Binary options trading has grown increasingly popular as one the fastest and easiest ways to trade. Fast does not necessarily equal effective though. Traders need to be cautious when working within this market. They are very different from other types of trading as the volatility is higher and the trades are short term.
With binary options, you do not actually own any of the assets. Instead, you are attempting to predict the movement of the underlying asset only. Think of it as a prediction of which way a particular asset is going to move and less of a long-term investment.
For example, if you are trading in the stock market and bought 100 shares of Google, you would actually be partial owner of this public company. Obviously, your share would be minimal, but you would still be a shareholder.
In binaries, it is totally different. All you’re doing is predicting whether the price of Google will go up or down. This allows you to trade dozens of assets without actually taking ownership. The assets that you trade in binary options are called underlying assets for this reason.
Binaries are really simple to understand with just a little knowledge, but they do take a while to master and become profitable. They are simple in concept, but very complex when it comes to using them correctly. You can learn more from our free online binary option trading course.
In their simplest form, binary options can only go one of two directions, hence their name. You can either be right or wrong. They are an all or nothing type of trade and there is no middle ground. This might sound threatening, but in reality they are quite easy to understand.
All you need to do is:
- Select an asset
- Predict whether you think that asset will go up or down in price
- Select the amount you are willing to risk
The broker that you are working with will display the percentage amount that you will have returned to you before officially committing your money to the trade
- Select the timeframe you want to work in
- Click “trade”
This is one of the greatest things about binary options. You have more information about how the trade will conclude with binary options trading than with any other type of trading. You know exactly how much you stand to gain and exactly at what time that money will appear in your account if you are correct in your prediction. Binaries explain all of these things prior to your commitment.
Trading Tip – Make sure your computer is working in an optimal state and avoid brokers from our binary option blacklist.
Binary Options for Dummies
Without assets to trade the binary options market would not exist. Imagine a marketplace without a market. This wouldn’t make any sense. However, there are dozens of assets to trade on a daily basis.
With binary options, you can trade all of the major currency pairs, stocks, indices, and commodities. The exciting thing is that you are not limited to only one place. Whether you want to trade gold futures, Apple’s stock, or the Japanese yen, you can do it all from the same platform. Trading binary options is about making winning trades and placing winning bets. Read more about itm and otm binary options to be assure you understand the basics.
You can also trade on an international scale without having to change brokers. Many of the top binary options brokers include numerous stocks and indices from Europe and Asia, allowing international traders to use their platforms without any problem. The good news for you is that brokers act as a one stop shopping place for all of your trading needs. You can trade pretty much everything with the same web site without having to keep switching screens.
There are four main types of assets to trade on the binary options market. Each of these are traded in the same fashion. Make sure you learn about each of these before trading them on a live trading account.We have also seen over the years that more “dummies” tend to opt to trade with a binary options robot or auto trading bot. We do not suggest this and instead propose to read more about binary trading strategies in order to learn trading yourself.
Forex
This is the marketplace that holds all the currency pairs. Some of the major currency pairs include the EURUSD, GBPUSD, USDJPY and many more. If you were to trade the Forex market you would actually own one side or the other. Meaning, if you were to buy euros you actually own the euro currency based on the price and if you bought the US Dollar you would actually own US dollars at the current price.
The difference between Spot Forex Trading and binary trading is the way we buy and sell the asset. In binaries we are predicting whether the euro dollar will go up or down. You can trade forex on the binary.com MT4 platform when you get a bit more experienced.
Stocks
Stocks are among the easiest types of assets to trade, because many first-time traders are already familiar with their machinations from traditional stock markets. The stock market is widely traded on a daily basis. You can trade thousands of stocks from around the world. In the binary markets, you can trade a selection of stocks based on the price only. Using our example from above, you’d actually trade the Google strike price predicting whether the price will go up or down from the point of entry. With so many stocks to choose from, be sure to understand the stock you are trading before you actually invest in it.
Stocks are prone to traveling up and down in price for extended periods of time, and the market sentiment and investor mood surrounding them is quite easy to analyze. Investors who trade in stocks must train themselves to be on the lookout for any type of business report, especially quarterly reports or P&L earnings reports, so that they can properly analyze the potential price movement in a particular company’s stock.
