I have made a living day trading equities for almost 4 years. I am interested in making the plunge into currencies. Where should I start? What are the good brokers and do you have any book suggestions? I am open to any input. Thanks.
meet the gang at the pub below. http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=29553&perpage=6&pagenumber=193
Reading through the Currencies/Forex posts is obviously a good start. You'll be dealing with a 24x6 trading market so depending on your location you may have to change your trading day to accomodate particular hours, or adjust your trading to accomodate the hours you're prepared to trade; see following: http://www.aboutforex.com/timezones.html Sunday open varies among brokers, technical close is 6pm EST Mon thru Thurs, Friday close may vary but is generally 4pm EST. Most online fx brokers provide useful introductory fx trading info. Most brokers in the USA and 'Europe' are registered. You want a broker providing instant fills and guaranteed stops. Unlike futures trading, 'overloss' is prevented; most brokers also program into their order entry software auto close of trades when a loosing position falls to Trading Margin minimum, confirm with broker. Two broker recommendations: fxcm: http://www.fxcm.com/ and Oanda: http://www.oanda.com/channels/investor/investors.shtml Fxcm minimum account size is US$300, US$130 to trade 1 minilot â $10,000, minimum tick is 1pip/$ for US currency pairs. Good trading platform which includes a chart plugin and news plugin from Thomson Financial â Forex only news. The major benefit with Oanda, an older Canadian registered company is that any amount can be used to open an account. For instance if you wanted to test trading systems you might open a $100 Margin Account and trade a $10 amount. Several fx brokers provide DDE 'constantly on no history' feeds from their quote systems, usually requiring 3rd party converters, some might be free or $40 or so monthly fee. MetaQuotes links automatically to MetaStock, a free renewable demo available from several brokers, Alpari in particular, who also provide MetaTrader a multiwindow trading/charting program: http://www.alpari-idc.com/ Visit: http://www.hypertrader.it/htools.shtml 'Free Trader's Tools' for several converters and downloaders. For the most part stock trading methods are assumed to be applicable to fx excepting a true fx volume isn't available. Consider fx â particularly the EUR/USD as trading index futures, technical analysis is same same, my experience is that the Lucas numbers fibonacci series is more applicable to fx than the Fibonacci numbers series. Most fx price quote feeds either broker or independant provide similar if not exactly the same quotes, so a data feed from one company to the charting program you might prefer to collect prices in won't be so different from your broker's price data, but it's your brokers price data is the one that matters. You may find free forex reading material doing searches at the various independant banks and Federal Reserve Banks of New York for instance, and try Google search: pdf forex.