FX Brokers Offering Institutional and VIP Accounts

Forex brokers today do not attend only to retail clients. They also have a package for institutional-level investors and those classified as high net-worth individuals (HNWI). The pro traders who practice institutional-style trading and the HNWIs who have boatloads of money to invest have special needs that differ from those of the retail traders. Exclusivity is at the very heart of the needs of institutional and VIP clients. The forex brokers offering institutional and VIP accounts can meet this need and others as desired by this particular class of traders.

VIP accounts are provided for high-net-worth individuals. HNWIs are classified as investors with $1m in liquid cash or assets that are readily convertible into cash. For investment purposes, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) classifies an HNWI as one with $1.5m in net worth or $750,000 in investable assets. HNWIs are given exclusivity in services by financial institutions. The VIP accounts capture these exclusive perks and services.

On the other hand, institutional trading accounts are not necessarily provided to HNWIs but are provided to professional traders. This class of investors are regarded as Sophisticated Investors. This category of investors would have received professional training, worked or actively worked for institutional trading firms, and want to make their own money. They are not on the same knowledge level as retail traders. They also have access to more capital than their retail trading counterparts and would love to use tools that are not usually accessible to retail traders to get a trading edge. Where retail traders are content with using forex robots, institutional traders would want AI-enabled or Python-programmed expert advisors.

Whether you seek to open an institutional-style forex trading account or have the funds that define you as an HNWI, the forex brokers offering institutional and VIP accounts are here to cater to your needs.

Who Qualifies for an Institutional or VIP Account?

Due to the advantages that trading with an institutional or VIP account brings to the trader, there is a need to put up a typical profile of who a VIP or institutional trader is. Many traders have robbed themselves of opportunity by not recognizing that they fit into the profile of traders qualified to use institutional-style platforms. Why would you settle for retail-style forex platforms when you can derive many benefits as VIP traders?

Do you qualify to operate an account with the forex brokers offering institutional and VIP accounts? It is essential to paint a profile of such a trader to get a proper response. So who is a typical institutional or VIP account holder?

1. An institutional trader has some professional training with the paperwork to back it up. You can apply for an institutional trading account with the significant leverage and other privileges of such an account.
2. Forex brokers offering institutional and VIP account types will usually indicate the minimum account capital. Generally, you must have access to no less than $20,000 capital to qualify. Some will even have as much as $50,000 or millions of dollars in capital.
3. You can afford to pay for all the various tools and add-ons that support ECN trading, high-performance charting software, or tools that support a low-latency backbone.
4. You can pay for extra market data access and specialized news feeds. Some of these services cost as much as $2000 a month and are accessible to those whose monthly trade volumes exceed $5m. API architecture allows some of these tools to be connected to regular trading platforms to give you a superior edge over other traders.

If you fall into any of these categories, then you are a candidate for getting an account with the forex brokers offering institutional and VIP accounts.

Forex Brokers Offering Institutional and VIP Accounts: What You Stand to Gain

Forex brokers offering institutional and VIP accounts present several benefits that retail traders in the FX trading space do not enjoy. These are summarized as follows:

1. Professional traders continue to enjoy the regular leverages inaccessible to traders in the retail FX market in the UK and Europe. So while leverage is capped at 30:1 for retail trading on major forex pairs, professional traders continue to enjoy leverage of 300:1 and even up to 500:1. You can apply for a Pro account with the UK/EU brokers once you can prove you meet the requirements of being a professional/institutional-level trader.
2. Forex brokers offering institutional and VIP accounts allow their traders to add more powerful algorithms and expert advisors to their accounts. This is usually via a FIX API protocol that provides a development environment where specialized programming languages such as Python are deployed to develop powerful automated software.
3. Exclusivity is the name of the game. What could be more exclusive than having a personalized account officer assigned to you as a VIP trader? Your account officer/relationship officer is at your beck and call to handle everything about your account, save the actual trading itself. You can often call up your VIP account officer to execute trades for you.
4. High-liquidity and high-frequency trading are features of institutional trading. Such trading does not pass through the dealing desks of retail trading platforms. There has to be a straight-through processing facility to enable immediate fulfilment of such orders at the level of the interbank forex market. The forex brokers offering institutional and VIP accounts provide such facilities for high-volume traders.
5. VIP account holders are generally guaranteed tighter spreads due to the high trade volumes they generate. These volumes ensure a lot of liquidity in the market, which generally brings down the cost of setting up trades. HNWIs can even negotiate lower spreads on their trades due to the VIP status of such an account that will be trading vast amounts of money.
6. Forex trading is a numbers gain. Using tools to gain an advantage and access a large capital base can deliver spectacular returns if your trades are accurate and produce the desired result. For emphasis, it is harder to trade a $1000 account (because of the small capital) than to trade $100,000.

Conclusion

The essence of the institutional and VIP accounts is to provide exclusivity in the services forex brokers provide to qualifying clients. There are benefits of using forex brokers offering institutional and VIP accounts. We have highlighted these in the paragraphs above. The article has also showcased the profile of a typical institutional and VIP trader. If you qualify, please go through the list of forex brokers offering institutional and VIP accounts and make what can now be called an informed choice to give you that market edge that the high rollers have.