metatrader 4 platform. It is pretty much what you might guess from the name: a stop loss that moves according to the current prices on the forex market. And a stop loss, of course, is a marker you set that will cause your MT4 expert advisor autopilot software (EA) to exit the trade when it goes against you to prevent you having any risk of a large loss.

But there are several things to be taken into account when you consider how to use the trailing stop. It is a little like a ratchet in that it can move up but not down. When you move into profit, it follows behind, moving up by the same number of pips that the market moved. But if the market falls, it stays where it is. So the market can rise and rise and you go on making more profit, but when it falls just a little way, the stop loss comes into effect and exits your trade with whatever profit or loss you made up until that point.

To give an example, you open a trade to go long. Of course at the moment of opening you are at point zero: 0 pips profit or loss. Let’s say you set your trailing stop at minus 30 pips. If you are unlucky and the forex market just falls and falls, the stop loss will kick in and close the trade for you at 30 pips down. But if the market rises, the stop loss will rise with it.
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Currency Trading Charts: Using Bollinger Bands

Bollinger bands on currency trading charts are used just as on stock and options trading charts, as an indicator to alert the trader to a new forming movement, breakout or trend. They are made up of three lines or bands.

The central band is a simple moving average over a certain number of periods, typically 20. The upper and lower lines are at a certain number (usually 2) of standard deviations calculated with reference to the number of periods used for the center band.

Bollinger bands were invented by John Bollinger in the 1980s. The idea behind them is that prices will normally remain within 2 standard deviations of the mean, which here is the moving average used to plot the central line. This means that as prices reach the upper and lower band lines, a reversal is indicated to keep the prices within the bands.

They are also an indicator of volatility. Wider bands indicate a more volatile market than narrow bands.
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Is Your Forex Broker Working for You?

People new to foreign exchange trading may be surprised to find that their forex broker may operate in some surprising ways. In fact, some companies offering forex trading services are not brokers in the traditional sense at all.

Traditionally a broker would work for you as a client, placing your buy and sell orders for you through their dealing desk and charging commission (for stock exchange transactions) or making their money from the spread (the difference between bid and ask prices) for forex trading. At one time orders would be placed by telephone. Now they are placed online, with you in full control of your account.

But standard forex accounts require significant investment. Typically the minimum deposit is anything from $10,000 to $50,000. Now that forex trading can be done from home, there are many new services springing up with lower deposit requirements, offering forex mini accounts. But their business model is not necessarily the same as traditional brokers, and this can have implications for you.

So these days, there are other types of companies that operate in different ways in order to provide services to the smaller investor. Most of these do not have dealing desks of their own.
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