I’ve just signed up for a demo account at FXCC, looking (hopefully) to start trading with some success. At the moment I’m grappling with the bare basics. I’m trading the AUD/USD pair, and have been going long or short, always setting a stop loss and a take profit. Sometimes these end up executing, or I end the trade manually. No problems with this.
The thing that’s bugging me though is that even when I’m not long or short, when I just have my starting currency (USD), the balance and the equity are different. My balance is $9987 and my equity is $10,167. This doesn’t make sense to me. Additionally, MT4 says I have 3 buy and 3 sell orders pending (are these old SL/TPs?). When I try to close them, MT4 says that I do not have enough money. This occurs when attempting to close any of the buy or sell orders.
Am I fundamentally misunderstanding how positions and equity work? How do I close these positions?
I’ve done quite a bit of the Pipschool, and looked at other tutorials on the basics of forex. That’s why I’m asking here. I can’t understand how my balance and equity can be different, when I only have USD currency.
This is definitely a question for your broker. I can see why some margin is set aside if you have live limit orders, but not being able to close any orders in your account is pretty strange.
Thanks for your response. So this is likely something wrong with the account? Luckily it’s only a demo account, I don’t know if it means they won’t respond if I email them. Just to be clear, I definitely shouldn’t be getting “not enough money” errors when trying to close either buy or sell positions on the “Trade” tab of MT4? I would include pictures just to be clear, but I need 5 posts first.
If equity and balance are different it means you have open position. Equity=Balance+floating P/L . If you try something and it says that you don’t have enough money it means that you try to OPEN a position.
Cheers.
Thanks for your help. So it’s possible to have an open position, even when I only have 1 currency in my exposure list? That’s what I don’t understand, how I can have a floating profit or loss when I only have my base currency (USD). My AUD balance is at $0. By that last sentence, do you mean I need to open a position instead of closing them?
The issue has actually somehow fixed itself. I stopped trading for a few days, and all of a sudden the positions that were supposedly open didn’t show up and my equity equalled my balance.
I was unable to post images before, but now I have enough posts. This is what it looked like before it “fixed” itself.
