Forex

Quick Start Guide

So you want to be a professional forex trader? Great! ..but before reading anything else, do understand that trading for a living can be one of the hardest professions you've ever encountered. Make no mistake, the odds are against you, and the market is designed to chew you up and spit you out.

"Trading is the hardest way to make an easy living." - Anonymous 

However, trading can also be one of the most rewarding careers out there (both financially and intellectually.)

We are stressing this because of the huge influx in 'social media' based influencers who are pitching FX trading as "easy" and requiring only a little starting capital. Often, new traders are too greedy to see such scams for what they really are; the influencer is only trying to make money off you through referrals, selling courses, mentorship, etc.. No matter what profit track record they show you (doctored images are common, but even trading software/servers can be manipulated to display fake results,) 99.99% of the time they are out to rip you off. Here's a simple logic test: If a social media guru / mentor is showing off how they can turn $100 into $50k in a few weeks, why are they working so hard to get you to fork over a few bucks for mentorship? Or a course? Or to sign up to a given broker or service?

There are no shortcuts in this industry.

If you're serious, and want to learn, here are the resources you need to get started:

Education and Courses

We do not recommend paid courses in general. They typically teach what can be found easily online when it comes to market basics, and even when they promise a trading 'system' or method it's typically not one that works consistently. Don't waste your money. See the free courses or guilds below instead:

BabyPips School of Pipsology <=START HERE. THIS IS YOUR ENTRY INTO THE WORLD OF FOREX. COMPLETE THE ENTIRE SCHOOL. Despite Babypips being a 3rd party commercial resource, we will give credit where credit is due; their 'School of Pipsology' is a great example of the free and robust forex education you can find online without having to spend a dime.

Lehman Brothers Foreign Exchange Training Manual - Don't let the company name fool you, this is a solid manual and was used to train up institutional traders for many years.

Market Life Trading by Adam Grimes - Specifically the free 22 hour long course on trading in general. Adam comes from a prop trading background and structured his free material around the trader development process common in the prop trading world. The focus is on teaching people how to come up with strategies (observations in the market, testing out ideas, refining, etc...) instead of just trying to teach a system.

Books

Recommended Forex Books for New and Developing Traders - A list of recommended books covering not only the basics, but advanced subjects and trading psychology.

Official Live Trading Chatroom for [/r/forex], [/r/algotrading], and FXGears.com

Make sure to join the community in chat during market hours! Links also found in our sidebar and top nav links: [Forex Trading Discord Chat]

Economic Calendar

You need an economic calendar. Why? As you will read in nearly every 'intro to forex' resource: news is a catalyst for change and volatility the market, so you need to know when scheduled announcements are coming.

[tradingview.com/markets/currencies/economic-calendar/] [www.forexfactory.com/calendar.php]

Hall of Fame Threads

https://www.reddit.com/r/Forex/wiki/index/hall-of-fame-threads

News Websites

[www.forexlive.com] [www.fxstreet.com] [www.reuters.com/finance/currencies] [www.bloomberg.com/markets/currencies]

Forums

[1] [www.forexfactory.com/forum.php] [2]

Charting

Desktop/mobile

• [tradingview.com/] - Great for HTML5 browser based charting and alerts * Use a demo account from a high quality broker, [popular retail forex platforms for demo can be found here on FXGears' demo comparison page.]

Prop / Scouting Firms

Some traders would rather trade for a frim than on their own. [FXGears has a great writeup on forex Prop / Scouting firms which can be found here.]

Virtual Private Servers (VPS)

If you're going to run Expert Advisers (EAs) or your own custom code to trade, you'll want to do so on a reliable computing platform. A VPS for trading will typically be managed, have good latency between the VPS provider's network and your broker's trade servers, and will always be running and connected. [Considerations and overview of recommended VPS providers]

Tick Data for Backtesting and Algo Trading

For use with a backtesting suite (ForexTester 3, TickDataSuite, etc...) or your own custom code, here you'll find instructions on how to extract tick level forex data from multiple sources: [HOWTO get free Forex Tick Data for backtesting]

Education

The vast majority of sites charging you for FX trading courses and education are scams or ripoffs. It is highly advised that you avoid such paid courses / sites / programs.