Indices
All indices are made up of stocks from certain exchanges. Your goal is to predict whether that particular indices will move up or down from the starting strike price. Each of these will be open at different times, so be aware of this when binary trading.
Each index is slightly different: some may hold as few as 10 companies, whereas some (like the S+P 500) stockpile up to 500 companies. Trading in indices is very similar to trading in stocks, but with a notable lack of stock volatility. Make sure to analyze the larger companies and stocks present in your indices, as these will likely be the assets that will affect the overall movement of an index. Watch for government reports or major announcements from large companies present in your chosen index.
Commodities
Commodities concern actual physical materials like corn, wheat or gold and are most often traded as futures with three-month time windows. We would all like to own gold but owning actual physical gold doesn’t apply here. When trading gold on the binary markets you are trying to predict if the gold price will go up down, just like the other assets.
Price activity is high in the early days of the three month contract, and movement remains variable until about the midpoint of the three months, after which it slows to a crawl. Traders need to remain vigilant in their world news research if they are trading commodities; many different events can affect physical goods, and investor sentiment can change rapidly and price dips or rises can occur dramatically. Monitoring market news is a key aspect of commodities asset trading.
If you were to invest $100 at a strike price of $1684, predicting the price to go up over the next 15 minutes, you will receive a payout of $180 assuming the rate was at 80%. If you were to lose this trade, you would end up losing your total investment. This is also known as all or nothing trading.
Each asset class offers a unique blend of opportunities for profit. If you are a novice trader, diversification is a very good idea. You never know which asset class will suit your particular binary options trading strategy best, and platforms offer so many different mechanisms with which to make money from all types of assets. As you become an advanced binary options trader, you’ll know just where to turn for the best profit daily profit opportunities.
With binary options, it’s important to remember that all of your trades will have strict time lines that you need to pay attention to. Some of these can be pretty short and others can last a bit longer. Ultimately, you will need to decide what timeframes work best for you. If you don’t like having money tied up in a trade for a long time, 60-second or 5-minute options might be best for you. If you don’t mind waiting, you can trade hour long trades or longer.
The thing to remember about expiry times is that they are adaptable only up until you commit to the trade. Once the trade is locked in, you must sit back and wait. This is different from other types of trading where you can sell off your purchased shares at any time you want, but it is a fact of options trading that you cannot get around.
Some brokers will allow you to sell off your trade for a small refund (closing options early), but this is a rare scenario that you shouldn’t worry about until you become an advanced trader. Instead, it’s far more important to spend time researching trades beforehand.
All Or Nothing Options
The term all or nothing in binary options means; you’re either going to win your trade with a guaranteed percentage or lose what ever invested. It’s a bit scary to think about, if you are a new trader. When you have the chance to earn 90% on a trade, the risks go up just as well. The important factor here is to always understand your risk before entering the market.
This fixed return will be determined by the broker and the strike price you get in at. Assuming you take a call option on Google Stock at $800 a share for $100. Your return on investment will be set before you enter the trade. Say you take this trade for an 81% return if the trade finishes in your favour. This would mean you will get back $181 into your account. If the price finishes anywhere below the strike price, your return will be $0 or a loss of $100.
There are several types of binaries that traders can use. You have the simple call and put option, boundary options, and touch or no touch options. These are all forms of all or nothing binaries. It’s best to test each of these before risking real money trading them.
There are also so many different types of timeframes you can trade these. You have the shortest timeframe of 60 seconds up to weeks. Our favorite style of option is the 10-15 minute binary. This gives your trade enough time to work itself out. You can even trade over the weekend on an all or nothing trade, but these are extremely risky. Keep in mind that it is important to know what is the best time to trade binary options.
Here are some examples broken down.
Call Option – Say you take a call option on the EURUSD hoping for the price to go up. Should the price finish above your strike price or the price you entered, you will have a winning bet. The percentage was determined before you entered the trade. Should the price go down instead, you’ll most likely end up losing the whole investment.
Put Option – This is the opposite scenario of the trade above. This time you want the price of the EURUSD to go down. If the price moves in your favour, the determined percentage will be rewarded to your account. Should the price move up, even by 1/10th of a pip you will lose the whole investment.
