Thursday, 2 April 2009

Beware of Your Forex Broker

By Hass67

Forex traders need to know about their forex brokers if they want to really start trading forex trading. There are many myths and scams that need to be exposed. Many retail forex traders are too simpleton to understand the games the forex brokers play with them.

Retail forex market is new and different from forex interbank market. Forex interbank market is only open to big players like banks, corporations, hedge funds, pension funds and other institutional investors and deals with large currency transactions.

The internet revolution made retail forex trading possible. Anyone can open an online margin account with a forex broker and start trading forex from the comfort of his/her home. But the problem is this that retail forex market is loosely regulated. Being not well regulated lets the forex brokers do whatever they like with you.

You should be beware of those games. You need to know the following facts while trading forex:

Nontransparent pricing: Since, forex market is over the counter market with no clearing central exchange, the prices that your forex broker quotes to you is the price that you get. It is really difficult for you to know whether the quoted price is fair or not. You have to just accept it.

Leverage: Forex brokers let you trade forex with a high leverage like 100-1 or 200-1. Rather they will encourage you to use more leverage. Using leverage allows you to make high gains with a small price movement but it destroys you when you are on the wrong side of the market. Since most of the forex traders dont know how to trade. Giving you high leverage lets your broker gain when you lose.

Brokers try to trade against you: Forex brokers act as an intermediary between the retail trader and the interbank forex market. Since most of the retail trades are too small in size and cannot be immediately offset in the interbank market, forex brokers get the opportunity to trade against you. If you go long, the broker will go short and if you go short, the broker will take the long position. As most of the retail traders are not good traders and lose most of the time, forex brokers make profit from this.

Practices that are unfair: Forex brokers and Casinos have the same mentality: they dont like winner. If you are winning too much, the house will be stacked against you. Your forex broker may make the execution of your trades very difficult or start denying the service to you. Your trade may not execute due to slippage. There are many games the broker will play against you so beware.

Once you know these facts, you can use a scorecard for evaluating different forex brokers. Bill Poulos, a veteran forex trader has developed one for you. Visit my Blog to read about it.

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