Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) of Trading in FBS

Trading

How much do I need to start trading?

To know how much funds you need to open a trade, you can use Traders Calculator on our site.

Choose the account type, trading tool, lot size, currency of your account, and leverage.

Click on “Calculate” and in the table below you will see the needed margin (the amount of funds you need to open an order).


In a Standard account with EURUSD currency pair, 0.1 lot, and leverage of 1:3000, youd need approximately $3.77 to open this order.

Where:

Trading tool - is the trading instrument that you are going to trade;

Lot size - is the volume of your order, how much you are going to trade;

Currency - is the currency of your trading account (EUR or USD);

Leverage - is the current leverage of your account;

Ask price - is the approximate Ask price for this currency pair at the moment;

Bid Price - is the approximate Bid price for this currency pair at the moment;

Contract size - is the size of the contract of the particular trading instrument you’ve selected, changes according to the chosen lot size;

Point value - shows the cost of one point for this currency pair;

Spread - is the amount of the commission you pay to your broker for this particular order;

Swap long - is the interest rate that will be applied to your trade if you open a buy order and keep the position overnight;

Swap short - is the interest rate that will be applied to your sell order if you hold it overnight;

Margin - is the minimum amount you need to have in your account to open the particular order;

When can I trade?

The Forex Market is open 24 hours a day, 5 days a week. Note that the Forex Market is closed for trading during the weekend.

You can trade anytime you wish during the working week. You can open your currency position for a couple of hours or even less (intraday trading) or for a couple of days (long-term trading) – just as you see fit.

Please, kindly be informed that for long-term trading, the swap may be charged (depends on the position and trading instrument).

The time of the trading server operation is from 00:00 on Monday to 23:59 on Friday terminal time.

Please consider that Metals, Energies, Indices, and Stocks have trading sessions depending on the instrument. You can check the trading session for the specific trading instrument in the contract specifications in the trading platform (MetaTrader4, MetaTrader5, FBS Trader Platform).
Note that Crypto instruments are available for trading 24/7.

 

What is a swap?

Swap is the overnight or rollover interest for holding positions overnight. The swap may be either
positive or negative.

Swap addition/deduction to open orders is carried out from 23:59:00 to 00:10:00, trading platform time. So the swap will be added/deducted to all orders which were open during the period from 23:59:00 to 00:00:00, trading platform time.

Contracts with an expiration date. In the case of trading those contracts that have a limited period of trading (expiration date), all orders executed on one contract will be closed by the last quote.

You can look up swaps long and short on the FBS website. The trading terminal automatically calculates and reports all swaps on your open positions.

Please, kindly be informed that for the weekend rollover, the Forex market books three days of interest on Wednesday.

I want a Swap-free account

Changing account status to Swap-free is available in the Personal Area account settings only for the citizens of the countries where one of the official (and dominating) religions is Islam.

How you can switch on Swap-free for your account:

1 Open the account settings by clicking on the needed account in the Dashboard.

2 Find "Swap-free" in the "Account settings" section and click on the button to activate the option.

Swap Free option is not available for trading on "Forex Exotic", Indices instruments, Energies, and Cryptocurrencies.

Please, kindly be reminded that according to the Customer Agreement:
For the long-term strategies (the deal which is open for more than 2 days), FBS may charge a fixed fee for the total number of days during which the order was opened, the fee is fixed and determined as the value of 1 point of the transaction in US dollars, multiplied by the size of the currency pair swap point of the order. This fee is not an interest and depends on whether the order is open to buy or sell.

By opening a Swap-free account with FBS, the client agrees that the company may debit the fee from his/her trading account at any time.
 

What is spread?

There are 2 types of currency prices at Forex - Bid and Ask. The price we pay to buy the pair is called Ask. The price, at which we sell the pair, is called Bid.

Spread is the difference between these two prices. In other words, it is a commission you pay to your broker for every transaction.
The following types of spreads are used in FBS:

• Fixed spread – the difference between ASK and BID prices doesn’t change regardless of the market conditions. This way you know in advance how much you will pay for a trade.

