Moving from simulated to real accounts is a serious psychological test for beginner traders. Getting profits 'for fun' is one thing, risking your real money is quite a different thing. Often, beginner traders kind of shrink after they move to real accounts, become scared of their own shadow and completely forget how they took months to hone their skills on simulated accounts. This way or another, losing even a negligible amount affects the mood of a beginner forex market player, primarily, in terms of self-appraisal: am I really a loser, is the foreign currency market not for me, did I waste months of theoretical preparation and elaboration of trading strategies on simulated accounts?
Broking company Nord Group Investments Inc. (Nord FX) offers a globally tested method of helping beginner traders enter the world of real money in the currency market - micro real accounts. The only difference between micro and standard accounts is that it is US cents rather than US dollars that the former use, i.e. the risk of losing goes down two orders of magnitude, a hundred times. Losing the worth of a packet of cigarettes a day is something any trader is fully comfortable with. This helps them het used to and not scared by the law of the real forex market jungle.
This simulator is suitable not only for beginner players of the currency market but also for quite experienced traders that want to test new trading strategies.
Experts of the of Forex and Stock Exchange trading raise both their hands in favor of the micro account practice as an intermediary between honing their skills on simulated accounts and trading on standard real accounts.
Nord FX representative, Mikhail Aleksandrov, confirmed to Market Leader that almost all beginner traders first work in Micro accounts before starting with Standard ones. There are some differences between micro and, on the other hand, Standard and Premium accounts, in Nord FX, but they are insignificant. The main functional options such as prices, orders, trading rules etc are fully identical for Micro and Standard accounts. This is why further transition to standard live accounts requires no retraining from traders.
The minimum size of micro accounts with Nord FX is only $5. The leverage is similar to that in 'heavy-weight' accounts - 1:500. You can trade 21 currency pairs in micro accounts with a minimum and maximum lot of 0.01 and 10, respectively, and an increment of 0.1. Nord FX micro accounts offer fixed spreads from two pips. The maximum number of micro accounts one person can open with Nord FX is 100. It is important for beginner traders that the broker allows automated trading in micro accounts. Margin call/stop-out levels offer serious schooling for beginner traders: their standard level of 40 and 20 percent can grow an hour before the trading session closes on Friday to 200% which is a serious test for newcomers to the forex market.
The serious nature of Nord FX micro accounts is maintained by the fact that account owners can participate in the company's affiliate program on a par with owners of 'real' accounts.
Traders move from micro to Standard accounts painlessly simply by transferring the balance from the 'kid's' account to a standard live account.
