Professional cricketers train for every possible eventuality when preparing for contests. Fielders spend hours practicing at hitting the wickets; batsmen face thousands of different deliveries; and bowlers study their opponents by analyzing video footage of their past performances. If so, you might wonder why players don’t always perform perfectly on big match days. After all, each player knows precisely what to do in every situation, having drilled the correct response into his memory multiple times.
The reason why things don’t go according to plan is that, even with lots of experience under their belts, there’s still plenty of room for these athletes to err. Strong emotions can interfere with their carefully laid plans; unexpected weather events can bring play to a halt; and injuries do occur. In short, cricketers’ theoretical understanding of how they should play has to translate into practical decisions, which are made in the blink of an eye, and this is difficult.
By way of comparison, you may have put in the hours learning about the forex market and even gained some trading experience, but, when it comes time to participate in live trading, new challenges emerge. In August 2024, the famous carry trade suddenly unwound, catching experienced forex traders off guard and resulting in huge financial losses. This trade, which entails borrowing the Japanese yen and using it to buy high-yielding assets, depends on a weak yen with low interest rates. When the Bank of Japan unexpectedly hiked rates, the yen strengthened, and traders’ best-laid plans were left in the dirt.
This is why you need to trade with a brokerage that gears you to face high levels of uncertainty and volatility, especially in our times when geopolitical events exert such a strong influence on exchange rates. In this article, we’ll discuss the suitability of the iFOREX brokerage for forex newcomers.
Live Rates
Many mainstream financial sites will feed you price information that’s up to 20 minutes old. This doesn’t help you very much if you’re trading in the EUR/USD forex pair, (which measures the euro against the US dollar). That heavily traded pair experiences average volatility as high as 0.22% in the ninth hour of the day, 0.26% in the tenth, and 0.47% in the 11th. Even if we consider less popular assets, their volatility in our times – which many say is higher than in earlier years – makes it untenable to base your trading on delayed information. In fact, the IMF (International Monetary Fund) write that the pricing of our financial assets doesn’t account for the shocks of geopolitical events, and this results in prices recoiling sharply when those events occur.
For these reasons, your trading platform must send you live rates for your currency pairs. iFOREX clients enjoy a steady flow of real-time quotes for their instruments, and the hundreds of others available on the platform. Therefore, you won’t have to devote precious energy to double-checking on the prices you’re seeing, and you can focus on what really matters: navigating the markets with your unique strategy.
Market News
One important characteristic of twenty-first-century trading is the prevalence of news events as triggers for price action. Mainstream and social media shoot news to every corner of the globe in milliseconds, and they don’t tend to do it in a calm sort of way. On the contrary, their aim, oftentimes, is to create the impression of panic or controversy, and to exaggerate the importance of those events. As a result, it takes a matter of seconds for a news report to fire up traders’ nerves and, in the process, rile up the markets considerably.
iFOREX sends clients a stream of relevant market news to keep them abreast of the events that are worrying or exciting traders around the world. Knowing this news in a timely fashion is crucial for forex traders, who need to constantly keep their fingers on the pulse of the markets. Indeed, the combination of factors that drives currency prices is particularly complex, including interest rates, inflation, central bank announcements, economic growth reports, and geopolitics. In order to perceive which ones are going to be key in determining exchange rates, you must be aware of what’s going on in the world.
Educational Materials
Studying the financial markets and their instruments is a never-ending process, and there’s no limit to the sources you should look at in developing your trading mind. But you also need a convenient education centre at your fingertips so that, when you need a succinct answer to your question, it’ll be ready at hand. It doesn't matter whether your doubt is on a point in technical analysis, the oil market, or the nature of CFD trading, because iFOREX’s education center is unusually well-equipped. Upon opening it, you’ll find a selection of instructional articles on financial concepts, geared both for beginners and old-timers. For the times when you feel like learning visually, try one of iFOREX’s video tutorials, each of which explains things in a straightforward, easy-to-understand manner. Later on, you may even decide to engage with the broker’s trading coach to finetune your strategy.
Wrapping Up
For a new participant in the forex market, iFOREX is a sound brokerage to choose. All the above mentioned features and more are integrated into a user-friendly interface that’s intuitive to use, suiting all levels of trading expertise. When you sign up with iFOREX, don’t forget to utilize their free demo account to get comfortable with the interface before using it in live market conditions. This can be a great way of settling your nerves and gaining confidence before going out there with real money on the line. To find out more about iFOREX and their unique CFD trading platform, please visit the iFOREX website.