How To Open Forex Trading Account in South Africa

First off, before opening you should know your trading style. This also includes the time which you are able to invest daily or weekly, as well as the amount of capital invested.

Do you plan to invest a lot of money? Will you be placing 1-3 trades a week or doing daytrading ?


Step 1 – Open forex account

Forex trading account (which I use currently for my real trading) registration is very easy and straightforward, and account verification makes it even more secure. Here one should always remember that opening a forex account is very similar to opening a new bank account. Once you signed up, the next thing is an online verification of an account due to security reasons you must proof that you are real person.

Very important: Forex Account Verification

For some accounts, you must first apply to receive the application documents. This is obtained by contacting the customer service of the respective broker via telephone, e-mail or post. Alternatively, it is usually given to download the documents as a PDF file. In this context, you should make sure that the provider requires the original signature on a document. Here is the probability of fraud attempts the least. Subsequently, the Forex provider should ask for an address confirmation. This is straightforward and can be accomplished by a telephone bill, a power or gas or credit card bill or by a bank statement of the house bank. The legitimacy test is the most significant. For this, the provider requires either an identity card or a passport, which should be best faxed in the form of a copy. If the steps listed here pass without any problems, the future forex trader can already think about how much he wants to make his first deposit.

Step 2 – Choose the right base currency

If all registration steps have been completed and your account has been successfuly verified, the base currency needs to be selected. The base currency is the currency in which you will handle and trade forex in the future.

For this, in most cases, the “four big ones” offered, so the Euro, GBP, USD and JPY. If, you are South African, we strongly advise you to choose one from  top 8 forex brokers in South Africa that allow you to use Rand as your base currency. There are NOT many that allow you to use ZAR but you can try for example XTB that for sure allows ZAR and is also FSB regulated.

Opening account in ZAR will save you lot of headache involved in the currency risk in the future. Eventually, it could be reasonable to use also the GBP or USD as a base currency but it depends on what currency pairs you will trade.

Step 3 – Play with demo account

Firstly try demo practice account with all important

Step 4 – Deposit real money

In most cases, forex companies offer numerous deposit options. As a rule of thumb, Visa, MasterCard, Maestro and Diners Club are widely accepted in South Africa. These deposit options are much faster than a bank wire transfer, which means that the money appears in your forex account within seconds. Since bank transfers always involve a certain processing time, it can take between one and three business days for the value adjustments to take place on your own forex account.

A deposit condition is, of course, the identity of the account holder and forex receiver, which must always be the same.

The forex software

The software itself is available free of charge by any broker that you choose. No worries about it. It can be any type of webtrader (no need to download into PC). If you want the best forex trading software then go either for Metatrader MT4 or cTrader. It will have to be downloaded to your PC and installed. Then you need your own personal data such as a secure username as well as a password to login.

Important NOTE!
Forex  or CFD trading, is always risky from your capital. There is always the risk of total loss. Therefore, I generally recommend to test the brokers with a demo account first and when you are satisfied only then deposit money.

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