Here is what we want you to do: before you go out and find yourself the best forex trading courses you could ever find, discover your trading identity. I know what you are thinking – what in the world kind of philosophical mumbo jumbo is this guy going to try to convince me of now? Well, I urge you to bare with me here.

There are two types of traders in the Forex market (or, 2 types of serious traders that are looking for major Forex profits). One of these kinds is the type of trader who makes their decisions based on fundamental analysis of the market. The other kind of traders makes their decisions pertaining to what to buy and sell based on procedural analysis of the market.

Procedural Trader

If you are a procedural trader, you are most likely focused on reading charts your broker gives you and analyzing each currency pair’s past. Your currency trading success relies on your ability to understand mathematical applications that dissect the behavior of a certain graphs. You look for Forex trading advice based on moving averages, and other formulaic numbers of the sort.

Fundamental Trader

If you are a fundamental trader, you are more concerned with reading the news your Forex broker is sending you than studying the various complexities of mathematical equations. You take a hard look at both the economic and political news coming out of the prospective country that you are looking to buy and/or sell. Things like monetary policy and interest rates get your juices flowing, and are the true instigators in the process that ultimately ends in you clicking the “buy” or “sell” button on your trading platform.

Which Are You?

The question is: does it really even matter which one you are? It matters in the sense that if you don’t know what kind of trader you are, then how are you ever going to develop a good Forex trading system for yourself? How can you be expected to get a quality forex education if you can’t even decide how you should trade?

Don’t get yourself too hung up on the topic, but to keep a long story short, no piece of Forex trading advice will ever help you if you don’t even know how to apply it.

Sure, you can leave here and go trade currency pairs on a whim. Sometimes you can take advantage of some pretty nice pip spikes that way. But, if you are wanting to save yourself from getting burned, try to come up with more of a solid plan to build off of.

The best Forex trading advice to give you with regards to helping you understand which kind of trader you are is this – you are most likely both. Every serious trader is assuredly more of one than the other, but even the guys that say they just read the news will figure in a little bit of procedural analysis in their trades. Vise versa for the fundamental group.

Overview

As an Interbank trader, you will be provided with a Meta Trader 4 Forex trading platform. Their system accepts any and all Expert Advisors, otherwise known as those automated trading robots you hear about. IBFX will already provide you with 40 custom tools and indicators for you to use at your own will.

Trades are executed fast and are highly automated. Their spreads ranks second to none, and with so many banks registered in their system, there will almost always be a handful of banks who are competing for your buy or sell.

When it comes to customer service, we have found Interbank Currency Trading to be unmatched by anyone else. They have always been extremely friendly, and from what we’ve heard from our trading partners, they treat everyone equally. No one trader is handled differently than another. In other words, your $100 account is just as valuable as another guy’s $1000.

IBFX is also one of the few Forex brokers that offer a debit card with your account. Using this debit card makes it extremely easy to make deposits and withdrawals with your trading account, and basically qualifies their company as the one company that offers the most liquidity of your funds.

Accolades

IBFX has won a plethora of awards for various things ranging from their customer service, all the way to their growth rate. Interbank FX ranked 208^th on the 2009 Inc. 500 list, which is an annual ranking of the fastest growing companies in America. Also, Interbank Currency Trading ranked 8^th in the Financial Services industry.

Money AM awarded IBFX with their “Best Online Forex Provider” title, as well as their “Best Online Forex Education” title in both of the award’s inaugural year – 2009. This is a prestigious ranking, and considering how many other Forex brokers are out there these days, we think these awards simply speak for themselves.

Interbank also took home quite a haul from FOREXDS in 2009. They were elected the “Best Overall Forex Global Broker,” the broker with the “Best FX Platform,” “Best FX Accounts Department,” “Best FX Funding Department,” and “Best Forex Customer Service.”

Interbank Currency Trading also claimed many other awards over the course of 2009. Just to name a few: Shares Magazine Awards gave IBFX their “Best Foreign Exchange Broker” trophy, Ernst & Young touted the owner of IBFX as being an “Entrepreneur of the Year” in the Financial Services Category, and the Middle East Forex Awards panel gave them their “Best Trading Platform” award.

Conclusion

We give IBFX a 4.7 out of 5. We are carefully to give a course or a broker a perfect rating, because we don’t want anyone to get any wrong ideas about a guarantee of profit. A trader is only as good as his trading ability, so one good broker isn’t necessarily better than another good broker. However, we truly respect what Interbank Currency Trading has done with their establishment, and we urge you to take a look into their service.

What FxClub Offers

To say the least, their homepage is very visually pleasing. Videos, moving graphics, and a slick professional feel really adds a dose of credibility to their operation over there. Their website has been around since 2000, so they’ve been in business for a while – perhaps being the reason their site looks so good.