News Wires

These can be expensive and some traders swear by them but they are not required to trade profitably.

Bloomberg Terminal ([3]): Price is estimated at USD $20,000/yr Reuters Eikon ([4]): Price is estimated to be $3,600-$22,000/yr depending on set up Dow Jones NewsWire ([5]): Price is estimated at $1,440 per year.

Squawk Services

Typically cheaper than newswires. Live running commentary on news events. Slight delay compared to wires.

ransquawk.com livesquawk.com

*Other "Feeds" and news sources *

Recommended [Twitter] setup: [How to setup Twitter to stream the latest FX and Economic news in 2019 and 2020]

Free, but fair warning: Twitter is social media, meaning that not everything posted by twitter members is accurate, timely, or of use. Not only will there be bias in what gets popular on Twitter, but Twitter can often become an echo-chamber if you only follow like-minded traders / sources. Stick to the guide's list of sources for best results as they are news / squawk services and their business is reporting accurately.

Paid Chatrooms

We do not recommend any 3rd part paid chatroom; they are often not worth their costs and are usually part of an up-sell tactic to push more products. (That said, we do recommend the official free /r/forex community chatroom, hosted in partnership with FXGears.com, [which can be found here.])

Brokers:

YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR DUE DILIGENCE.

There are many factors to consider when choosing a broker but some of the most important factors are regulation, execution quality, and ease of deposit/withdrawals. Being "regulated" on it's own is not a guarantee of protection against bad brokers; often bad brokers will be regulated out of a jurisdiction that has lax rules and weak enforcement, so their marketing team can boast about being regulated while not actually providing much protection to their clients or having much oversight by governing bodies. Consider WHERE, HOW, and by WHO a broker is regulated.

UNITED STATES BASED TRADERS

   |Brokers for US residents can be found on this wiki page.

BROKERS FOR CANADIANS

   |Writeup on Canadian broker options can be found on this wiki page.

INTERNATIONAL BASED TRADERS

EUROPEAN (EU) BASED TRADERS: ON 27 MAR 2018 the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) placed new restrictions on spot FX trading. They are as follows:

• Maximum leverage of 30:1 on FX Major Pairs
• Maximum leverage of 20:1 pn FX Minor Pairs as well as Gold
• Maximum leverage of 10:1 on commodities
• Maximum leverage of 5:1 on indices
• Maximum leverage of 2:1 on cryptos
• Along with various other regulations. [Read Here]

BROKERS:

[Pepperstone]

https://pepperstone.com

Pepperstone was founded in 2010 and quickly grew to become one of the largest forex brokers in the world thanks to execelent execution quality and great customer service. Pepperstone is well regualated and has a history of doing right by their clients.

• Regulation: Regulated in Australia by the ASIC, in the UK by the FCA, in the Bahamas by the SCB, and in Dubai by the DFSA
• Pricing: Competitive spreads of 0-0.2 on Razor ECN account, and average spreads of 1.2 pips on Standard account
• *Leverage: * 500:1 in all regions except for the UK / Europe where FCA regulations set leverage at 30:1
• Account Minimums: $200 USD for all account types
• Products: Forex, CFDs on Equity Indicies, US Dollar Index, Commodities, Crypto, and US Shares
• Platforms: [MetaTrader 4, MetaTrader 5, cTrader] (cTrader also comes with cAlgo, a C# based algotrading platform for automated trading)
• Notes:
• Islamic account types (swap/interest free) available

• NEW - UK residents have access to tax free [spread betting accounts]
• NEW - Currently running an [introductory offer where your first 20 trades are commission free.] Not available to UK or European residents

