Anybody involved in forex trading cannot avoid dealing with currency trading brokers. As an individual trader you cannot set up your own dealing desk, so currency trading brokers are your way in to the forex market.

As trading from home becomes more and more popular with private individuals who often have relatively low startup capital, new types of brokerage firms are springing up to cater for them. Most of these companies are completely legitimate but you do need to do your due diligence before committing your funds to them. Check which country they are registered in and whether they are regulated there.

What would happen to your funds if the company went out of business? In some cases you are protected by regulatory bodies but in other cases you are not. So this is a good question to ask before you invest.

Most forex traders work with 100 or 200 times leverage. This means that to control a position size of $10,000 you would have to commit only $100 or $50 of your own money. This gives you a lot of power because you can make a lot of money in a short time when things go your way. On the other hand of course it is also possible to lose a lot, if you do not have stops in place to prevent you. For this reason, when you are beginning it could be a good idea to sign up with a broker who will automatically close out your trades when the limit of your account is reached. This protects you from margin calls which can otherwise mean that you could end up owing the broker more than you have in your account.

Currency trading brokers provide many services to their clients these days. You will probably have access to a demo account where you can test out the brokerage software that allows you to trade in the market in real time. You can also use the demo account to test your trading systems before going live with real money.

Currency trading brokers will also usually provide some kind of technical analysis in the form of charts and indicators. You can expect candlestick, bar and line charts, and indicators including the Stochastic, MACD and Bollinger bands. Try to look at the charting services provided by several different brokers through their demo accounts and consider ease of use and whether they give you the information that your trading system requires. Of course, many traders sign up with dedicated charting services once they become more successful, but when you start out, getting good technical analysis from your broker can save you that cost.

You will want assurance that the broker’s software platform is not easily cracked by hackers. Remember this is your money and you do not want anybody to be able to access your account illegally. Ask the currency trading brokers what security measures they have in place, or check on forums.

There are many Currency Trading Brokers available. The most frequently used is

Forex Yard

If you want to make money with currency trading, you will know that of course you are going to need some good currency trading strategies. Foreign exchange trading is like anything else in this world. If you want to do it well, you need some training and some practice. And if you are going to get into this activity you better do it well otherwise you could lose your shirt.

Getting the practice is easy enough because most currency trading brokers will let you open a free currency trading demo account. In fact they encourage it, because they are hoping that once you are making money with your currency trading demo account you will go ahead and invest some money with them. Then they can profit from the spread or the fees that they charge on your account. Hopefully you will make enough money to pay the broker and then some, so everybody benefits.

Finding profitable currency trading strategies is a little harder. There are plenty of systems out there, but some are very complicated for the beginner. What you probably want is something very simple so that you can start trading with your demo account today. Notice that I said "with your demo account".

So let’s take a look at a simple currency trading strategy using what is called support and resistance. You can put this technique into action when you have a situation where the market is fluctuating up and down within certain boundaries. So if you look over a long period it is within an upper position and a lower position.

You can see this on the charts that you will be able to access in your demo account. Look at the candlestick chart over a large number of time periods. You can probably identify a time when the price was moving up and down between certain points.

You could draw a line along the top points. This line is called the resistance line and it will be horizontal. When the price hits this line it moves down again to keep within the boundaries. So at that point you could sell the currency pair.

Similarly if you draw a horizontal line along the bottom points this is called the support line. When the price hits this line it moves up again, so you could buy at that point.

If you try this in your demo account on live prices you will find that sometimes the price does not bounce back into the zone and on those occasions you will lose. Usually this is because a trend was beginning to form. You can use the indicators in your charting software to check when a breakout like this might be expected. From this you can develop your own system based on support and resistance on the one hand and following new trends on the other.

Be sure that your system is working profitably over a long time (several months) before you start using it to trade with real money. Currency trading is always risky but by testing your system in this way you can be more confident that you have created a profitable system from your currency trading strategies.

There are many currency trading brokers on the market. The most frequently used is Forex Yard