GoldExchange.EU is an European e-gold and e-bullion exchange service. It started operation in April 2007 with low rates and fast service. I have used them more than 20 times and exchanged several thousands dollars worth of ecurrencies successfully. The only concern I could have with them is the fact they are very new. However the very low fees allow me to send small amounts at one time without paying bank taxes.

Buying Ecurrency

GoldExchange.EU sells ecurrencies for bank wire. The steps you need to perform are simple:

1. Fill the Buy e-currency form on the site.
2. Send the wire to the given bank details
3. Receive ecurrency straight to your e-gold or e-bullion account

The fees for buying ecurrency are 1.9% with 3.50 EUR set as minimum. There are no bank fees upon receipt.

Selling Ecurrency

You can sell your e-gold or e-bullion to GoldExchange.EU in three ways:

• Selling for bank wire. This is the best method to out-exchange your e-currency especially if you live in the European Union. There are no bank fees for EU citizens so all you need to pay is 1.9% fee for e-bullion and 3.5% for e-gold. For international clients there is additional $20 bank fee.
• Selling for PayPay. PayPay is a Paypal-like service especially popular in Czech republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. It can be used from any other country with international bank transfers.
• Selling for Company Check. This option is available only for US customers and there are no other fees except the 3.5% fee.

The Service

My impressions about GoldExchange.EU‘s service are very good. Usually the buy/sell orders are executed in a matter of several hours. As I am in EU, I usually get my wires for 3 business days.

In case of trouble their support is highly responsive and friendly. There is ICQ, Skype and Phone in case you need instant contact, but their email responses are almost instant in the EU day hours anyway.

Any troubles?

So far none. The service is working great and always on time. I wish they could offer debit cards too. The international clients should be wary of eventual extra charges applied from intermediate banks.

GoldExchange.EU is still a relatively new service so I hope we can expect future developments from them.

If you are one of the many traders who prefer trading thru their web browsers instead of downloading trading platforms (although download option is also available), you will like Finotec. The company is established in 1998 and since 2001 is offering real-time Internet trading in currencies, commodities, CFDs and Options.

You an either use their Java based online interface which works in Internet Explorer or download the 10 MB large platform for Windows XP.

Available currencies, Leverage and Spread

There are 13 major and 19 cross currency pairs for the Forex traders. The maximum leverage is 200:1 with 0.5% margin. The standard spread on the most popular pairs is 3 pips.

Trading commodities includes crude oil, gold and silver and CFDs with a margin requirement of up to 5% – among the lowest available on the market. The minimum size of a transaction is fixed at 100,000 (1 standard lot) increments of the base currency or the reference currency’s equivalent.

Account Types

If you are a complete beginner it is highly recommended to start with a Demo account. Trading in Demo account is free and you can test your skills, strategies or just luck with $10,000 virtual.

The beginner to intermediate traders will feel best with the Mini account. It requires only $200 minimum deposit. The Mini Trading Platform provides live charts with tools like RSI and Moving Average.

If you are already an experienced trader, you’d better get all the benefits of the Finotec Trading Platform. In this case you have to deposit $10,000 and open a Standard Account. The Finotec Trading Platform provides live charts with tools like RSI and Moving Average. It also provides real time account equity.

The Online Java Platform

The Platform is available for all the account types and does not require installation. I had no success running it in Firefox, but in Internet Explorer it works just fine.

In addition to all the standard tools allowing you to trade all the currencies, options, equity and commodities, in the platform there are daily and weekly analysis issued by Finotec experts. You can also get SMS alerts and use their wireless trading capabilities. Directly from the platform you can request live support on the chat.

Overal Impressions Of The Service

There were some boring technical issues while I was getting my first impressions. The registration form displays an error “Please type in English” each time when I was trying to use Tab for moving to the next field. As already said the Java platform does not run in my Firefox browser. My affiliate interface was not accessible in the first day I got registered.

However for all these problems the support is very helpful and always willing to provide friendly service. A big plus for these who don’t speak English well is that the site and the support can be provided in several languages – currently Chinese, French, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, Polish, German and Portuguese.

I like very much the fact that Finotec is not only a forex trading platform – even if you don’t plan to trade seriously commodities, it’s pretty nice to be able to test few strategies while doing your forex trading.

