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hey guys been trading futures sucessfull for few months and friend of mine said i should look into forex , can someone point me in the right direction for broker and platform ? i have ninja not sure if that work with forex ?
thanks so much , and i did a search but i like updated answers sorry .
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
Ninja works with TDAmeritrade which offers all types of instruments including forex and futures, if you'd rather not risk the forex only shops like FXCM or Alpari. Also heard MBTrading has been rated well for years, although not sure if their supported platforms include others than MT4.
I have an older ThinkOrSwim account so I can't use Ninjatrader with TDA. but a new TDA account can be used through Ninja. I have a regular (stocks&options) account and forex and futures account with TOS but can only trade forex through the TOS platform and not Ninja. For futures trading, I use Mirus/Zenfire with Ninjatrader.
@TIYF mentioned Mirus also has a forex site that works with Ninjatrader.
Playing a bit of devils advocate, but if you are currently in the beginning stages of being successful with futures, why would you want to wander into another category of trading where your success is unknown?
I know the question was for the OP, but thought I'd like to chip in. Forex and Currency Futures pretty much look the same. EUR/USD and the 6E is not exact to the tick but it's pretty much exactly the same behavior and price action. With Forex one can size down fractionally much smaller than a futures contract. Generally the spread of the bid/ask can be much wider than a typical future spread but it's also on a relatively small size basis. And Forex has the historical retail trading problem of being much less regulated with a lot of cases of independent broker spread manipulation , stutter/delay tactics and other shenanigans since the market goes through Interbank and not a more regulated futures exchange center. Supposedly that's improving though and there should be much more reputable Forex brokers today. A size analogy could be forex as penny slots and futures as dollar slots. Although one could size up on forex (like today's videogame "slots") as well , and some do trade big solely on Forex.
An example of 6E futures and EUR/USD Forex side by side on ThinkorSwim at smallest available size of each. So one can see EUR/USD can be traded at 1/12th the size of 6E for lunch money:
Yes, if he meant just transitioning from currency futures to forex, then I agree the transition is not that big. I assumed the way the original post read, that he was switching asset classes as well. If not, forget what I said.
The main reason to use spot is smaller lot sizes so you can scale into a position. In terms of price action futures generally lag spot but not by much at all or everyone and their uncle would play the arbitrage, so if you have figured out an edge trading currency futures then switching to spot with a good broker is not an problem.
I use Interactive Brokers and MB Trading for forex. Both work with Ninjatrader. MB Trading is good if you are just looking for lunch money. You can go down to $1000 lots with commission also scaling up or down. You get paid a small amount for limit orders so with say Limit In/Market Out you will only pay the commission one way.
Interactive Brokers is different beast with $2.50 minimum commission and $25000 minimum lot size. But IB is great for trading news as their liquidity is several orders of magnitude higher than MB Trading.