Although it is not necessary to have a broker for currency trading, some people do choose a managed account for any number of reasons. It may be because they don't have the time to watch the trends because they are busy working with their other investments, or it may be because a managed account turns over the responsibility for making the right decisions to someone else. Whether it's a good or bad idea depends on how efficient the manager is that is handling your forex investment account.
A managed forex account is beneficial to the investor who is either inexperienced or doesn't have the time to continually watch the market. The management company will follow the trends as they develop and make recommendations regarding currency exchanges. Keep in mind that the whole idea behind forex is to buy the currency at the lowest price and sell it at the highest, and with a managed forex account, you are relying on someone else to handle all that for you. This means you want to make sure that the firm you hire to manage your account is reliable and experienced in the currency market. Since you are relying on someone else to recommend or make investment decisions for you, it stands to reason that you want someone who is fully knowledgeable.
Certainly, there is nothing that requires you to have a managed account, and you may not choose to do that. However, for many investors, the idea of sitting down at a computer all day and viewing charts and graphs in order to know the right move to make is just not something they wish to do. It seems a much better move to turn it over to a professional management company who will buy and sell your currency on your behalf, just as a broker would do if you were investing in securities. We know the forex market is not as volatile as the securities market, but that doesn't mean there isn't activity. In fact, $1.5 trillion is traded every day in the foreign currency market.
On the downside of the issue is the fact that managed accounts tend to require higher initial investments than ones you could do on your own, especially if you choose a mini forex account. Depending on the management firm you choose to manage your exchanges, you can be expected to invest anywhere from $10,000 - $20,000. Those are high odds to play, if something should happen and the management company makes a wrong trade or fails to trade at the proper time to give you the most ROI (return on investment). The average trader who hires a management company to handle his funds can earn from 5% - 20% every month, or a minimum of $500.
Since most management firms work with several different banks, they have inside information regarding the exchange rate and what the trends are within the currency market. This helps them make choices for their clients that are sound and in their best interests. Since exchange rates tend to change on a daily basis, it's important to know as soon as possible in order to make a decision on which trades to make on a given day. Even an experienced investor would not have access to that kind of information, thus the idea of a managed forex account can provide an investor with a higher ROI than he could expect to earn if he were doing all the trading himself.
For investors who are considering a managed forex account, make sure the company you choose is experienced and knowledgeable. You also want someone who is going to work on your behalf, knowing what you would want him or her to do concerning each trade. You will not always be there, so your manager must know the decision you will make.
When you have been trading the online currency market for as long as I have, you begin to gain an intuitive sense of when something seems out of place or sounds too good to be true. The forex market is still largely unregulated, so brokers and companies offering training can make off-the-wall hyped up claims and there will be nobody like the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to step in and put them in their place (especially if the broker is not based in the United States).
When I first heard about the protected forex account, it was promoted as being a "risk free" investment, and when I heard those two words there were alarms going off in my head because as a seasoned trader I know that there is always risk associated with forex trading. So being the curious guy that I am, I decided to research a bit about what this type of account is all about, and from what I have seen it turns out that this type of forex trading setup actually is legit because it turns out to be a win-win situation for the broker and the trader in kind of a clever way.
Let's start by defining exactly what a protected forex account entails (and this is information that I could only find from one broker, so it may not be accurate for all brokers offering this type of account). The terms of the protected forex account are as follows:
The protected forex account is much like an introductory APR rate on a new loan, as it is only a nice hook to pull in new traders. The broker will allow you to fund a mini account with up to $500, and you can trade with the typical level of 100:1 leverage. For the period of two weeks, you will be given a kind of "test run" for your trading account, and the broker will cover any of the losses that you sustain over the two week period. If your trading turns out to be profitable over the two weeks, you get to keep all of the profit in your account and continue to trade normally, at which point the regular trading rules apply again.
This is a good option for beginning traders because it functions like a funded demo account: it is impossible to lose money during this period because the broker will cover your losses if your account balance turns out to be negative. Many traders are still skeptical though, and one of the main questions that I have heard some forex traders ask about this type of account is "How is a broker able to offer this kind of setup and not lose a lot of money doing it?"
Remember that this type of account is available only for a two week period, and it is only available to a trader one time as an introductory offer, so they cannot keep going back again and again to take advantage of risk free trading. The reason the protected forex account is structured in this manner is to allow demo traders to ease into trading with real money without the fear of loss, and the maximum amount of money that can be put into a trading account is $500, but since most of these traders are filled with trepidation (or they would not be demo traders in the first place!) they will probably only put around $200 into the account. The most money that the broker can possibly lose with this kind of setup is the amount of money that the trader puts into the account, and that would only be when the trader is so bad that they run their account down to a margin call in two weeks.
On the flip side, if the account turns out to be profitable, what the broker has done is turned a demo trader into a confident live trader that is not afraid to trade with real money anymore. And because the broker makes a small amount of money on the spread for every trade that is placed, the amount of money that can potentially be earned from a single trader over a lifetime just from the spread alone is tens of thousands of dollars. So in the eyes of the broker this is a good investment because they can potentially gain thousands of dollars over the course of a few years (along with developing a trusting relationship with a new trader) by risking only a few hundred dollars, and it is good for the forex trader because they can progress from a demo account to a live account without the fear of losing money.
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