A quick skim through their front page will tell you a number of things. First off, they offer a substantial amount of Forex trading courses, including educational videos, guides, seminars, and more. Clearly all of their years of being in business has taught them that to bring in customers, you need to offer a lot more than just being a broker. All of the above mentioned aspects in addition to their community forum make fx club seem more than qualified in the “services” department.

As with just about any other major online Forex broker this days, they offer a free demo Forex trading account. On top of your free practice account, you get access to an Fx training guide that will help you through each trade that you make.

Their minimum deposit is comparatively low at a meager $10. Additionally, fxclub also provides a free $100 margin bonus if you deposit 100 dollars or more, and if you deposit $300 or more they will provide you with an unlimited amount of market signals.

What People Are Saying

Sites like Forex Peace Army are flooded with reviews ranging anywhere from really good, or depressingly bad. Nevertheless, the main points people make are in regards to their trading platform, customer service, and their terms of service.

FXClub utilizes a unique trading platform called the Express FX Platform. Unfortunately, this system has not been very well received by the public, and Forex Club has lost many of their more experienced traders because of this. For us, MetaTrader 4 is the standard, and we just don’t see Express as being up to snuff in relation.

Many people comment on long wait times when it comes to their customer service. There have been numerous reported instances of people asking for quotes, but getting such a long delay from the trading desk that any profits they would have hoped to earn had already fizzled away. Plainly put, without timely quotes, making educated Forex trades is close to impossible.

A lot of traders find things to be concerned about in this broker’s Terms of Service. One commonly complained about clause in their TOS is a mandated minimum 12-15 pip stop loss on top of their fixed commission, or in other cases, their spread. These extra fees are simply too much for many traders, which causes them to leave in search for a cheaper broker option.

As a final point in this fxclub review, we did not find that their service is a scam, save a handful of unhappy customers. However, ruffling the feathers of some of your clients almost comes with the territory of being a major Forex broker these days. So, if you are interested in trading with these guys, just know that just about any broker has positives and negatives about them. It’s up to you to weigh those pros and cons, and make a definitive choice.

For several years Japan had a 0% central bank interest rate, specifically between the years of 2000 and 2006. Now, at the time of writing this article, the interest rate is up to 0.1% (Feb 19, 2010). However, in relation to other countries, this number is significantly low, making Yen trading for any currency trader an attractive option for carry traders.

As of February 2010, interest rates for other major currencies were still higher than the Yen. Australia is at 3.75%, United Kingdom at 0.5%, United States at 0.25%, and the Swiss National Bank at 0.25%.

Other countries have even higher interest rates. Egypt rings in at 8.25%, with their last update in September of 2009. South Africa is at 7.0%, and hasn’t been updated in August 2009. China is at 5.31%, India at 4.75%, and New Zealand at 2.5%.

Let’s take the New Zealand Dollar, or NZD, as our example currency. Say we want to make a carry trade with Yen trading, in other words: we would be selling our Japanese Yens and buying New Zealand Dollars. With that, we take New Zealand’s 2.5% rate and subtract Japan’s 0.1% interest rate to get a 2.4% difference between the two currencies.

In this example, if we were to buy $20,000 of NZD for the equivalent amount in Yens, that trade would earn us $480 over the course of a year. However, there are many factors you must consider before you go off thinking this will be easy money for you. One of which is the fees that an online fx trading broker is going to charge you based on your trades.

One great Forex trading tip I can give you is that any online broker you find is going to charge you fees, or take a certain percentage out of your trades as their “cut.” Read your agreement with whatever broker you choose to go with, like the one you’ll find at FXClub or IBFX, and make sure you aren’t getting charged any fees that your mind doesn’t agree with. There are many great brokers out there, so it’s not worth getting gamed by a broker you didn’t read enough about.

No matter what forex trading program or strategy appeals to you the most, carry Yen trading should always be in the back of your mind. Even if you do not use this technique immediately, carrying in Forex is still important concept to understand. Remember, you always want to be up to date in all new trading information and techniques. So, in effect, you should never ignore any given strategy.

So, what does that mean for you? Well, it could mean several things, not the least of which is if you don’t have a fx trading account already with another forex broker, you might end up considering GCI. They’ve been around since 2002, and we have seen numerous complaints about their customer support and their general complacency towards growing a respectable company.

Here is one of the most exciting things you would get if you become a member of their forex community: commission-free trading. We don’t know how they do it, but that might be a reason to avoid them at all costs. Yes, GCI trading is one of the very few online forex sites that offer commission free trades. And, from what we have found at least, they are probably one of the only ones that needs to be looked in to.

As one of their many members in currencies trading, you will also have access to top notch, state-of-the-art foreign currency trading software. Even though this doesn’t equate to a solid broker, inside, you will find three separate online fx trading software options to try your hand at.

