The world is filled with a plethora of financial markets, and advances in technology has made it possible for each of these markets to be accessible to the average Joe who has an internet connection and a computer or mobile device.

 

As such, there may be some confusion as to what financial market to participate in. Forex has caught a lot of attention because the promises seen on the sales pages of forex brokers and vendors seem to point to it as a way of easy money. However, because this market has some peculiarities which traders must be thoroughly at home with, many unprepared traders have seen themselves at the wrong end of the market.

 

This is where binary options come to the rescue. In this piece, we are going to outline some advantages that binary options trading has over other forms of trading the markets.

 

Minimal Financial Risk

 

If you have traded forex or its more volatile cousins, crude oil or spot metals such as gold or silver, you will have probably learnt one thing: these markets carry a lot of risk and it is very easy to be blown off the market. Too many parameters affect trade outcomes that traders have to battle with. Things like leverage and margin, news events, slippages and price re-quotes, etc can all affect a trade negatively. This is why trading the currency and commodities markets is a risky venture. The situation is different in binary options trading. There is no leverage to contend with, and phenomena such as slippage and price re-quotes have no effect on binary option trade outcomes. This reduces the risk in binary option trading to the barest minimum. Unlike what obtains in other markets, many binary options brokers return a fraction of the amount used in purchasing binary options contracts when the trade is a losing one.

 

Flexibility

 

The binary options market allows traders to trade financial instruments spread across the currency and commodity markets as well as indices and bonds. This flexibility is unparalleled, and gives traders with the knowledge of how to trade these markets, a one-stop shop to trade all these instruments.

 

Simplicity

 

A binary trade outcome is based on just one parameter: direction. The trader is essentially betting on whether a financial asset will end up in a particular direction. In addition, the trader is at liberty to determine when the trade ends, by setting an expiry date. This gives a trade that initially started badly the opportunity to end well. This is not the case with other markets. For example, control of losses can only be achieved using a stop loss. Otherwise, a trader has to endure a drawdown if a trade takes an adverse turn in order to give it room to turn profitable. The simple point being made here is that in binary options, the trader has less to worry about than if he were to trade other markets.

 

Greater Control of Trades

 

Traders have better control of trades in binary options. For example, if a trader wants to buy a binary options contract, he knows in advance, what he stands to gain and what he will lose if the trade is out-of-the-money. This is not the case with other markets. For example, when a trader sets a pending order in the forex market to trade a high-impact news event, there is no assurance that his trade will be filled at the entry price or that a losing trade will be closed out at the exit stop loss. This is not the case with binary options trading.

 

Payouts

 

The payouts per trade for binary options are usually higher in binary options than with other forms of trading. Some binary options brokers offer payouts of up to 80% on a trade. This is achievable without jeopardising the account. In other markets, such payouts can only occur if a trader disregards all rules of money management and exposes a large amount of trading capital to the market, hoping for one big payout (which never occurs in most cases).

 

Accessibility

 

In order to trade the highly volatile forex or commodities markets, a trader has to have a reasonable amount of money as trading capital. For instance, trading gold, a commodity with an intra-day volatility of up to 10,000 pips in times of high volatility, requires trading capital in tens of thousands of dollars. This restricts the access of everyday people to such markets. However, binary options has much lower entry requirements, as some brokers allow people to start trading with as low as $200.

 

These advantages make binary options an attractive option for traders looking for a low-risk way of playing the markets.