Touch and No Touch – In this all or nothing scenario you’re seeking a trade whether you think the price will touch a certain price or not touch. All the price needs to do is touch the price point for a winner. If the price doesn’t reach that high or low, then you’ll lose the total investment. It is that simple. When trading this method you need to be very careful and look for the best setups.
The Boundary option is similar to the touch or no touch, but this time you are looking for the price to stay in a certain range. Should it do this you will have a winner. Of course, if it doesn’t, the investment will be lost.
Once you learn the different types of trading models you should start to practice on a demo account. This will help you get better with your entries. Over time you will learn what to look for, so you can take the best trades only.
Call Options
A call option within the world of binary options is a prediction that indicates a belief that the price of an asset is bound to increase. With this type of trade, it doesn’t matter how much the increase happens to be—it can even be a fraction of a penny. If the price rises by even this small of an amount, the call option is considered to be successful and the payout will be received. This is the most basic of all types of option and is coupled with its opposite, the put option, on the vast majority of brokers’ online.
Choosing a call option is as easy as pushing a few buttons on your screen. Many platforms use the call/put option as their default setting, so you only need to choose the up direction next to the asset of your choice and decide how much you want to risk.
These can be executed across the widest range of timeframes. Some brokers have limited choices for the very short and very long term options, but call/put options are generally available for all assets and all timeframes. This is true even of 60 second and two minute options. For the longer options, call options are still one of the most popular types. You can find these present even in options up to one whole month long.
The downfall that you will find with call options, especially the shorter ones, is that their payouts are not as attractive as other types of trades. For example, a high yield boundary trade might return as much as 350 percent of your investment. These big return trades are notorious for being difficult to be right with, though, so even though a traditional call option might only return 75 percent, you will be right far more often. A few of these calls—when predicted correctly—will more than make up for the loss of profits because of the lower rates. Of course, it doesn’t make sense for brokers to offer high yield call options since the definition of a call option is that it has gone up, even if it is only slightly. Offering a much higher rate for this would be detrimental to the survival of a broker.
Another thing you may notice with the short term call options is that they do not return as much as the long term options. This happens for a very specific reason: when you go for a month long timeframe, your money is tied up for longer and thus cannot be instantly put back to use for you such as with a 60 second option.
If you are looking for a versatile type of trade that is easy to master, call options might be your best choice. These are the type of binary option that most closely resemble the traditional purchasing of stocks. With these, you are not taking ownership of anything, but like buying stock, you are hoping that the price you enter the trade at will be a low point and that the price will keep going up for as long as you are actively trading calls.
So whether you want to trade currency cross pairs at the 60 second level, or you want to trade U.S. stocks over the course of a month, you can use call options to help increase your profits. This is a simple, yet powerful type of trade. Even though it is the most basic trade you can conduct and is really easy to understand, it is very customizable, and this gives you a big advantage when it comes to making yourself some money.
Put Options
In the world of binary options, a put option is the opposite of a call option. With call options you are predicting that the price of an asset will be going up, but with a put, you are hoping that the price of the asset will drop in value. This feature gives you a lot more flexibility than you would find in the traditional world of stocks. With stocks, you do have the choice to sell a stock short, but to do this, you need to have a margin account, and this can be a very expensive thing to maintain. $10,000 is the legal minimum for how much you need to have deposited in order to use this feature. With binary options, however, you can use as much or as little as you have in your account, as long as you meet your broker’s minimum trade amount—usually this is no more than $10, but it does vary from broker to broker.
This opens up a lot of doors to traders, especially those that want to start out small. Not having to meet strict financial guidelines is only one of the many benefits here, though. You are also alleviating a lot of risk when you trade like this. If you sell a stock short, in theory, if the price of that stock soars upward and you do not quickly cover your position, you can be at a potentially limitless amount of risk. This is not a good thing. But with binary options, this risk is greatly alleviated. The only risk you take when you trade a put option is what you type into the box on your broker’s trading platform. And even then, many brokers will pay you a small rebate when your trades are on the losing end of things.
