A mini Forex trading account is extremely helpful for a new trader who is more interested in developing a disciplined, rational trading strategy without focusing entirely on profits and losses.

The reason for the ‘mini’ is obvious. The forex trading contracts are much smaller than the typical forex trading contracts. Mini contracts are about one tenth the size of a typical forex trading contract. Mini forex trading is an advisable way to start trading the forex if you are staring with a small sum of money. You can test various forex trading systems without a lot o risk, keep good records on your trades and the result, and refine your trading techniques.

Then, as your trading improves and you build your portfolio, you can graduate from mini forex trading to larger, more typical forex trading contracts with confidence that you have a profitable trading system in place.

You can open a mini forex trading account with a lot less money, usually around $300 instead of the thousands required for a typical forex account. The high leverage available to forex traders still applies but you are obviously risking a lot less money in a mini forex account.

With a mini Forex trading account you can learn risk management, which will help you in future while dealing full-size trading account. You can trade by using one mini lot and can then build up on the lot size later.

In a conventional sense, you should use only one mini lot for every thousand dollars that you have in your account. Say if you have five thousand dollars, you can take only five mini lots. But in mini Forex trading the pip value is one dollar and therefore, you can concentrate on building strategies without paying much attention to the profit and loss.

With mini Forex trading, you can invest just $250, but trade 10,000 worth of a currency because of the high leverage. In a mini account, the margin deposit requirement per $10,000 lot traded is only $50. This leads to a leverage of 200 to 1 (10,000/50 = 200). Therefore, with your $250, you can trade a maximum of 5 mini lots, with $500 a maximum of 10, with $1000 a maximum of 20, etc.