Cover story
A forex platform is the screen between you and the currency market: a price feed, an order ticket and a ledger of your positions, all run by a firm you have to trust. RavixGlobal explains how that machinery works, and how shares and crypto are wired differently, for readers who plan in years rather than minutes.
RavixGlobal is not an exchange, broker or wallet. You cannot open an account, deposit money or place a trade here, and nobody from RavixGlobal will ever message you offering to. Read our about page and research standards.
Currencies
Pairs, pips, lots, leverage caps and the overnight financing charge, followed through a single GBP/USD trade so every term arrives with a number attached. If you are weighing up any currency platform, read this first.
Shares
Exchanges, nominee accounts, dividends and indices for the patient investor.
Crypto
Blockchains, wallets, coins and stablecoins, and the risks that come bundled with them.
Adverts show the chart. The parts that decide whether your money is safe sit underneath it. Every currency trading service, whatever its branding, is built from the same four layers.
The app or terminal you see. Often licensed from a third party such as MetaTrader, so two very different firms can look identical on screen. See our MT4 guide.
The broker that quotes prices, takes the other side or passes orders on, and holds your deposit. This is who you are really dealing with.
The regulator that licenses the firm, caps retail leverage and requires client money to be kept apart from the firm's own. No licence, no protection.
Spread, commission, overnight financing and currency conversion. Small per trade, large over years. Our cost guide adds them up.
When a forex platform looks polished, that tells you the software licence is paid. It says nothing about layers two and three. Our checklist on how to choose a broker walks through the evidence worth asking for, from the licence number on a regulator's own register to a small test withdrawal. And because the name of the software is often the only name a scam uses, our scam guide shows how cloned firms borrow real brands.
A download takes seconds; recovering money from the wrong firm can take years, if it happens at all. Whether the app is for currencies, shares or coins, put these questions to it first, and write down the answers.
Your local time: –
Regular sessions only, worked out in your browser from each venue's published hours. Public holidays and early closes are not shown, so check the exchange calendar before relying on it.
Short-term traders obsess over entry points. Long-term investors have a quieter enemy: the percentage that leaves the account every year in fees, spreads and financing charges. It looks trivial in any single year and becomes striking over two decades.
Take an illustrative $10,000 left alone for 20 years. Suppose the underlying investments grow 6% a year before costs; that figure is purely for illustration, not a forecast. With total yearly costs of 0.2%, the pot grows at 5.8% and ends near $30,883. With costs of 1.2%, it grows at 4.8% and ends near $25,540. The one-point difference in costs swallows roughly $5,340, more than half of the original stake.
Nobody controls returns. Everybody can see, and usually cut, costs.
That is why our trading fees guide matters as much as any chart pattern, and why we explain spreads and financing before we explain strategies.
| Illustrative case | Yearly growth after costs | After 20 years |
|---|---|---|
| No costs | 6.0% | $32,071 |
| 0.2% costs | 5.8% | $30,883 |
| 1.2% costs | 4.8% | $25,540 |
Nothing you type leaves your device. Each tool prints the formula it uses, so you can check the answer by hand.
New words along the way? The glossary has plain definitions, and the FAQ collects the questions readers send most.
RavixGlobal is a small independent publisher. We research, draft and edit explainers about markets and the firms that serve them, and we build simple calculators to go with them. We do not take deposits, route orders, hold coins or manage money, and we do not accept payment to feature any company.
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