• Floating spread – the difference between ASK and BID prices fluctuates in correlation with the market conditions.

* For instruments with fixed spread or fixed commission, the Company reserves the right to increase
spread in case spread on the basic contract exceeds the size of the fixed spread.

What is "lot"?

Lot is a measure of the order volume.

1 lot equals to 100 000 of the base currency.

Please, check how it looks in the Metatrader:

Here the volume size is 1.00 which means that you will trade this order with 1 lot.

Please, kindly be informed that the standard lot size is used for all the account types except Cent account.

Kind reminder: 1 lot on a “Cent” account = 0.01 standard lot.
 

What is the leverage?

Leverage is a ratio between the amount of guarantee and the trading operation volume.

Sounds difficult, right?
Let’s put it simply!

When trading you trade with lots. A standard lot equals 100 000 units of the base currency, but it doesn’t mean that you have to invest this huge amount of money yourself. Your broker can help you. The standard leverage is 1:100. It means that if you want to trade one standard lot of the pair, you have to deposit just $1 000. Your broker will invest the remaining $99 000.

Though this doesn’t mean that you will see $100 000 on your balance: leverage gives you the possibility to trade with bigger lots but doesn’t influence your equity.

FBS provides other sizes of leverage too. You can check the leverages and leverage limits here.

Kindly note: the bigger leverage is, the more risks a trader is likely to encounter.

What are the leverage limits?

When you trade on margin you use leverage: you can open positions on more significant sums than you have in your account.

For example, if you trade 1 standard lot ($100 000) while having only $1 000, you
are using 1:100 leverage.

The maximum leverage differs from account type to account type.

We would like to remind you that we have specific regulations on leverage in correlation to the sum of equity. The company is entitled to apply leverage change to already opened positions, as well as to reopened positions, according to these limitations:

Please, check the maximum leverage for the following instruments:

Indices and Energies	XBRUSD	1:33
	XNGUSD
	XTIUSD
	AU200
	DE30
	ES35
	EU50
	FR40
	HK50
	JP225
	UK100
	US100
	US30
	US500
	VIX
	KLI
	IBV
	NKD	1:10
STOCKS		1:100
METALS	XAUUSD, XAGUSD	1:333
	PALLADIUM, PLATINUM	1:100
CRYPTO (FBS Trader)		1:5

Also, kindly note that the leverage can be changed in your Personal Area only once a day.

How is the Stocks commission calculated?

In the Stocks specifications, the commission is stated as 0.7%. But what does this percentage mean?

The stock commission is calculated as 0.7% from the current stock price (bid or ask) multiplied by the number of stocks you want to trade.

Lets see an example:
You open a sell order for the Apple stock in 0.03 lot volume.
Since 1 lot equals 100 stocks, 0.03 lot equals 3 stocks.
The current bid price for the stock is 134.93.
This way, the commission will be calculated as follows:
134.93 * (0.03 * 100) * 0.007 = $2.83

Thus, $2.83 is the commission to be paid for the 0.03 lot sell Apple order.
 

Trading indices, energies, stocks and commodities.

When trading indices, energies, stocks, or commodities, you create an agreement with a broker to exchange the asset price difference between the time the contract opens and closes. Such trading doesnt imply the delivery of physical goods or securities. I.e. it offers an opportunity to profit from the difference in the assets price without physically owning them.

Traders who expect an upward movement in price buy the asset, while those who see the downward movement will sell an opening position.

This way you can trade indices, stocks, futures, commodities, currencies – basically, anything.

Also, please, consider that Swap Free option is not available for trading on these instruments.
 

What are the Margin Call and Stop Out levels?

Margin Call is an allowed margin level (40% and lower). At this point, the company is entitled but not liable to close all the open positions of a client due to the lack of free margin.

Stop Out is a minimal allowed level of margin (20% and lower) at which the trading program will start to close client’s open positions one by one (the first position closed is the one with the biggest floating loss) to prevent further losses that lead to negative balance (below 0 USD).
 