Thinking that trading equals to gambling is the most certain way to lose all your money. If you just try to select currency pairs “by luck” and hope for the best you just won’t make it.

The trading education is the first vital step you need to take if you want to achieve success in forex trading. It’s much better to invest time and money into a good forex trading course rather than losing a lot more learning by the error and trial method.

What Is A Good Forex Trading Course?

There are thousands of books, DVD packages, seminars, “home study” programs and e-courses promising you to help in achieving great trading success. As usual in life, only a part of the promises are really delivered.

A good trading course or seminar should meet at least the following requirements:

• Fast learning process. You are not going for University degree here, you need to learn fast and start trading. A good course will get you started in a couple of months
• Interactive Trading. You can’t expect this from a free course, but if you are paying, you should expect interaction between you and the instructors
• Cover The Basics of Technical and Fundamental Analysis. You can’t be a serious trader without having idea what these are.
• Identifying optimal entry and exit points. A good course will teach you how to know when is the best time to open and close positions.
• Outlined program. If you are going to invest your time and/or money into a trading course, you should know its program at the beginning. You have no resources to spend for surprizes.
• Money back guarantee. If the course is paid and the sellers are so sure it’s worth the money, they’ll be ready to offer money back guarantee.

The good course featuers are not limited to the above points. Many good courses will offer you personal coaching, sample trades and deeper technical analysis education.

Free Or Paid?

Usually people say that you get what you pay for. But to conclude that the free forex trading courses are worthless is a big mistake. There are a lot of quality free courses, especially for beginner traders.

The writers of those free course of course need to get some return of their work. To do this they often advertise a particular trading platform within the tutorial or course. While there is nothing wrong with that, you should be able to identify which course is created with the sole point to promote a trading service and which really contains value.

One important mark of a good free course is the lack of replication of common and widely known information. If the course has some unique angle and personal style, chances are it is good. If the course concentrates on how one single company trades or how a single trading platform works, it’s probably created only to advertise.

The paid courses usually provide better value, but of course there are pretty many crooks who just want to get your money. In addition to using the checklist from this article, you need to search the Web for reviews and opinion for the course you plan to enroll in.

Practice Is Important

The mistake which a lot of novice traders to is to read and study without applying the knowledge into practice. Then at the end they try to remember everything and start trading.

Practice while you study!

Open a demo account with a Forex trading company and start applying everything you learn in the course. This is not only the best way to see what works and what not, but also to memorize the most important things that you learn in the course.

Don’t stay at demo stage. If you always trade in demo, you’ll never really learn. You will have to invest some minimal amount and try trading for real. Doing it is much different than playing with virtual money. The emotions are important part of the game!

Check our reviews for some forex trading courses. No matter if you enroll some of them or another one based on your choice, let us know about your progress.

Can you picture yourself sitting in front of the PC screen with a glass of whine making thousands with two mouse clicks? And what about doing this just a couple of hours daily?

Unfortunately to achieve this you must first read big fat books on trading, technical and fundamental analysis and strategies. In addition you have to follow the news every day so you can take appropriate actions.

In the beginning most self traders stay on the PC all the day with red eyes and lose money with each mouse click.

What Are Trading Signals?

There are people who have already been there years ago. They have read the books, spent the hours learning, experienced trials and errors. They are now expert traders who regularly win more than they lose. They are professional traders.

Such people want to use their knowledge and earn more right now. They can make living by trading their own money, but why stop there? Would you refuse some extra income especially if you don’t need to lift a finger for that?

Those traders can take other people’s money to trade and get part of the profits. This is called managed account trading and there are many who do it.

Another option for them to make extra income is to offer stock, forex or options trading signals. The signals are being sent automatically when they perform a buy or sell trade on their own accounts. So they don’t need to do anything more except to set up the software and charge their clients.

What Can The Signals Do For You?

Obviously, they can save you time for education and following the news. You can just follow the trades that the expert makes and have the same profits (or losses).

Trading by signals requires only basic education how to work with the trading platform you have selected.

The trading signals allow you to trade like the professionals without having to go thru the “red eyes” stage. Now you can even drink your wine while trading.

