I have been trading forex with OANDA for a while now, and wanted to share my experience today. Forex is a great way to diversify your investment portfolio, on top of stock and shares trading. OANDA established its forex division in 2001, and is one of the biggest forex trading platforms worldwide. It handles more than one million trades daily. In the UK, OANDA is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.
OANDA’s trading platform, called fxTrade, offers you over 100 foreign currency pairs to trade, as well as commodities, such as gold and silver, and index funds, like the S&P500 or the UK100.
The trading platform can be accessed on your computer, or via a mobile phone app on iPhone, Blackberry and Android.
Opening an account is pretty straightforward.
It will ask for your personal details, then you will be asked to provide proof of ID and address, like you would when opening a bank account. Once you’re all set, funding your account is easy. OANDA lets you send the funds via a BACS transfer, credit or debit card, and even PayPal. Please note that you will be required to withdraw the funds through the same funding method you used.
Once your funds clear, you are ready to trade! If you are a beginner trader, OANDA offers a wide variety of trading material, as well as technical analysis and reports, to help you place your trades.
Forex trading is quite simple. You place a trade on a pair, for example EUR/USD, and decide where you think the pair is heading. If you think the dollar will get stronger, say from $1.12 for one euro to $1.11, you place a short trade (sell). If you think it will go from $1.12 to $1.13, you place a long trade (buy). You can also ask the platform to automatically stop your trade should it go your way, with a “take profit” option, or should it go the other way, with a stop loss. OANDA will tell you how much you stand to earn or lose for each outcome, based on the size of your trade, and the level you input for your take profit and stop loss.
OANDA’s spreads are quite tight, at 1.2 pips for the EUR/USD pair, and there is no minimum trade size. You can start trading by funding your account with £200.
If you use this link to open your OANDA account, you will also get free access to its extensive 8 hours long Forex Trading Course, worth £1,000.
What the course covers in four two hours webinars is an in-depth look at today’s trading strategies:
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A Modern Approach to Technical Trading. How to set your entry level, stop and profit for a trade. How to identify and interpret a trade. How to study a chart structure to identify opportunities.
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Price Action Mastery. How to read a chart to figure out future movements, with candlestick patterns and moving averages.
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Understanding the Bigger Picture. Understanding the trends thanks to indicators such as MACD or RSI, how to identify trend reversals and look at the big picture.
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Precision Trading Strategies. Learn about the “Momentum Breakout” and “Trend Flow” strategies. Piece it all together to maximize profit and minimize your risk.