Best Ripple Trading Brokers

The brokers below represent the best Ripple Trading features

FP Markets

This brokerage offers a massive range of tradable assets through Forex, CFD, and share trading accounts. FP Markets supports the MT4, MT5, and IRESS platforms and offers leverage up to 500:1. You can trade 45 currency pairs with competitive spread or commission pricing.

FP Markets was founded in 2005 and is headquartered in Sydney, Australia. It is regulated by by the ASIC in Australia. Demo accounts are available. While it is suitable for beginners, education resources are limited. 

IC Markets

IC Markets was founded in Sydney, Australia in 2007 and is regulated by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), as well as the Seychelles Financial Services Authority (FSA). According to the broker’s website, they processed $646 billion worth of trading volume in April 2019 alone.

While the broker offers services and features designed for both beginner and professional traders, the company promote themselves as the ‘go to’ choice for high volume traders, scalpers and trading algos due to their New York Equinix NY4 data centre – processing over 500,000 trades per day.

eToro

eToro is an online trading platform that was founded in 2007 by the Assia siblings and their friend David Ring in Tel Aviv, Israel. Formerly known as RetailFX, eToro is the pioneering online broker for social trading.

Their Openbook social trading platform in fact changed the nature of the way beginner online traders can trade the financial markets. It made the markets accessible to everyone, no matter what their level of experience by creating a user-friendly environment and allowing traders to copy the trades of other traders’ strategies automatically.

What is Ripple?

Ripple is a new cryptocurrency with the symbol XRP. Ripple is the world’s only enterprise blockchain solution, designed to enable global payments from financial institutions using cryptocurrency. Ripple was designed to take care of the inefficiencies of today’s global payment systems.

In an era where there has been a lot of innovation and development of technology that has transformed the turnaround time of many tasks, the system of a wire transfer in banks has still remained largely unchanged from the pre-internet days. These days, you can send an email to someone from a smartphone wherever you are in the world and expect the data transfer to last only seconds, leading the other party to receive the email less than a minute later. However, it still takes days to wire money from part of the world to another. The main issues with wire transfers are the following:

1. They are slow, taking between 3-7 days for full settlement to occur.
2. They are expensive, incurring large transaction costs that are estimated to run into trillions of dollars on an annual basis for all global transactions.
3. They have become less of an efficient payment solution due to the time it takes to conclude.
4. Cross-border transactions require currency exchange, which can add to the cost of the transactions if the exchange rate fluctuation works against the sender.
5. About 4% of wire transfers fail.

Ripple was therefore built to solve these payment problems by connecting payment providers, banks, digital exchanges and corporate organizations using RippleNet, Ripple’s cryptocurrency network. The aim is to provide a seamless, frictionless experience when sending money across the world.

So what are supposed to be the key advantages that Ripple offers as an alternative payment solution?

1. The number one advantage that the Ripple technology is meant to offer is speed. Instant, on-demand settlement is meant to be the unique selling proposition of Ripple, cutting transaction times for bank payments from days to mere seconds.
2. Ripple is meant to offer low transaction costs and lower operational costs by eliminating the need for paperwork, staff resources, intermediary banks, etc.
3. Ripple offers connectivity across several networks.
4. Ripple will make it easier and faster to track transactions and trace funds, thus enhancing the fight against illicit financial flows.

Ripple is built on a more advanced blockchain technology than Bitcoin, and in August 2017, briefly became the 3^rd most valuable cryptocurrency after Bitcoin and Ethereum. It presently lies in 3^th place after the price took a little bit of a hit. Ripple (XRP) benefited from the price appreciation most of its peers experienced in the 1^st and 2^nd quarters of 2017. It is believed that increased adoption of XRP by financial institutions will boost its demand going forward.

Ripple Trading Explained

In order to expand its user base not just for individual users but also to include institutional clients, Ripple announced a partnership with cryptocurrency exchange BitGo for the development of enterprise-grade wallets which will incorporate high-end security features to match the highly advanced requirements for institutional users. These enterprise grade wallets will provide a better and more secure platform for financial institutions to be able to offer cryptotokens for cross-border payments.

Many more exchanges are coming on stream to offer XRP on their networks. The enhanced user base from these expansions will create a dynamic in terms of supply and demand for XRP tokens. These supply-demand dynamics will then create price shifts that will make XRP a tradable instrument across exchanges and trading platforms. These changes have therefore marked a paradigm shift from the company’s initial core business, which was strictly on providing an alternative way for financial institutions to support cross-border payments.

What does this indicate? Interest in trading XRP has increased substantially from pre-2017 levels. The price changes which followed can be said to be as a result of the following factors:

1. A carry-on effect from the price gains of other cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ether.
2. An indication of possible adoption by financial institutions. It is on record that at least 70 financial institutions worldwide have been signed up on the Ripple network. Some of these banks include Spain’s BBVA (sponsors of La Liga, the Spanish Premier League), MUFG (Japan), Axis Bank (India), Akbank in Turkey and SEB in Sweden. Others include heavyweights such as Bank of America, UBS, Standard Chartered and RBC.

With the increased interest in XRP exchange comes the opportunity to trade XRP as cryptocurrency CFDs. These Contracts-for-Difference assets enable traders to predict price differentials without having to hold the XRP tokens. Trading XRP as a CFD comes with some advantages.

