Forex Brokers in Nigeria 2024 List
Broker
Country
Min. Deposit
Regulators
Leverage
Action
Recomended Broker
There are multiple factors you should consider before you choose your forex broker. Check the basic features enlisted below to find out if a broker is suitable for you or not.
Nigeria Safety and Regulation
Table of Contents
A financial market is a place where a lot of frauds and scams take place. That’s why there are worldwide regulatory authorities to ensure transparency for the entities that hold clients’ investments and give them financial services.
These regulatory authorities oversee the activities of the brokers, the maintenance of the clients’ funds, and the sanctions in case of market infractions.
They scrutinize the compliances of the service standard and provide licenses for conducting their operational and promotional engagement for their business. Another key reason for the reinforcement of regulatory authorities is the brokers that provide the retail traders with liquidity often take opposite positions of their clients. The regulatory intervention here ensures that these brokers shouldn’t manipulate the market.
FCA (Financial Conduct Authority), ASIC (Australian Securities and Investment Commission), SEC(Securities and Exchange Commission) are some of the Tier-1 regulators.
In Nigeria, the local forex market is regulated by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN). CBN issues the license after conducting supervision over the local and foreign brokers and brings them under a strict regulatory system so that they maintain customers’ funds in a segregated bank account.
CBN has a consumer protection department to monitor the complaints about the brokers. They reserve the right to fine and even revoke the license of any Financial Service provider in the Nigerian local market if any serious inconvenience is proven to have occurred by the broker.
There are many brokers that are registered by Offshore regulations like IFSC (Belize), FSA (Mauritius), etc. it is strongly not recommended to open an account with them as they don’t have enough influence in the interbank network to ensure proper security of the client. Some of them are even illegal.
Besides these facts, be sure to choose a broker that has been in the industry for at least more than 5 years. It is not wise to trade with a broker that doesn’t have enough user reviews and have their service tested by a decent amount of clients.
Offering of the Instruments:
If a broker is offering a wide range of tradable assets, that means it maintains a good trading volume in the global financial market. As you are up to trade forex, you also check well if they allow trading on all the major, minor and exotic currency pairs. The more expert your broker is in maintaining a multitude of instruments, the more competitive their spreads will be.
Brokers nowadays offer CFDs on different instruments. You also can check if your broker is providing CFDs on forex pairs, stocks, metals, commodities, cryptos, etc. If you are dealing with a popular and trustworthy broker, you will find detailed information about their offering of tradable instruments on their website.
Trading Platforms
This is another feature to look for in a broker. Like the rest of the world, MetaTrader 4 is the most popular platform in Nigeria. Though there are many brokers out there with their own proprietary platforms, MT4 is the most used platform all over the world.
With its chart station, you can analyze a range of instruments on various timeframes through a range of symbols. You can also put some technical indicators along with that.
With efficiency with the programming knowledge, you can also create your own trading robot and program your trading strategies for automatic implications. So, it is always good to start with an MT4 platform if you have less knowledge about trading.
You should definitely be accustomed to your trading platform through trading with demo accounts before you put real money for investment.
Trading Tools
Being a little bit tech-savvy with your trading approaches may lead you to greater profitability and effectiveness. There are several trading tools offered by different brokers to take you one step ahead to improve your trading decisions. Some provide necessary data for your technical analysis, some are designed to make your calculations and speculations easier. Your trading platform is the most common tool you’ll be using for making your trades happen.
Some of the popular trading tools provided by the well-known brokers are-
- Charting softwares
- Financial news wire
- Economic calendar
- Copy trading Tool
- Forex volatility calculator
- Currency correlation Tool
- Time zone converter
Trading Cost:
The most obvious costs you have to pay to your broker are Spread and Commission. There are also other costs like Swap charge, inactivity fee, deposit, and withdrawal fee that you have to pay to the brokers.
There are two types of spread models brokers usually earn from – Fixed Spread and Variable Spread. The fixed spread brokers provide a wider spread than the real market rate.
The variable spread brokers provide spreads close to the market rate. In this case, the spread is exposed to the market volatility so it can fluctuate between a lower to higher range. Here, a commission on your per lot trade will be applied with your trading volume. This may be 3% to 10% of the spread you are trading with.
You must keep track of the costs you are charged by your brokers. Your amount, your time, and your versatility to imply different trading strategies will determine the fee structure you should go with.
Education
You certainly should know how to use the trading platforms, calculate your trading costs, and a breakdown of your trading strategies with both technical and fundamental analysis of the market.
An authorized broker will have a good education and FAQ section for answering your queries about trading. You can learn about the market languages, trading platform features, and functions from there. It is to their benefit if they can train you up as a good trader. As soon as you open an account with a regulated forex broker, you will have access to their guide materials, platform lessons, webinars, and other resources you need to be a trader.
Then you will have to apply and practice your knowledge through trading with a demo account. Here, you can trade multiple currency pairs and other assets with virtual money. It is strictly not recommended to make real investments if you hadn’t tested your trading procedures in a demo account.
Opening a account:
When you are prepared enough to trade with real money, you will have to open a retail account with your broker.
Usually, brokers offer three types of retail accounts depending on the lot size you want to trade –
Micro Account: If you have a lower amount of investment and are not skilled enough to make accurate speculations from the analysis of the recent market history, a micro account is recommended for you. This account allows you to trade a micro lot, that is 1000 units of the base currency.
Mini Account: If you have figured out how to win from your micro-lots in the market, you may upgrade to the mini accounts where you will be offered to trade 1 mini lot, 10k units of the base currency you are trading with.
Standard Account: A standard account allows you to trade with the standard lot, that is 100k units. You can trade with a standard account only when you can understand the risk factors and handle the trades with effective real-time decisions as per the market movement.
The more you can handle larger lot sizes, the more features and facilities you will be offered by your brokers. For example, for trading a micro lot, you may have to deposit the whole 1k in your account. But in a Standard Account, you don’t have to invest more than 50k-60k as a deposit as trading with larger lot sizes allows you to trade with larger leverages.
Traders who are skilled in making good trading decisions and experienced in handling the risk factors used to go for a broker that provides an STP or ECN account. These account types allow you to trade in exposed liquidity. You get the live market rate and a transparent cost structure. Retail brokers charge hidden costs and mostly give a rate that is not similar to the market. People like to trade from these accounts as it helps you to trade amounts larger than 100k units.
Customer Support:
This is a key important trait you should investigate in your trader. Your broker should have good customer service throughout the working days for 24 hours. They should be available through multiple media so that you can talk over instantly if you are having any issues.