What You Must Know About Mini Forex Trading

A mini Forex trading account is extremely helpful for a new trader who is more interested in developing a disciplined, rational trading strategy without focusing entirely on profits and losses.

When you start Forex trading you can begin with a paper trading account with which you can understand how the market moves and you can develop more skills and knowledge about this trading account. Once you are successful with the paper trading account then you can move in for the mini Forex trading account.

In mini Forex trading, you get all the benefits of a full-size Forex accounts. The same software, charts and graphs can be used while handling mini Forex trading. However, it helps you to develop the confidence needed to be successful without the anxiety and distractions that come when large sums are on stake.

Mini Forex trading is done in smaller contract sizes of ten thousand units, which is 1/10th the size of the standard account. For opening a mini Forex account you would require 100-300 dollars. Here one PIP is equivalent to one dollar for EUR/USD and GBP/USD.

Getting into mini account trading essentially means that you are engaging in marginal trading. That means that you are leveraging your trades, that is, borrowing money to be able to perform a trade without having to put in the full amount required for a single lot. The money that you do put in from your own pocket is known as a marginal lot. For a mini account, the marginal lot for every $10,000 lot is $50, or a 200 to 1 leverage. When you start a mini account with a minimum of $250, you are trading five mini lots.

You may be concerned that the mini account requires a fairly large degree of leverage, 200 to 1. (In contrast, when day trading on stocks the leverage ratio is only 4 to 1 within a single trading day.) For obvious reasons, it is usually not an ideal proposition to take on a large amount of leverage in your investments. But this is the standard practice in mini Forex trading and is not considered over-leveraging. Also, the investor’s risk on a mini account is actually offset by the lower possible losses one can face in mini trading.

With mini Forex trading, you can invest just $250, but trade 10,000 worth of a currency because of the high leverage. In a mini account, the margin deposit requirement per $10,000 lot traded is only $50. This leads to a leverage of 200 to 1 (10,000/50 = 200). Therefore, with your $250, you can trade a maximum of 5 mini lots, with $500 a maximum of 10, with $1000 a maximum of 20, etc.