1. You can profit from rising and falling prices when trading XRP as a CFD. This is unlike exchange-based XRP transactions where gains are only made when the trader buys at a lower price and resells at a higher price.
2. Access to technical analysis tools and charts can provide a market edge by showing the way to better entry and exit points.
3. All transactions on crypto CFDs are executed instantly.
4. You can use EAs plugged to virtual private servers to carry out your trades.
5. Ripple CFDs can be traded on leverage.

How to Buy and Sell Ripple Online

XRP can be bought and sold online using the following means:

1. Buy and store XRP in online wallets, then resell at a higher price.
2. Trade XRP as a CFD asset on forex platforms.

Where to Buy and Sell Ripple

The currency on which transactions can be carried out across RippleNet is Ripple (XRP). Ripple can be mined and traded. It can also be bought from exchanges and resold at a higher price. The third marketplace for Ripple exists on forex platforms where XRP is listed as a CFD asset, usually in a pairing with the US Dollar.

1. Exchanges

To be able to buy or sell Ripple on cryptocurrency exchanges, you must have a wallet with a unique wallet address. The wallet is like your bank, and the wallet address like your bank account number; it is personal to you. Exchanges offer their clients free wallets to be able to conduct business. Majority of the exchanges offering XRP have a large South Korean base.

In order to buy XRP on an exchange, you have to purchase it using your fiat currencies or with digital payment solutions. A list of vendors who have XRP for sale is usually listed on each exchange. Each vendor has a different price and will accept various payment methods.

Exchanges usually have a list of verified sellers who will post how much they are selling XRP for the various fiat and digital currencies. This allows the buyer to choose from a list of prices and to select the price that will be favorable for the transaction.

2. Trading Platforms

XRP contracts can be traded as CFDs on several trading platforms. These platforms basically list the various contracts that feature XRP as a paired asset.

The list above shows the various pairings of the XRP asset, which provides various kinds of trading opportunities. These assets can all be traded with leverage.

If you are using a trading platform which supports the programming and use of EAs, then, by all means, you can use your EA to trade any of the XRP pairs. It is important to note that majority of these platforms are owned by market makers. So traders should observe the rules of using market maker platforms, one of which is that not many of them allow EAs or scalping techniques.

Payment Methods for Ripple Trading

You need to have an acceptable payment method to enable you to trade with Ripple on an exchange or on a trading platform.

For exchanges, you can buy Ripple using the following methods:

• Credit/debit cards
• Paypal
• Digital wallets such as Skrill, Neteller, OKPay, Yandex. Money, etc.
• Bank wires (SWIFT and SEPA). This method is restricted as not all banks work with Ripple exchanges.

Ripple Trading Sites, Brokers & Software

A Ripple exchange is a marketplace where Ripple can be bought or sold in exchange for fiat currency, digital currencies or other cryptocurrencies. The strategy is to purchase at lower prices, hold for appreciation of price and resell for a profit.

Due to the much lower number of exchanges offering XRP, it can be a challenge selecting the best Ripple exchange for your business. There are several factors which must be considered. These are as follows:

1. What country or region are you located in? In some countries, it is difficult to send fiat currency using the banks to the cryptocurrency exchanges. It is even outlawed completely in a few countries.
2. Where you have the means of sending money to an XRP exchange, what are the transaction costs?
3. What are your chances of withdrawing your money after trading?

When it comes to transaction options, here is what can be done.

1. Use a bank account to purchase your Ripple instantly. Some exchanges have restrictions on what banks they do business with.
2. Buy Bitcoin (BTC) and use it to purchase your Ripple. This can work if you use exchanges that are cryptocurrency-based. Some exchanges prefer to deal with cryptocurrencies only so as to avoid regulatory red tapes associated with using banks.
3. Setup a foreign bank account with an exchange that permits transactions from this account. This option may not work with many people and is obviously not available for certain countries.
4. Use a digital payment solution such as Skrill or Neteller.

The financial systems in Asia are better suited to work on Ripple exchanges. Those in North America are not because there are many regulatory red tapes.

Advantages

• Transactions are not leveraged, which allows the trader to purchase XRP in quantities they can truly afford and at risk levels, they can manage.
• Transaction costs are lower than in XRP CFD trading.
• Get pricing of Ripple from several sources. This gives you a choice of what prices will benefit you the most. Some sellers simply want money desperately and can sell to you at cheap prices you will not get on CFD platforms.

A major advantage of using exchanges is that many of them now offer mobile apps that can be downloaded from the iOS Store or from the Google Play Store.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we present the best Ripple trading brokers for 2017. Even though there are traders who would want to trade solely on the exchanges, as well as others who would like to trade XRP CFDs exclusively, it is advocated to be active on both sides of the divide. This is because the knowledge gained from technical analysis of the XRP CFD asset on trading platforms can equally be used to great advantage on the exchanges.

In coming up with this list, we considered brokers and exchanges that could come up with the following:

• Sound regulation and a track record of transparency, honesty, and openness in trade operations.
• Brokers with transparent pricing and not pricing meant to skew the market against traders.
• Brokers whose platforms permit the use of the automated trading software.
• A system of verification to separate genuine traders from scammers.
• A track record of traders being able to fund and withdraw money from their accounts.
• Brokers that offer seamless and stress-free transaction/payment methods.
• Exchanges that offered a good variety of payment channels so that any trader anywhere in the world would be able to buy or sell Ripple in their local currencies or at least currencies/digital payment systems that could be purchased with their local currencies.

Read More:

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