Forex trading is not what it used to be anymore – it is better. Back in the day, before the smartphone era began, trading forex markets was a tad more challenging than it is now.
What the smartphone brought was freedom for the forex trader. And control, which, in turn, improved the money management system.
As such, one can monitor the open positions on various forex trading apps and manage them. Or initiate new ones.
Before apps and smartphones, it was all about pending orders. In principle, any trade must have at least two pending orders – one stop-loss and one take-profit. More precisely, the former is the invalidation level, and the latter is the profitability level. Both are exit levels.
Besides these two pending orders, others exist, such as buy stop and buy limit or sell stop and sell limit. A buy stop order is placed when the trader wants to enter the market from a higher level than the current one. Conversely, a buy limit order is used when the trader wants to buy at lower levels than the current market levels. The opposite is true for sell-stop and limit orders.
It sounds straightforward – and it is.
But the problem with trading only with pending orders when not in front of the screens is that you never know what the market will do. Or, what the broker will do, as conditions fluctuate from broker to broker. For instance, some brokers have a 1.5-pip spread on one currency pair and some others have a 1.9-pip spread. It means that one pending order might be filled at one broker while missing at another.
On top of that, the FX market is full of false breakouts. That is particularly true when important economic data is released, such as the non-farm payrolls report in the United States. Also called the NFP Report, it is released once a month, typically on the first Friday of the month, and the data refers to the month that just ended.
The NFP is traded heavily by trading algorithms or quants, making it difficult for the retail trader to trade the spike higher or lower that emerges when the data is out. Because of the violent move happening in milliseconds, brokers will have different levels for a market, and so, pending orders might result in a different filling than initially planned.
A trading app solves this by allowing traders to monitor both the market and their trading account constantly. In the FX market, one never knows when an opportunity may arrive. It could be that the market reacts with a higher move following the NFP report, but two hours later, it reaches a significant resistance level on the monthly or weekly chart. Hence, by monitoring the market with the help of a trading app, one can always decide if it is the right time to open or close a trade.
Technological improvements, therefore, helped traders and the trading industry too. By being able to login to the trading account from anywhere, traders have more opportunities to beat the market.
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