Forex Brokerage Firms
 If you’re looking to trade Forex the first thing you’re going to need is a Forex broker, there are many Forex brokerage firms to choose from but they’re not all suitable for beginners.
In this post we’ll go through what to look for when choosing your first Forex broker. We’ll go over the many pitfalls and show you how to avoid them. If you follow the guidance in this post you should be able to choose the perfect broker for your style, budget and experience.
When you’re new to Forex trading, price should not be the overriding factor, looking for the cheapest Forex brokerage firm is a mistake at this level. It’s far more important to look at the quality of their training materials and the level of support they offer.
Cheaper brokers are cheap for a reason, they offer much lower levels of support and aren’t prepared to invest the significant amount of money required to provide quality training materials.
What to look for
So always look for a broker that provides basic training, live seminars, video tutorials and provides a virtual trading platform for you to practice on. You can go further than this by also looking for a broker that offers a built in trading community for you to learn from.
For example Zecco offer one of the best trading communities around and eToro enable you to follow along live with more experienced traders within the community.
Neither Zecco nor eToro have the narrowest spreads but what they offer in terms of education is worth far more to you in the long run than saving a few dollars in commission.
What you learn here will stand you in good stead as you develop your trading strategy and should enable you to trade profitably for the long term regardless of whether it’s a bull or bear market.
The Number One Tool for Beginners
If you’re a beginner there is one tool you can’t be without, a virtual trading platform. You shouldn’t even begin to trade a strategy until you can prove it’s profitable in a virtual environment. The added stress of trading with real money isn’t going to turn a bad strategy into a good one.
So the number one thing you should be looking for in a broker is a virtual trading platform. Fortunately both eToro and Zecco offer a full virtual trading facility which is identical to their real time platforms. So you can make full use of it to test out the success rate of your strategy before committing any real capital.
What to Avoid
So that’s what to look for from your broker, but what should you avoid? Well first off you want to avoid Forex brokerage firms that charge platform fees. There is a legitimate reason to pay platform fees, especially if it includes level 2 data. But at your stage of development its an unwarranted expense.
Trading with level 2 data is strictly for experienced day traders and shouldn’t be attempted by a rookie. It’s a good idea to get a thorough grounding in the basics before you try your hand at day trading.
Secondly look out for brokers that charge account inactivity fees, as a beginner you don’t want to be forced into unprofitable trades just to cover account inactivity fees. Forex trading is stressful enough without needles adding to it.
Happy Trading
Follow these simple guidelines and you shouldn’t have any nasty surprises, your first few months trading should be uneventful and you’ll learn the tricks of the trade that will stand you in good stead as a trader.
Forex trading is hard, less than 5% of people succeed in making a profit. Make sure you’re one of the 5% who do by learning all you can from more experienced traders, test your system over and over again until you’re 100% confident that it’ll make a profit over the long term.
When you’ve done that you’ll have the confidence to trade even if you have three or four losing trades in a row.
So if you think you’re ready to learn Forex trading I recommend you join either Zecco or eToro. Both brokers are very professional and offer a full virtual trading platform and don’t have any account management or inactivity fees.
Add to that excellent training materials both video based and live tutorials along with superb trading communities and you have the perfect broker to establish a profitable strategy, learn vital money management skills and conquer your trading demons, which should enable you to trade profitably for many years to come.
|
