Currency Secrets

It’s been awhile since I’ve perused Dukascopy’s website, as back in the good ‘ol days they were pretty much only known for their free forex data (which was indicative).

Since then I never really gave Dukascopy a second glance, however, as I soon found out a lot can happen in a space of a couple of years and I was impressed by what I saw when I checked out their forex platform the other day.

Probably the most prominent feature that blew me away was the Level II market depth screen! You could see quantities (in millions) of people who had placed limit entry orders.

Who cares? some of you may be thinking, HotspotFX has had Level II type screens since inception.

And that’s true, but the liquidity Dukascopy had far surpassed that of HotspotFX.

In fact, liquidity was so good that the spreads of the major currencies were often 1 pip (in fact I saw instances of 0.5 pip spreads on the EUR/USD)! Yeah, that’s right, that includes 1 pip spreads for the volatile GBP/USD!

Other things I enjoyed were:

• One click trading

• Economic, Event, and Equity Announcement Calendars (oh, and holiday calendars too)
• Swiss based - now I don’t really feel too much at ease with Swiss brokers (just look at some of the complaints I get about ACM here!), but I will give them (and Switzerland) the benefit of the doubt and add it as a positive.

Unfortunately though there were a couple of things I thought could’ve been better.

For one, they only allow accounts to be denominated in either USD, EUR, GBP, CHF, or JPY - if you live those countries you’ll think this to be fantastic, but for those living in countries such as New Zealand, Australia, and Canada we’re not too overly pleased. Also I haven’t opened

The charting was standard. I’ve seen worse (such as the charting plugin from FXCM), and I’ve seen much better (such as MetaTrader), but it’s good that they’ve at least provided something.

I also noticed that they charged commission on their trades. My initial reaction was “how dare they” (as it has always been with forex brokers that charge commissions), but considering they offered such a great platform and such awesome spreads I really didn’t mind. The commission rates they charge can range from anywhere between US$10 per 1 million traded, to US$30 per 1 million traded - it all depends on how much trading you do throughout the month.

After salivating so much on everything Dukascopy had to offer I was keen to fill out some forms and begin a live trading account.

It was then that it hit me.

Upon clicking on the open a live account I saw at the bottom that you needed a minimum of US$50,000 (or its equivalent in another currency) to open an account.

*sigh*

Oh well, at least there demo account was free and fun to play with. If you would like to have a play of Dukascopy’s demo click here.