Contract-for-difference (CFD) trading is a popular alternative to traditional investing because of its ability to maximize capital investments and, in turn, increase your potential profits or losses. This approach to forex trading has grown in popularity over the past decade, especially with some brokerage firms offering negative balance protection to limit heavy losses that would put your trading account into debt.

So what are the advantages of CFD trading? Here’s a look at some of the other key benefits.

Target trading is one of the most popular forex trading strategies. If you can identify how the market is trending and anticipate how prices will move, you can use that information to preemptively establish profit-taking points, or targets, at which to exit or partially exit your position. 

A grid trading strategy is a common form of target trading in which traders preemptively create conditional stop entry orders and set a profit target for each pending order.

Most forex traders want to stay active throughout the year, even as market conditions change. Whether you’re facing a bull market or a bear market, forex trading opportunities are out there for individuals who are willing to do the research and adapt their strategies.

Overview

The relative strength index, or RSI, is a price momentum indicator in the same family as the moving average convergence divergence (MACD) and stochastic oscillator. Like other momentum indicators, the RSI is charted on a separate graph adjacent to price and has an oscillator range between 0-100. Most traders use the RSI to identify overbought and oversold market conditions and locate trade entry and exit points, but it can also be used as a divergence indicator.

Moving averages are one of the most popular tools that forex traders lean on when attempting to understand market movements because they add an extra layer to any chart analysis you’re conducting, highlighting exactly where the price action is happening.

Based on pure popularity, the exponential moving average (EMA) and the simple moving average (SMA) are the two most common moving average tools. But there are differences between the two. Read on to learn more about SMA vs. EMA.

Overview

Known informally among forex traders as “Geppy” and “The Beast,” the GBP/JPY pairing is viewed as a reliable indicator of global economic health. These individual currencies provide a strong reflection of economic health and policymaking in both the Asia-Pacific region as well as Western Europe.

But this reliance on GBP/JPY as an economic indicator shouldn’t mislead traders into treating it as a safe pairing for beginners to get their feet wet with. Though the pairing’s volatility is great for generating potential earnings, it also creates significant risk for forex traders. This is why “Geppy” has one of the most fearsome reputations among all forex pairs.

Profit-earning trading is possible, but traders should approach “The Beast” with caution and familiarize themselves with the complexities of this forex offering.

There is serious earning potential at hand when you choose to trade currency, something that every investor should be trying to unlock. Looking at the scale of forex trading, it’s certainly worth knowing not only what the top traders are making, but also how they are making it and how top traders differ from the rest.

While most forex traders leverage their free margin to maximize trading power—and, thus, their earnings potential—margin trading is only one aspect of their success. What is free margin in forex? Basically, it’s the amount of available equity you have in your account to open a position using the borrowed margin offered by your online broker.

Again, this is just one characteristic of high-earning forex traders. Here’s a look at some of the other traits that are common among the world’s top forex trading professionals.

Investors of all stripes use hedging as a strategy to protect one position from adverse price movements. Typically, hedging involves the opening of a second position that is likely to have a negative correlation with the primary asset being held, meaning that if the primary asset’s price makes an adverse movement, the second position will experience a complementary and opposite movement that offsets those losses.