My hedged order triggered the margin call, why?

The hedged margin is the security to open and maintain locked positions required by the broker. It is fixed in the contract specification for each tool.

FBS has a 50% margin requirement on the hedged positions.

I.e the margin requirement will be divided among the two positions: 50% of margin for the orders in one direction and 50% of margin for the orders in the opposite direction.

Some brokers have no margin requirement, but that leads to a situation when some traders open disproportionately large positions compared to the size of their balance, because when the price moves, you are down on one of the positions, but up on the opposing one for the same amount, so your profit equals your loss until you close one of the positions. Due to this, some clients received margin calls when closing one side of the position (which triggered an added margin requirement for the remaining un-hedged side).

The result of the hedged positions seems fixed, however, it varies together with the spread – so a sudden spread widening (let’s say during the news release) can also lead to a margin call.
Since the margin considers the current price, if the spread widens, the price will change as well, thus, the margin level changes too.

 

What are the advantages of 5-digit quotes?

What does "5-digit quotes" mean?

5-digit quotes are the quotes where there are five digits after a comma (0.00001, for example).

The advantages of 5-digit quotes are:

• Transparency of the spread in comparison with 4-digit quotes.
• More precision.
• Best suited for scalping trading strategy.

MetaTrader

How to log in to my trading account?

How to set up the connection in case you have "NO CONNECTION" error in MetaTrader:

1 Click on "File" (top left corner in MetaTrader).

2 Select "Login to Trade Account".

3 Enter the account number into the "Login" section.

4 Enter a trading password (to be able to trade) or investor password (only for observation of activity; placing orders option will be switched off) to the "Password" section.

5 Select the proper server name from the list suggested at the "Server" section.

Please, kindly be informed that the number of the Server was given to you at the opening of the account. If you do not remember the number of your Server, you can check it while recovering your trading password.
Also, you can insert the Server address manually instead of choosing it.

Why is my Cent account balance bigger in MetaTrader?

Please, kindly take into consideration that in MetaTrader, your Cent account balance and your profit appear in cents, i.e., 100 times bigger ($1 = 100 cents). While in your Personal Area you see the balance in dollars.

Example:
You have deposited $10 to your Cent account.
In your MetaTrader, you will see ¢1 000 (cents).
 

Why is my MetaTrader password incorrect?

You have opened a new trading account or generated a new trading password for your account and now trying to log in, but the password is still incorrect?

In this case, please:

1. make sure you are copying the password without blank spaces or type it manually;
2. make sure you are not using automatic web-page translation at the moment;
3. try to generate a new password and log in with the new one.

Good luck!
 

The connection is too slow. What can I do?

We recommend you to rescan the servers.

To do so, click on the Connection status in the right lower part of the platform. Then click on “Rescan servers” - your MetaTrader will look for the best server available.

Also, you can connect to the preferable server manually by choosing one from the list and clicking on it with the left mouse button.

Note: the fewer milliseconds (ms) you see - the better.
 

I see “NO CONNECTION” error. What can I do?

We would like to inform you that when you are connecting with an incorrect trading password, you can see the “No connection” error first, which soon changes to the “Invalid account” error.


How to fix connection problems on your MetaTrader4/MetaTrader5 platform?

1 Try to Log in to the Trading Account again using a newly generated trading password.

2 Try to rescan the servers.

3 Try to restart your MT4/MT5.

We recommend you to wait a little bit before opening the platform again - MetaTrader may need some time for log files update.

4 Check the correctness of the chosen server.

The server number is shown during the account registration. You can check it in the letter “Trading account registration #” sent to your e-mail or by generating a new trading password.

5 Try to disable your Anti-Virus, Firewall, or Internet security software.
 

How to log in to the MetaTrader4 mobile application? (Android)

We highly recommend you to download the MetaTrader4 application for your device right from our site. It will help you to log in with FBS easily.

