5 Best Free Forex Training Opportunities • Benzinga

Getting an education in foreign exchange or forex trading was once only possible through working at a major bank or other financial institution involved in the forex market. These days, many educational websites and online forex brokers cater to retail forex traders and provide free forex training so you can learn forex trading at your own pace. 

While many online brokers offer free forex courses, finding the right course for your needs could be a challenge, especially if you’re completely unfamiliar with the forex market. 

In this article, Benzinga offers insights into the best free forex courses and educational resources for you to learn how to trade forex without having to pay for expensive courses.  

Quicklook: Best Free Forex Training

• Best Overall for Most Traders: DailyFX
• Best for Beginning Traders: BabyPips
• Best for Intermediate-to-Advanced Traders: FX Academy
• Best for Automated Trading: MetaQuotes
• Best for Market Analysis: Forex School Online

5 Best Free Forex Training Options

For this review, Benzinga looked over the offerings of many free online forex training courses you can use to learn how to trade forex to come up with the best reputable options. 

Factors like training methods; access to instructors, mentors, and a trading community; what learning resources were available; and value-added features were noted and incorporated into this review. 

The options were then compared, and the best free forex training options in five categories were chosen to describe in further detail below.

Option #1: DailyFX

DailyFX is Benzinga’s top overall pick for free forex training. DailyFX also has an extensive forex broker resource and review list and provides timely forex news. The informative site even links you to AvaTrade if you would like to get started with a reputable online forex broker. 

The education portion of DailyFX’s website contains a wealth of free information on forex trading covering useful topics from the basics to advanced trading strategies. Its market section gives you live quotes and charts for many forex currency pairs, indices and commodities. 

DailyFX’s resource section provides information on forex regulations, as well as several useful widgets that monitor live exchange rates, a currency converter, a pip calculator, a position sizing tool and a MarketWatch widget. 

After taking in the educational resources on DailyFX’s website, you can link to other forex courses via the website’s Trading Guides link, as well as its Learn Forex section, which links you directly to FX Academy, which is reviewed further below. 

The website’s broker reviews rank the best online forex brokers by country, category, platforms and instruments. If you need to keep track of the market while away from your computer, then DailyFX’s free mobile app for iOS and Android devices can keep you constantly informed about the forex market while on the go. 

Best for: Most traders 

Website

Special Features

• Forex webinars 
• Forex articles
• Forex basics 
• Forex glossary

Benefits

• Ebooks
• Trading guides
• Link to FX Academy.com
• Blog and community

Disadvantages 

• Free advanced courses only available through the third-party FX Academy website

Option #2: BabyPips

BabyPips teaches you the basics of forex in an entertaining and easy-to-understand manner, making it the top pick for beginning forex traders. For people with no experience in forex trading, BabyPips offers comprehensive educational material suited for those initially unfamiliar with the foreign exchange market. 

The website’s School of Pipsology covers all aspects of forex trading in an extensive course where you can keep track of your progress. The course is based on the normal school sequence starting with preschool, working up to kindergarten and elementary school, then on to summer school and high school. The course tackles more advanced market concepts at the undergraduate freshman, sophomore, junior and senior levels until you’re ready to graduate. 

BabyPips’ website is also full of relevant news and information on the forex market, and it provides useful calculators for currency traders. These calculators include a position size calculator, a back-to-breakeven calculator, a pip value calculator and a pivot point calculator. 

The BabyPips site also provides a number of quizzes and a trader personality test to help you determine the type of trader you most closely resemble so you can select an appropriate trading strategy that suits you best.   

Best for: Beginning traders

Website

Special Features 

• Timely forex news  
• Currency heat map
• Detailed economic calendar
• Proprietary market analysis tools 

Benefits 

• Complete and easy-to-understand free forex course 
• Trade ideas
• Trading psychology 
• MarketMilk visual technical analysis tool
• Forex course quizzes 
• Community discussion forums
• Covers forex technical and fundamental analysis

Disadvantages 

• Limited advanced trading strategies 

Option #3: FX Academy

FX Academy offers excellent educational resources for traders with experience. While courses begin with an introduction to forex trading, the courses make more sense to people who already have a sound foundation in forex market concepts. 

Courses are presented in a stimulating, vibrant manner with interconnected lessons and an animated video on the subject. At the end of each course, you can find recommendations for further study and trade simulators. 

If you decide to take a course at FX Academy, you can open a practice account, which lets you gauge the viability of your strategy and trading plan. The company’s team of experts constantly updates registered members and adds new courses and curricula as the program progresses. 

Best for: Intermediate-to-advanced traders

Website

Special Features  

• Strategy simulator 
• Practice account 
• MetaTrader4 guides and tutorial
• Technical and fundamental analysis 

Benefits 

• Practice account
• Strategy simulations  
• 16 different courses
• Cryptocurrency course

Disadvantages 

• No disadvantages could be found at FX Academy 

Option #4: MetaQuotes

MetaQuotes is Benzinga’s top choice for free automated trading training because it offers extensive information about how to automate your own trading plan and free full-featured MetaTrader 4 and 5 (MT4/5) trading platforms that can run automated trading software.

Forex traders who use MetaQuotes’ popular MT4/5 trading platforms will find its website provides a wealth of free knowledge and techniques for using and maximizing trading results on those platforms. MetaQuotes also offers hedge funds and online brokers different solutions for organizing their financial services.   

