Forex margin trading is a way of applying leverage to increase the purchasing power of your money. Leverage simply means using a small sum to control a much larger sum. This is possible because it is unlikely that the value of a currency will change by more than a certain percentage over a short time. So you can place a few hundred dollars in your brokerage account to trade on the margin – the amount that you think the price will fall. Your broker will in effect lend you the balance. It is a technique that the makers of trading robots, like the Forex Megadroid Robot, have attempted to build into their systems.
Margin trading is not unique to forex, people us this leveraging technique in stock and futures trading too, although it works best on currency markets. Each broker has different rules, but it is possible to trade up to 200 times the balance of your trading account.
The possible profits of margin trading is large, but so is the potential losses if it goes wrong. In general, the more leverage you use, the more risky your trading is.
This example will help you better understand this concept.
Imagine that the current rate on the British pound to US dollar forex market is shown as GBP/USD 1.5100. So to buy one British pound you would need $1.51. If you expected the value of the dollar to rise against the pound you might decide to sell enough pounds to buy $100,000. Many brokers us lots of $10,000, making this trade 10 lots. Then you would sit back and wait for the price to go up.
After a few days you see the price is now GBP/USD 1.4600. Sure enough, the dollar has risen and the pound is now worth only $1.46. If you sell your dollars now and buy back into pounds, you will have made a profit of 3.3% less the spread. 3.3% of $100,000 is $3,300, so that would be an excellent trade.
But most of us do not have $100,000 spare cash that we want to trade on the currency exchange market. So here is where the principle of forex margins comes into play.
Because you will be trading in several different currencies at any time, the money you need in your account only has to be enough to cover any potential loss. You would be able to place a stop loss on your trades to limit losses, and so a balance of $1,000 could potentially be enough to make $100,000 trades. The remaing $99,000 is guaranteed by the broker.
Recently brokers have started to offer limited risk accounts, where your trades are automatically shut down if your account balance hits zero. This prevents you from getting into a situation where, after several losing trades, you end up losing more than you had in the account. The broker’s software that you use to control your account will not let you lose more than your account balance. If you trade with a robot like Forex Megadroid, it is possible to adjust the settings to manage this for you too.
This type of leverage trading is now very commonplace, and most traders do it as part of their trading day. Still it is important to keep in mind the risks. Lower leverage is always safer and you may never want to go to the maximum forex margin that your broker would allow. Some people do prefer to use automated systems to manage this type of trading for them, you can download Forex Megadroid yourself and test it on a demo account first.