To log in to your MT4 account from a mobile application, please, follow the steps below:

1. On the first page (“Accounts”) click on the “+” sign:

2 In the opened window, click on the “Login to an existing account” button.

3 If you have downloaded the platform from our website, you will automatically see “FBS Inc” in the brokers list. However, you need to specify your account server:

Login credentials, including the account server, were provided to you during the account opening. If you dont remember the server number, you can find it in the account settings by clicking on your trading account number in the web Personal Area or FBS Personal Area application:

4 Now, enter the account details. In the “Login” area, type your account number, and in the “Password” area, type the password generated for you during the account registration:

5. Click on “Login”.

If you have any difficulties logging in, please generate a new trading password in your Personal Area and try to log in with the new one.
 

How to log in to the MetaTrader5 mobile application? (Android)

We highly recommend you to download the MetaTrader5 application for your device right from our site. It will help you to log in with FBS easily.

To log in to your MT5 account from a mobile application, please, follow these steps:

1 On the first page (“Accounts”) click on the “+” sign.

2 If you have downloaded the platform from our website, you will automatically see “FBS Inc” in the brokers list. Click on it.

3 In the “Login to an existing account” field choose the Server you need (Real or Demo), in the “Login” area, please, type your account number and in the “Password” area type the password generated for you during the account registration.

4 Click on “Login”.

In case you have difficulties with logging in, please, generate a new trading password in your Personal Area and try to log in with the new one.
 

How to log in to the MetaTrader5 mobile application? (iOS)

We highly recommend you to download the MetaTrader5 application for your device right from our site. It will help you to log in with FBS easily.

To log in to your MT5 account from the mobile application, please, follow these steps:

1 Click on “Settings” in the right lower part of the screen.

2 At the top of the screen, please, click on “New account”.

3 If you have downloaded the platform from our website, you will automatically see “FBS Inc” in the  brokers list. Click on it.

4 In the “Use existing account” field choose the Server you need (Real or Demo), in the “Login” area, please, type your account number and in the “Password” area type the password generated for you during the account registration.

5 Click on “Sign In”.

In case you have difficulties with logging in, please, generate a new trading password in your Personal Area and try to log in with the new one.
 

What is the difference between MT4 and MT5?

Though many may think that MetaTrader5 is just an upgraded version of MetaTrader4, these two platforms are different and each better serves particular purposes.

Let’s compare these two platforms:

	MetaTrader4	MetaTrader5
Language	MQL4	MQL5
Expert Advisor	✓	✓
Types of pending orders	4	6
Timeframes	9	21
Built-in indicators	30	38
Built-in economic calendar	✗	✓
Custom symbols for analysis	✗	✓
Details and Trading window in Market Watch	✗	✓
Ticks data export	✗	✓
Multi-thread	✗	✓
64-bit architecture for EAs	✗	✓

MetaTrader4 trading platform has a simple and easily understandable trading interface and mostly used for Forex trading.

MetaTrader5 trading platform has a slightly different interface and gives the possibility to trade stocks and futures.
In comparison with MT4, it has a deeper tick and chart history. With this platform, a trader can use Python for Market analysis and even log in to the Personal Area and perform financial operations (deposit, withdrawal, internal transfer) without leaving the platform. More than that, there’s no need to remember the server number on MT5: it has only two servers - Real and Demo.

Which MetaTrader is better? You can decide it for yourself.
If you are only at the beginning of your way as a trader, we would recommend you to start with MetaTrader4 trading platform due to its simplicity.
But if you are an experienced trader, who, for example, needs more features for analysis, the MetaTrader5 suits you the most.

Wish you successful trading!
 

I want to change my MT5 account to MT4 or vice versa

Please, take into consideration that it is technically impossible to change the type of account.

However, you can open a new account of the desired type within the existing Personal Area (web) or in the FBS Personal Area app.

If you already have some funds on the account balance, you can feel free to transfer them from the existing account to the newly opened one via Internal Transfer in the web Personal Area or in the FBS Personal Area application.

Also, we would like to remind you that you can open up to 70 trading accounts within one Personal area if your account is fully verified and the total deposit to all accounts is 100$ or more.

