Forex Blog

NordMarkets is a new Swedish Forex broker that has a wide variety of trading account types — starting with mini and ending with the big institutional accounts. For the mini Forex accounts the trading conditions are not very interesting — $1,000 account minimum (deposits only via wire transfer and credit card), 0.1 standard lot position sizes and 3-4 pips spreads. Basically the larger is your account the better conditions you get — up to the interbank spreads for the really big trading accounts. For the smaller accounts NordMarkets can offer Muslim trading conditions — without overnight interest. They also provide their own trading platform, FXDesk, but I can’t say that it’s very advanced or functional.

Now you can download a new free research paper related to the Forex market from the e-books section of my site. It is “The Interaction Between the Frequency of Market Quotes, Spread and Volatility in Forex” that was published in the Applied Economics journal more than 10 years ago. This paper researches the relations between volatility, spreads and the frequency of the new market data in the Forex. It can be considered outdated for the majority of the modern traders, but it can help in understanding of how the interbank Forex market works. This e-book is definitely not for the general traders’ community, but it holds a lot of information for the experienced and professional traders.

These news aren’t that new, but for Forex traders it would be interesting to know, that Marketiva broker now offers world indexes (Dow Jones, Nasdaq 100, S&P 500, DAX and FTSE 100) and precious metals (gold, silver, platinum and palladium) trading. Metals are now part of the Commodities tab in Marketiva’s Streamster, which may hint for adding other commodities (think of oil) too. Spreads for the new instruments are higher than for currency pairs, but that’s OK, since other brokers also use high spreads on the less popular trading symbols. Spreads vary during the day and become lower during stock markets trading session periods.

Marketiva has lowered its spreads for almost all Forex pairs. Now the spreads for all currency pairs traded on Marketiva are as follows (in pips):
EUR/USD - 2
USD/JPY - 3
GBP/USD - 4
USD/CHF - 4
USD/CAD - 4
AUD/USD - 4
EUR/JPY - 4
EUR/GBP - 3
EUR/CHF - 4
GBP/JPY - 8
AUD/CAD - 10
EUR/AUD - 10
EUR/CAD - 10
GBP/CHF - 8
CHF/JPY - 5
AUD/JPY - 5
NZD/USD - 4

Those are very competitive spreads in current Forex market, which makes Marketiva even more attractive as retail Forex broker.