Dear Community,
I’m trading Spot Forex successfully for almost one year and decided recently to try trading Binary Options. I was very well aware of the risk, because Binary Options is more gambling than actual trading. But I had some extra cash, so I opened an account with OptionBit, one of the major Binary Options broker.
For those not familiar with Binary Options (further: BO), I want to give you a quick introduction: BO have usually an expiry of a few minutes/hours, although there are weekly options, the minutes/hours are the more common used. You are betting if the price of an asset (currency pair, stock index, commodity) will fall or rise. If you call an option, you are betting that the price will rise. If you put an option, you are betting that the price will fall.
Let’s say you called an EUR/USD option with an 15 minutes expiry at 1.35000. If the price has risen above 1.35000, you will profit. Let’s assume the payout rate is 75 % -> with an 100 $ bet you could gain 75 $ in only 15 minutes. But if the price has fallen, only 7 $ of your 100 $ bet would left.
A 75 % gain in such a short time sounds very attractive, but don’t think you can actually make money with Binary Options. The “brokers” are like casinos, only worse. In Spot FX some brokers can trade against you, but they also can direct your trade to an bank. With the BO Brokers there is a direct conflict of interests. Your profit is their lost, so they have absolutly no interest in your long-term success.
I have also scalping experience, so I could occasionally “predict” the movements of a few assets (usually FX Pairs) correctly with the help of Technical Analysis. But remember, as my profit was a lost for the broker, soon the manipulation started. The options expired with a delay, so that an profitable trade became a losing one. Its funny how every delay made my previously profitable trade into a loser. I wrote to them and got no answer. I called, but was put on hold and didn’t get any support at all. My profits were gone due to the manipulation trades.
So I decided to withdraw the left money, which took horribly long. I already gave up, as I couldn’t get any helpful answer from the “Customer Support” (a huge joke, I think the guys sitting their have no clue about options). In the end I got my money, it wasn’t a huge amount, so I wasn’t freaking out about the long time waiting. But imagine waiting weeks to get a larger amount of money back, which you need. I was lucky that I opened my account with a small amount of money.
This is my experience with binary options. I haven’t try the other BO brokers, but please people, [B]be aware as the BO brokers are not regulated. If you are too profitable, they easily could take your profit. You can’t sue them, nobody will help you.[/B]
Anyway, I’m focusing on FX Spot only and if I will ever have the need to gamble a little bit - I will prefer my local casino.
Best luck,
John