Dukascopy Bank

• English but has multi language interface
• ECN based
• JForex platform and API, MT4 optional through their bridge.
• Spreads considered "good" by the community
• Based in Switzerland
• Minimum USD$1,000 with Dukascopy Bank - but ECN accounts only have a minimum of $100 with Dukascopy Europe
• Allows trade sizes as small as Microlots (1K units)
• 200:1 max leverage with Dukascopy Bank, and 30:1 max for Dukascopy Europe

[VantageFX - https://www.vantagefx.com]

VantageFX was founded in 2009 in Australia and serves clients globally. They have proven to be a reliable broker and they are well regulated in each jurisdiction where they operate.

• Regulation: Regulated in the UK by the FCA, in Australia by the ASIC, and in the Cayman Islands by CIMA. (If you're not a UK or Australian resident, you will be serviced by the CIMA regulated branch)
• Pricing: Competitive spreads of 0-0.3 on RAW ECN account, and average spreads of 1.4 pips on Standard account
• Leverage: * 500:1 in all regions serviced
• Account Minimums: $500 minimum deposit for RAW ECN account, $200 minimum deposit for Standard account
• Products: CFDs on Forex, Indices, Commodities, and Shares (US, UK, EU, HK, and AU)
• Platforms: MetaTrader 4, MetaTrader 5, VFX Mobile (proprietary)
• Notes:

• Fees for most deposit transactions are waved (including credit card)
• Has a [deposit bonus promotion (50% bonus on deposits up to $500,)] but keep in mind that deposit bonuses are basically just extra leverage and not cash you can withdrawal

Interactive Brokers

• English with multilingual support
• "ECN like" execution.
• Spreads considered fair and competitive, but minimum commission of $2.50 a trade makes any small sized trading non-viable. Consider if your minimum deal size will be well past 100k units of currency. (Also requires 25k minimum size for exchange based execution.)
• US based, but due to the SEC regulations they fall under they are no longer providing margin trading to US clients. International clients are still serviced.
• Minimum deposit for margin is $2,000USD
• Max Leverage appears to be 50:1
• TWS platform is not very useful for chart based traders. You will need a 3rd party charting package / software and most decent options that hook into IB are quite costly.

Darwinex

• English, Español, Français, 中文
• DMA/STP model. Liquidity from LMAX Exchange and other sources.
• Platforms / APIs include: MT4, MT5, FIX, and a RestAPI(beta)
• Spreads /r/Forex review: "Fair spreads (averaging between 0.3 and 3.0) and very minimal slippage! I only personally experienced it during news which is normal."
• OUTSTANDING customer service!
• Minimum deposit and account balance of $500 USD/EUR/GBP initial, then $100 for additional deposits.
• Located in the UK (and rebranded to Darwinex in 2014) and FCA regulated (previously in Spain under Tradeslide Trading Tech Limited)
• FCA / ESMA based leverage limits, but designations between Pro and Retail exists for additional margin rates.
• r/Forex review: "I'm honestly not aware of any restrictions. Your strategy can be manual, EA, whatever you want. But please ask them and they will promptly answer any questions you may have! ZERO conflict of interest! Also, if you are a successful trader and you land in the top 40 you will not just get funded by investors (potentially) but Darwinex themselves will give you cash to trade and you keep 20% of profits every quarter."
• [Platform available to invest in other traders / strategies, or get paid to trade for others.]

Saxobank

• Multilingual
• Headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark
• Access to multiple asset classes (stock, futures, forex,)
• Spreads and fees are high unless you deposit a significant sum in your account (tiered pricing.)
• Dealing desk based for forex.

FXCM Inc

• Market Making and Straight Through Processing based accounts
• "Trading Station", MetaTrader 4, NinjaTrader, others
• Min Deposit $2000
• Notes: CAUTION: FXCM nearly went bankrupt in Jan-2015.
• FXCM NO LONGER ACCEPTS US CLIENTS