The performance of the different traders and trading types vary. I have seen forex signals which can help you make more than 100% pure proift per year.

Depending on your leverage and margin, you can make or lose much more than the expert trader does.

How Much Do The Signals Cost?

Usually the prices are between $50 and $300 monthly, but I have seen traders asking for $1,000 per month. It’s wrong to assume that more expensive signals are better, but often it is true. Most signal services offer significant discounts if you subscribe for 3 or 6 months or a full year.

One important thing to consider when subscribing for a trading signal service is that your equity must be high enough to justify the costs. For example if you you pay $100 monthly for signals which averagely achieve 5% profit per month, you need to invest $2,000 in your trading account just to break even. Still this is much lower than the $25,000 or more minimum most managed account services require.

How To Find Good Trading Signals?

The business of making money and investing has always been full of dishonest people and companies. Unfortunately the trading signals are not an exception. Many companies report fake performance results just to get some subscribers.

One good place to check for proven services is our reviews page. I won’t list any service which is not confirmed by at least two independent sourses. In most cases I’ll have my own experience with the services as well.

If you decide to find signal services thru the search engines, make sure to do some basic due diligence. Type “service name” + review and “service name” + scam and see if there are complains posted on forums and other review sites.

Think about what can happen with your money if you let it grow for few years at let’s say 75% yearly ROI. Just for five years they will double 4 times. If you invest $10,000 and don’t withdraw any of the profits you will have $160,000 at the end of the fifth year. For 10 years this money will be already $2,690,000.

This may sound like a dream, but is definitely achievable with Forex Capital Markets even if you are not a great trader yourself. Returns of 75% – 150% per year are not unheard in the Forex world – they can really be achieved with a good trading strategy.

But how could you do it?

You don’t really need to do it yourself. You can use the service of professional forex traders or systems with zero fraud risk. This is called a managed forex account.

What Is A Managed Forex Account In Simple Words

In short it is a contract saying that your funds will be traded in the forex market for which you pay a percentage fee of your profit. The performance fees vary, but usually are between 20% and 40%. The best thing is you don’t have to pay fees if you don’t make profits.

With the managed accounts you don’t need to understand forex at all. You are not trading anything yourself, but just collecting the profits. The traders trade your money. Their motivation to achieve great results is the percentage fee they take. If the traders lose or make no profits, they won’t get paid for their work.

“But then they may run away with my money!”

No, they cannot do it. You deposit your money with a third party forex broker service, the funds are in your name and only you can withdraw. It’s simple as that.

How To Get A Managed Forex Account

The application for a managed forex account is fairly simple if you follow the instructions given by the provider. There are some documents to be submitted and funds to be wired. Let me outline the main steps:

• Find a good managed forex account provider. Indeed this is the hardest part. There are hundreds of offers out there, but which one to choose? Many of them have too risky trading style and the risk of trading loss is too big. Others are too conservative and barely beat the bank deposits. You need the golden middle – traders which outperform the mutual funds, but don’t put your money at huge risks. There are such accounts and some achieve 100% + ROI per year. You can check out our reviews for such offers.
• Apply for an account. This is simple. Just follow the instructions they give you. There are usually two sets of documents that you need to fax or mail. One is for the managed account traders, the other is for the forex broker where your money will be traded
• Make sure that you deposit at a third party reputable forex broker! I can’t emphasis on this enough. There are fraudulent services on the Internet which claim to offer managed accounts, but in fact they take the funds themselves. You must deposit your money only on your name with a forex brokerage service and NOT in traders name or in some unknown e-currency account.
• Deposit the funds. Most managed accounts will require at least $10,000 or $25,000 minimum investment on your part and for some the threshold is even $250,000. If you don’t have such amount, you’ll need to consider another form of investing.

After these steps your funds will start being traded. You can only wait and watch the profits rolling in!

What are the risks?

Any investment involves a risk and that is especially valid about the companies which try to achieve higher returns on your money than the conventional investments. The forex trading is one of the riskiest financial activities and even an experienced trader can lose your money.

The good managed account providers have strategies to minimize the risks and limits about how large part of the money can be lost – even in theory. Avoid investing with traders which don’t offer serious risk management. Check our reviews to see some of the best managed account providers which are available at this time.