You can download MT 4 and/or 5 from MetaQuotes’ website and learn how to code automated trading software in MetaQuotes’ proprietary MQL5 programming language based on C++. This feature lets you start creating your own applications for automated forex market analysis and trading. 

If you prefer to use automated trading software developed by someone else, then MetaQuotes offers the largest online store for trading robots and technical indicators that run on the MT4/5 platforms. Its website connects you to over 10,000 automated trading applications, including scripts, expert advisors, technical indicators and trading robots. 

Other useful MetaQuotes features include a strategy tester for optimizing and troubleshooting an automated trading robot before using it in a live account. The tester uses historical prices to analyze a robot’s performance over different time periods to evaluate its efficiency and lets you check if the robot correctly performs trading operations based on its algorithm. 

Best for: Those interested in automated forex trading 

Website

Special Features 

• Free multi-asset forex trading platforms
• Fully automated algorithmic trading
• MQL5 programming language based on C++
• Historical strategy tester
• Virtual hosting for automated trading

Benefits 

• Mobile and web trading 
• Trading signals 
• MQL5 community and forum
• MQL cloud network for fast distributed strategy testing

Disadvantages 

• No structured method for learning  

Option #5 Forex School Online

Forex School Online offers several free forex trading courses on its website, as well as a lessons section that includes hundreds of educational articles on different forex-related strategies and techniques. 

Forex School Online’s cornerstone lesson topics include Forex Trading for Beginners, Price Action Trading, How to Trade Forex, Technical Analysis, Forex Charts, Forex Trading Strategies and Money Management. 

The tools and resources for trading have been personally tested by the website’s founder, professional forex and futures trader Jonathon Fox. The website offers useful trading tools such as a forex demo tester for testing and back-testing your trading strategy. You can also download two free MetaTrader4 indicators for auto-managing positions and creating any time frame. Other tools include a trade entry/risk size calculator. 

Best for 

Website

Special Features  

• Extensive free forex trading courses 
• High probability price action trading course 
• A list of forex trading tools and calculators
• Forex demo accounts
• Introduces option trading strategies

Benefits 

• Over 30 different topics and tutorials 
• Step-by-step explanations to learn at your own pace 
• Beginner-to-advanced trading lessons 
• Technical analysis techniques

Disadvantages  

• Price action trading aimed more at swing traders than day traders

What is Forex?

The forex market is where national currencies trade in pairs against one another. The forex market is a decentralized and largely unregulated financial marketplace run by a worldwide network of financial institutions. Retail traders can now access this huge currency market via online forex brokers. 

A forex transaction involves buying one currency and selling another at a given rate of exchange or exchange rate. The vast majority of forex transactions occur in the spot market for settlement within two business days.

Forex trading generally involves taking a strategic position in a currency pair based on a bullish or bearish prediction of the future exchange rate for that pair. Speculative forex traders generally avoid taking delivery of the currency they buy, instead performing daily rollovers to keep their positions value spot and hence suitable for trading out of in the highly liquid spot market. 

The most commonly traded currency pairs include the EU’s euro quoted versus the U.S. dollar (EUR/USD), the Japanese yen quoted versus the U.S. dollar (USD/JPY) and the British pound sterling quoted versus the U.S. dollar (GBP/USD). 

Things to Consider with Free Forex Training

A major challenge facing aspiring forex traders is deciding among the myriad training options currently available to further their forex trading education. If you’re looking for a free training course to get started with, then you’ll want to consider such things as the provider’s reputation for customer satisfaction, the suitability of the topics for you, what educational materials will be provided, whether you will have access to an instructor or mentor and if a trader community is available for peer-to-peer discussions.

Learning from Reputable Sources

If you want to start your forex education without paying for courses, books or professional mentorship, then be sure you are sourcing your educational information from a reputable source. This practice will help you avoid getting taught low-quality information and ineffective trading techniques.

Learn how the Forex Market Works

Those just starting out as forex traders will definitely want to learn what the forex market is and the basic mechanics of how to get started trading currencies. You will also want to learn about the forex market as a whole, including its market hours, what economic and geopolitical factors affect exchange rates, the pros and cons of forex trading versus trading in other markets and what sort of forex trading strategy might suit you best based on your preferences and personal psychology. 

Free May not be Enough

While getting a free education may be ideal in theory, it will likely come up short of being sufficient if you want to truly master trading the forex market. Benzinga has reviewed some of the top paid forex training courses in this article for those who have the budget and feel the need for more extensive training.  Keep in mind that since it can take a lifetime to become a consistently profitable trader who has truly mastered the forex market, you might want to buy an expertly written book, pay for the advice of an experienced forex trading mentor or invest in a paid course to teach you about more advanced forex trading concepts.

Is Free Forex Training Worth Your Time?

Since taking a free forex training course will take some of your valuable time, you should make sure you invest that time wisely. You should generally review the topics of any free forex training class closely to see if they will add value to your existing expertise or will just end up wasting your time.

If you’re still a forex trading novice, then you can certainly start off taking one or more of the free online courses or programs listed above to help boost your learning curve and determine if forex trading suits you before paying for a more advanced forex trading course. You can also sometimes sign up for free trials of paid courses before paying in full. 

If you’re considering free forex training because you intend to become a full-time professional forex trader operating in the market either for your own account or for a financial institution, then you will probably want to invest some money into a comprehensive and top-quality forex trading class.

Frequently Asked Questions