In fact, trading put options is much simpler than just about any other type of trading. All you do is select an asset, click the down or put button, type in how much you wish to trade, select an expiration time, and then click the button to finalize the trade. All of this can be accomplished on the same screen in the matter of mere seconds.
This brings up another positive feature of trading these. You have a very wide range of assets at your trading disposal, and you will never have to change sites or platforms to access them. From the same web page you can trade currencies, stocks and stock indices from around the world, and even many of the most popular commodities. This creates a sort of one stop shopping for your trading and can be a great way to help save time and consolidate your trading.
If you are new to actively trading, put options can open up a lot of doors for you. They are easy to learn, and when used in conjunction with call options, they can give you a lot more control over your financial decisions. As you will quickly see, the more power you have over the decision making process, the more likely you will be to create more profits for yourself. And after all, this is the main point of trading in the first place. Binary options give you a lot more freedom than pretty much every other type of trading out there, and thanks to the varying scales of amounts you can use per trade, this type of trading is a potent tool for both the hard core experienced trader and the individual brand new to playing the markets. Put options alone open up many doors that you simply don’t have elsewhere.
Binary Options For Beginners
Figuring out which choice is going to be best for you is something that will be different for each person. Basically, you need to ask yourself these two main questions:
1: What Experience Do You Have with Binary Options Trading?
First, you need to look at what your experience is. Are you a former Forex trader looking to augment profits with a new strategy (trading patterns)? If this is the case, your expertise on the currency market is fully transferable to the binary options marketplace. Or maybe you are a former day trader, looking to alleviate some of your risk. If this is true, binary options can help, and you will want to begin with your focus on the stocks that you are most familiar with.
2: What Are Your Goals?
Ultimately though, it comes down to what your goals are. You need to figure out what your trading goals might be and then develop a plan to realize those goals. If you want to make $1,000 per week, you need to figure out which types of options will help you to hit this mark, and which timeframes will be best suited to get you there.
The answer to the above question is something that will be different for each person, but you should always place an emphasis on the quality of your trading and not on the quantity. Five trades per day that are correct are going to return more to you than six correct and four incorrect.
Understanding Binary Options Trading
Take a close look at these 3 steps you will need to begin trading binary options.
Step 1: Select a Broker
Check out our updated list of the best binary options brokers. Make sure to select a broker that has a free demo account (like the ones on our list of top brokers).
Step 2: Practice Trading on a Free Demo Account
Many brokers, like IQ Option or NADEX have free demo trading accounts, and you need to take full advantage of these.
What is a demo account?
Binary options demo account trading is basically no-risk trading since real cash is never exchanged. You are given play money and for a limited time you are able to trade those play dollars in real time and learn the ropes of how binary options work. The longer you demo trade, the smaller the learning curve will be when you start trading with your own real money. Even if you only have 72 hours to demo trade, you need to capitalize on this. At the very least, you want to learn the software that you will be using in order to eliminate the possibility of user error.
Demo trading should be used as much as possible until you have established a method that works for you and you are confident with it. You want to eliminate the possibility of mistake because of inexperience. You want to use them as much as possible while you have the opportunity available to you.
Step 3: Make Your First Deposit
Once you’ve figured out which broker will best suit your needs and you’ve gotten some practice from their trading platform, you deposit your trading money with them via a credit card or wire transfer.
Each broker has a different minimum deposit, so make sure to check what deposit is required beforehand.
Tip: IQ Option minimum deposit is only $10 – one of the lowest minimum deposits in the market!
Make sure that your trading money is money that you can afford to lose and not funds that you will need to get through your daily life.
Once you have created an account and have funded it, you are set to begin trading.
Conclusion
Binary trading is fast paced and exciting, but it’s not for everyone who doesn’t have best binary options education. There can be a lot of risk in binary options trading. If you are new or simply changing your venue, binaries can have a lot to offer. Know that binary options have a lot of possibility for profits, but because of their all or nothing nature, there is also the chance that you can lose substantial amounts of money. For this reason, you will want to get as much practice as possible and want to do as much research as you can. These binary options courses are a good place to start your journey and make sure you signup only on the best binary options brokers reviewed on our site ensure a stable binary options payout. What is the point of winning if you don’t get paid?