 

The "New order" button is inactive. Why?

It seems like you have opened your trading account with an investor password (read-only).
You can give the investor password to some other trader only for observation; placing orders option is switched off.

In this case, please, kindly re-log in to your trading account with a trading password.

The "Sell" and "Buy" buttons are inactive. Why?

It means that you have chosen an incorrect order volume for this account type.

Please, check your settings for the order volume and compare them to the trading conditions stated on our website.

 

I want to see the Ask price on the chart

By default, you can see only the Bid price on the charts. However, if you want the Ask price to be displayed as well, you can enable it in a couple of clicks by following the instructions below:

• Desktop;
• Mobile (iOS);
• Mobile (Android).

Desktop:
First, please, log in to your MetaTrader.

Then choose the menu "Charts".

In the drop-down menu, please, click on "Properties".

Or you can simply press the F8 key on your keyboard.

In the opened window choose the “Common” tab and put a check for the “Show Ask line” option. Then click "OK".



Mobile (iOS):
To enable the ask line on iOS MT4 and MT5, you must successfully log in first. After that, please:

1. Go to the Setting of the MetaTrader platform;

2. Click on the Charts tab:

Click on the button next to the Ask Price Line to turn it on. To turn it off again, click on the same button:


Mobile (Android):
As for Android MT4 and MT5 app, please, follow the steps below:

1. Click on the Chart tab;
2. Now, you need to click anywhere on the chart to open the contextual menu;
3. Find the Settings icon and click on it;
4. Select the Ask price line checkbox to enable it.

How can I change the language of my MetaTrader?

To change the language of your platform, please, log in to your MetaTrader first.

Then, please, choose the "View" menu.

In the drop-down menu, please, click on "Languages".

Now you need to choose your preferred language and click on it.

In the popped up window, please, kindly click on "Restart".

After you restart the terminal, its language will be changed to the one you have chosen.
 

Can I use an Expert Advisor?

FBS offers the most favourable trading conditions to use almost all trading strategies without any restrictions.

You can use automated trading with the help of expert advisors (EAs), scalping (pipsing), hedging, etc.

Though, please, kindly note that according to the Customer Agreement:
3.2.13. The Company doesn’t allow the usage of arbitrage strategies on connected markets (e.g. currency futures and spot currencies). In case the Client uses arbitrage in either clear or hidden way, the Company reserves a right to cancel such orders.

Kindly consider that though trading with EAs is allowed, FBS does not provide any Expert Advisors. The results of trading with any Expert Advisor is your responsibility.

We wish you successful trading!
 

How can I download the MetaTrader platform?

FBS offers a wide range of MetaTrader platforms for Windows and Mac.

And a set of MetaTrader applications for Android and iOS allows you to trade on your account from any smartphone or tablet.

You can find the appropriate version of the trading terminal on our website.
Choose the suitable option and click on the corresponding icon.


 

I want to change my Investor password

Upon opening a trading account, you get two passwords: trading and investor (read-only).
You can give the investor password to some other trader only for observation; the placing orders option will be switched off.

In case you have forgotten your investor password, you can change it within the MetaTrader4 platform.

Here are four simple steps:

1. Once logged in to your MetaTrader4 platform, please, find the "Tools" menu and click "Options" there.

2. In the "Options" window, please, click the "Server" tab to bring up your account details, then click "Change".

3. Once the "Change Password" window pops up, you will need to enter in the provided field your current trading password, then choose the "Change investor (read only) password" option and then enter your new desired investor password.

4. Do not forget to click "OK" to save the changes!
 

I want to create my own trading password

The Personal Area is not the only place you can change your MetaTrader4 password. You can also change your trading password within the platform.

Here are four simple steps:

1. Once logged in to your MetaTrader4 platform, please, find the "Tools" menu and click "Options" there.

2. In the "Options" window, please, click the "Server" tab to bring up your account details, then click "Change".

3. Once the "Change Password" window pops up, in the provided field you will need to enter your current password and your new desired password.

4. Do not forget to click "OK" to save the changes!