Criteria for Choosing an Online Trading Platform

In recent years, there are enormous numbers of trading platform emerged in the financial market. Most of them look identical, some are inethical, you have to be careful when choosing one for your own trading.

There are fours factors that I look into when choosing a trading plaform: Uniqueness, Dealing spreads, Commission rate and Minimum amount for account opening.


UNIQUENESS
There are many platforms in the market now, ask yourself why must I choose this platform to trade? Do this platform offers something unique that other platforms do not offer?

Well I had identified a trading platform that is unique compared to most other platforms. That platform is from ForexYard.

1. This platform offers super mini contract for oil which most platforms do not offer. Most platforms only offer oil futures contract from Nymex exchange.
Contract size for Nymex oil futures is too huge for a normal employee to st omach the risk, value of 1 point is US$1000.
As for super mini oil contract offers by ForexYard, 1 point is only US$100, which is very affordable for a normal employee.

2. Most platform offers contracts that have expiration date, but contracts from ForexYard does not expire.
If you had traded oil using other platforms, say you are bullish on oil, so you bought oil June futures contract. You will be forced to sell off your position last week on 20 May as the contract had expired on that day. If you want to hold on to a oil position, you will need to buy July contract again, again you face the risk of your contract expired before you see profit in your trading. It will be painful to see oil price rally after your contract expires, missing the great profit gain.

But with ForexYard platform you will not have this problem, because its oil, gold and silve contracts do not expire. As long as your account has suffic ient equity, you will be able to hold on to your positions.

DEALING SPREADS
Most customers are not awared that there is a group of dealers behind every trading platform, controlling the dealing prices 24 hours a day. When there is an event that is not favourable to the company (such as during major economics news release or fast market), the dealers will widen the spreads of the quoting prices.

With ForexYard platform you will not have this problem. The platform offers the clients 3 pips spread for EUR/USD and 3-5 pips spread for other majors. The company promises not to widen spreads under any market condition.
An example of such senario is: US Non-Farm payroll data is going to be announced in 5 minutes time, you think that this data is going to be bearish, so you can place an order to buy EUR/USD and at the same time place a stop loss limit in case your view is wrong, ForexYard will still quote 3 pips spread. As for other platforms, they may quote you 7 - 10 pips sp read.

ForexYard has also promised to quote prices at all times, irregularless of market conditions, so you will be able to trade even during important news events. Some other platforms may just widen their spreads or freeze their price in a volatile market. Most of the big run comes during important news events, it would be frustrating if your platform had freezed the price at that time.


COMMISSION RATE
Since most trading platforms looks the same, functions are the same, one of the way for them to differentiate itself is to lower commission rate. Guess what? ForexYard is not charging commission for all its products.

ForexYard only makes money from the spreads. Here are the spreads for their commodity products:
1. Gold spread is $1, spread for spot gold range from $0.60 to $1.00, so $1 spread without commission is pretty reasonable.
2. Silver spread is $0.06, spread for s pot silver range from $0.04 to $0.06, so $0.06 spread without commission is reasonable.
3. Oil spread is $0.06, spread for oil futures range from $0.04 to $0.07, so $0.06 spread without commission is reasonable, and not forgetting that their oil contract does not have an expiration date.


MINIMUM AMOUNT FOR ACCOUNT OPENING
Most companies required their customers to deposit US$30,000 in order to open a trading account. Customers may not have problem coming out with USD30,000, but that does not mean that we are willing to start trading with a capital of US$30,000, US$30,000 is a huge sum of money to most people.

The customers may just want to start out with a smaller capital, trade mini contract as a practice for a start, then increase their capital when we are more comfortable and more skillful in their trading. But not a lot of companies realised that, they just want big customers, big accounts. In my view, trading is ju st like any other skills, practice makes perfect.

For ForexYard, minimum amount required to open a standard account is only US$1000, and minimum amount required to open a mini account is only US$100. If you are opening the trading account for the purpose of trading super mini oil, then you have to choose Standard account, Mini account can only be used for trading mini forex.


If you are interested to open an account with ForexYard, clickhere: http://basemetal-trading.blogspot.com/2008/06/trading-platform-for-trading-oil-gold.html

If you are only interesting to test your trading skills, open the demo account, its free anyway!

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