The foreign exchange market (Forex) is now considered to be the largest financial market in the world because of its huge turnover. It is a non-stop cash market where foreign currencies are constantly and simultaneously bought and sold across local and global markets. Forex traders’ goal is to profit from the currencies movements.
You can trade Forex with Alpari (UK) 24 hours a day from Sunday 23:00 to Friday 22:00 (UK time). If, for any reason, it is not possible to use your MetaTrader 4 platform, please contact our 24-hour Trading Desk by telephone. Please refer to Telephone Trading Etiquette before calling us.
Alpari (UK) does not have any restrictions on scalping.
Alpari (UK) does not have any restrictions on hedging.
The base currency is the first currency in the pair, eg for EURUSD, EUR is the base currency. The second currency is referred to as the term currency.
In finance, leverage is borrowing money to supplement existing funds for investment in such a way that the potential positive or negative outcome is magnified and/or enhanced.
The amount of leverage on an account will determine the amount of funds you will need to put for a trade.
Read more about leverage.
balance = total financial result of all completed transactions and depositing/withdrawal operations on the trading account
equity = balance +/- floating profit/loss
margin = amount of funds being held in margin on open trades
free margin = equity – margin held on open trades
the % free margin = (equity/margin held on open trades) x 100
Orders are sometimes filled away from the desired price due to gaps in the market. This occurs because currency prices can sometimes be very volatile or liquidity can be thin. In these scenarios, orders cannot always be filled at the exact price.
Orders are never guaranteed because if volatility is high, prices can be missed and we may not be able to obtain a quote for you at the price you requested.
When attempting an instant execution order you may be re-quoted within a few seconds and in the case of a pending order you may experience slippage.
Our trading servers always run on Central European Time (CET), that is GMT/BST (UK time) + 1 hour. Having times in CET avoids having small candlesticks on Sundays and therefore allows the running of technical analysis and backtesting to be more straightforward. CET has summer and winter time, which usually changes on the last Sunday of March and on the last Sunday of October respectively.
Usually a losing position is automatically closed by the system when equity becomes less than 20% of the necessary margin. However, the Forex market is highly volatile and if you have a very low margin level over economic news releases, or under other abnormal conditions, the market can rapidly move against you and the system will close open positions at the next best available price which could cause you to lose the whole deposit or even more. Also, if you are holding positions over a weekend when we are closed, the market can open out of line from the close on Friday, causing extended losses.
Trading contest live at the London Investor Show FOREX 24 February 2012
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