I have read time and time again that opening a trading acount with 50,000 minimum is the only way to go. It seems reasonable since so many of the brokers are hedging against you on each trade ,to have a decent sized account to allow for some losses. Babypips school even goes so far as to say as much. Any thoughts for someone who wants to trade and actually make some money?
You absolutely DO NOT need $50k to start trading. If there weren’t mini and micro contracts available and very narrow spreads on the major currency pairs then the discussion would be different. Nowadays, though, you can put $100 in an Oanda account and trade just as well as you could with $100,000. Actually, probably easier because you may not be quite so stressed about the size of potential losses in real money terms with the smaller account.
As to brokers hedging against you, I’m not sure exactly what you’re saying there, but it sounds like brokers taking the other side of your trade and trading against you. Again, that’s not true unless your broker is a prop shop. Your broker offsets your positions against other customer positions. If there is a missmatch, meaning they have an exposure left over, they hedge it in the open market. Brokers want order flow, not price risk.
any thoughts on ecn brokers vs. market makers?
To be honest, I haven’t given much thought to the whole discussion. I don’t scalp or anything like that, so variable spreads is not something that concerns me. I honestly don’t believe the stop running and all that related kind of stuff people claim companies are doing is nearly as much of a problem as some would lead you to believe. To me that smacks of sour grapes when stops that are set too tight get taken out by normal volatility. Reputable firms don’t do that stuff because they risk their reputation. Plus, there are market makers whose systems have zero human interaction, eliminating the hanky panky.
My number one criteria by far (after being sure the company isn’t going to walk away with my money, of course) is that I can get in to and out of positions when I want and at the price I want.