1. Meta Trader 4 – This is one of the most accepted forex trading platforms in the industry, and you get free access to it right of the bat with GCI trading.
2. ICTS Forex – This software will give you access to trading forex, crude oil, gold, as well as stock indices. This software is a little more of a chore to use when compared with Meta Trader 4, but once you get the hang of it, you will surely enjoy all of the customization options, and eventually, it’s relative ease of use compared to certain other trading software out there.
3. CFD/Share – In this software you will also get access to multiple markets, including forex, commodities, as well as stock market shares. If you’d like, however, all of this can be easily integrated into your Meta Trader 4 trading software, MT4 for short.

GCI trading also provides real-time quotes and charts for all currency pairs, free of charge to their trading partners. This and many other features help cater to whatever fx trading strategy you employ. However, keep in mind that you can find this from several other brokers, as well. Pick your fancy!

Finally, every account is given access to GCI Financial’s research utilities, which include a large supply of forex trading advice, as well as an advertised 24 hour support team for your convenience.

So, if you are still searching for the right place to start your foreign exchange account with, and you are considering GCI trading as one of your top few choices, you might want to reconsider. There have been many complaints against the company, many of which can be found on various online forex forums and communities around the Internet. In short, when dealing with GCI, keep a close watch on your pocket book.

With that said, we know there are other great programs out there for you to consider, and we hope to continue to help you in your decision making process.

Most people, due to the aforementioned information, like to believe that Forex is pretty much the be all, end all of every financial trading market in existence. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not the only game in town. There are several other competitive markets people tend to forget about, such as stocks, gold, bonds, and oil.

Quite honestly, there are a lot of lies and misleading bits of information, especially on the Internet, about how each one of these markets are related to each other. Some “pundits” with Forex trading courses go as far as relating a certain currency pair to an entirely separate market than Forex. Frankly, there is always a relationship between two entirely separate things – even financial markets, like Forex and oil. That is, even if two markets share absolutely no correlation whatsoever, they still have a relationship.

Electronic currency trading through online brokers like FXCM is its own type of animal. If you are going to be fair, you cannot compare it to, for example, the American stock market. The scope of the foreign currency exchange is much, much greater than the scope of a single country’s publicly traded company market. So, you have to be careful to trade within the market without basing too much of your decisions on outside influences. Whatever you see happening within Forex, keep that within Forex – and do the same with every other market, universally.

The concept of electronic currency trading was revolutionized once the Internet gave way to the “common man” being able to gain access to Forex trading in the late 1990’s. It cannot be taken for granted that Forex has always been its own entity, and cannot be independently evaluated based on any other market’s data.

You might have a few questions about Forex before you get started on your training, and we’d like to try to answer a few of them for you here. Follow along if you would like, and feel free to browse other areas and resources given to you here on the site.

Forex – otherwise known as the Foreign Exchange market, Retail Forex, Spot FX, FX, or sometimes simply Spot – is measured to be the single largest financial market known to man, weighing in with a daily trading volume of over $4 trillion. This market actually equals an amount over three times the cumulative amount of all of stocks and futures markets – yes, combined. With that information alone, are you able to see how huge the forex market is?

One of the first questions we get when we’re explaining this to someone new to the market is “What do you actually trade if you’re not trading stocks or futures?” Here’s your answer: money. You may wonder how it may be possible to trade your own money for someone else’s money, and somehow (hopefully) make a profit.

However, consider what happens when you cross a border into another country that operates on an entirely different currency. You go to a bank, and exchange an arbitrary amount of cash for your tourist destination’s country currency. Typically, you do not get an amount equal to the amount you gave the banker. This is due to the exchange rate – an ever fluctuating measurement that is always moving, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Essentially, currency trading involves the buying of one currency and the simultaneous selling of another – based on exchange rates. You may trade currencies via a dealer or a Forex broker, most of which are found online. Once you sign up with one of several brokers like GFTForex, IBFX, or FXDD, you will most likely want to look into forex trading courses before you risk a handful of your hard earned money.

Currencies are traded in “pairs.” Some of the most common, and most traded Forex pairs are the EUR/USD and the GBP/JPY, or the euro and the US dollar, and the British pound and Japanese Yen, respectively. In layman’s terms, foreign currency market pairs are used as a sort of ratio – comparing one country’s financial well being to another’s. So, when you see that you can buy hundreds of Japan’s currency with, say, USD, that does not mean you are receiving 300 dollars for 1. This isn’t highway robbery, and unfortunately, there is nothing special about your one dollar that separates it from any other dollar.

However, all jokes aside, online forex trading can be a difficult concept to grasp, considering you are not buying any physical materials. You will not receive a certificate of your purchase like you might if you were to buy a share of a company on the stock market. Instead, you are essentially buying shares in entire countries – prospecting on any given country’s economic health at any given time.

We can cause you to spend hours on this one page, getting you into all of the Forex basics your mind could possibly handle. Or, we could give you a chance to have a look around at all of our other resources we’ve provided for you here. It is our hope that you find the best forex trading courses that suit your needs, and that you have fun doing it.