Broker to Trading

Day trading is speculating on changes in value of traded markets on shorter term time frames. As to what the time frame is, depends on the natural session for the market. Day trading comes from trading Stocks, thus day trading can be more clearly seen here as trading within the daily session for Stocks, i.e. typically the US Stock market opening hours. This differentiates it from buying Stocks to hold.

Day trading then seeks to take advantage of changes which can happen on the shorter term and involves tools which can look into shorter term market movements, such as fundamental data and technical analysis. However day trading also extends to other markets such as Forex. Forex is divided into multiple sessions during a 24 hour period, it does not have a 'day' session per se, like Stocks. This is also the case for Stocks in some sense, as different countries have different market times for their Stock markets. However while each session has its own characteristics, the markets traded are Forex pairs, perhaps focused on one or a few Forex pairs. So the natural flow for Forex day trading can more naturally extent into different sessions.

The trader may wish to trade a Forex pair based on the different characteristics of each session, or perhaps focus on one. Different pairs may have different levels of liquidity for different Forex pairs in different sessions. Other markets may also have a 'day' session but some may be traded 24/7, like Cryptocurrencies at some brokers. For these markets a day trader may wish to trade within a day as well, perhaps defined as the hours which they can comfortably trade within. A reason for picking a Forex session, is that most action tends to happen before and within sessions.

So to day trade, the trader may want to consider a broker which offers the capacity to go long or short and to use leverage, as the trader will be taking short term positions, not buying a market at 1:1 leverage and waiting for it to move over the longer term. However increasing leverage increases risk and it is possible to trade on smaller trade sizes (for example on a Cent account). To analyse markets the trader would need an online trading platform which offers technical charting tools and perhaps fundamental data in the form of an economic calendar (which brokers in general offer).

If the trader makes their own analysis and executes their own trades then they can use a platform which has both tools and perhaps aims to be user friendly. If they use robots to execute trades in their behalf, then they may consider using a platform which supports automated trading. Day traders may want to supplement their analysis with the ideas or actions of others and thus can consider a platform with social and copy trading tools. The MetaTrader platform offers support for both traders who execute their own trades and those who want to use trading robots, called Expert Advisors (EAs) on both MT4 and its successor MT5. Offshore brokers can be defined as those which are based outside of the main broker regions, typically but not necessarily on an island. The table below has a range of brokers which support day trading and are located on offshore locations.