I’ve been demo’ing with Alpari for awhile now. I’ve only been using a demo account of £20 and trading very small.
I thought to myself, why not just open a real account with £20 and for the tiny amounts of money i have been making on Demo, atleast i could be making some kind of real money whilst i still learn to trade.
Alpari require a minimum £200 deposit for micro accounts. So my question is:-
If i was to deposit the £200. Would they let me withdraw £180 pretty much straight away, only leaving £20 in my account to do what i’ve been doing with the demo?!
I’m not sure whether or not they would allow that. And I would imagine that if you asked them beforehand they’d tell you that they would not allow this.
The above being said though and more importantly: you need to ensure that you are able to trade while still adhering to strict money management rules. In other words (and I’m not sure on this because I’ve had no dealings with Alpari) you may find that because of their minimum lots sizes it would be impossible to trade with 20 GBP while still adequately adhering to strict money management rules which, without, you may as well just take that 20 GBP and have a couple of ‘pints’ with it because not adhering to strict money managment rules will ENSURE that you eventualy lose the 20 GBP.
And as much as I’d love to be able to recommend Deltastock to you: given Deltastock’s minimum lot sizes you STILL would not be able to trade while adhering to strict money management rules. Not with 20 GBP.
In your case, and if 20 GBP is all you can spare, or are prepared to use, the only two brokers that I can think of where you could trade with 20 GBP while adhering to strict money management rules would be either IBFX (they offer what are commonly known as ‘nano lots’ i.e. very small lots or a Oanda as I believe that with Oanda you can trade the barest minimum of lot sizes). And just be careful when talking about account types i.e. this can become a bit confusing given the terminology. As I say I have no experience with Alpari so I don’t know what their idea (lot size) is of a ‘micro account’ is. But generally speaking: ‘nano lots’ normally mean 100 units, ‘micro lots’ normally mean 1 000 units, ‘mini lots’ normally mean 10 000 units, and ‘standard lots’ normally mean 100 000 units (I’m using EUR/USD here as an example). The difference is the monetary value per pip movement and this is what has to be taken into account while formulating your money management rules. And ‘generally accepted’ money management rules would have you never lose more than 2% of your capital on any single trade (but LESS than 2% is better but more difficult to adhere to unless you’re trading with a HUGE amount of capital).
There may be others (brokers I mean) that offer ‘nano lots’ but both of those brokers have good reputations so far as I can tell.
Whether or not you’ve been through the BabyPips School I’m not sure but I do seem to remember that in the school it is stated somewhere, and quite rightly so by the way, that the number one reason for traders failing is being undercapitalised (and that’s the same thing as not having strict money management rules i.e. without enough capital you simply cannot adhere to strict money management rules).
HOWEVER: once you have built that 20 GBP up to 2 000 GBP or somewhere in that region REMEMBER WHO GAVE YOU THIS ADVICE (of course that means ‘open an account with Deltastock’)!!! LOL!!!