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hi, i am just starting small, usually i put between 5000 to 10,000 in a broker
in the past, i set up accounts based on friends recommendation but did not do any own research on forum
lately, i start to have some minor issues (claims that they did not receive notice of withdrawal so causing some delays which can be frustrating) when i try to withdraw funds from some of the smaller brokers
which was the reason i started to read uo more about broker review and now i am trying to shift some funds to a larger broker such as IC markets
this is my personal view :
1.we have to accept that MOST (maybe not all) of the brokers will try to get an unfair advantage over the trader in order to make money out of us, eg widening of spreads, stop loss hunting. We just have to read more in forum to find out, how OFTEN they do such things, and how BAD is the widening of spread. if there is regular complaints, then we better stay out or be extra alert if we have an account
2. we need to know what sort of strategy we plan to use to trade - eg day trade (no worries about overnight swap fee), or early morning trade - need to beware how serious is the spreads widening during early morning. To avoid stop loss hunting, my friend taught me one trick about setting stop loss, which is NOT to put stop loss in the actual trading account to avoid stop loss hunting. what he does is that he has a copy trading software which he will trade in the DEMO account and copy only OPENED trades to his LIVE account. this way, the stop loss or pending orders will NOT be seen in the live account. Another issue about margin call triggering stop loss, is try not to overleverage eg only use leverage of max 100x.
3.if you are good enough to make profits - make sure to REGULARLY take out some funds - i have not reached a stage where i can regularly make profit haha but so far breakeven or only slight profit with my trading
4.NEVER just use one broker, it is good to ROTATE among 2 to 3 brokers the funds every 6 months - to make sure the brokers' service and system is still good