Trading from a phone

A trade on a phone is still a contract between two prices. The app gives that contract a name, a direction, a size and a time. The direction is either buy or sell. The size is written in lots. One standard lot on AUD/USD is 100,000 units of the base currency, which is the Australian dollar in this pair. A mini lot is 0.10 of that, and a micro lot is 0.01. The app shows the size as a decimal, so 0.05 means five micro lots.

The app also shows two prices side by side. The lower one is where you can sell, and the higher one is where you can buy. The gap between them is the spread. That gap is not a fee added later. It is already inside the price you receive. On a small screen the two numbers sit close together, so the spread looks like a single figure. It is two. If the spread is three pips, a buy starts three pips behind the sell price at the same moment.

Every open position carries a running profit or loss in the account currency. The app updates that number as the price moves. It does not tell you whether the number is large or small for your account. That judgement is yours. The same A$11.30 move is a different event on a A$500 account than on a A$50,000 account. The app shows the amount, not its weight.

A phone chart shows fewer candles than a desktop chart at the same zoom. A candle is one unit of time, such as one hour or one day. If the screen fits sixty hourly candles, it covers about two and a half days. The desktop may fit several hundred, covering weeks. Both charts are correct. They answer different questions. The phone answers what happened recently. The desktop answers where the price has been.

The range of a market is the distance between its highest and lowest price over a period. On AUD/USD around 0.6640, a quiet week might travel 80 pips, and a busy week might travel 200. One pip is 0.0001. If the visible chart holds only the last forty pips, a fifteen-pip move fills more than a third of the screen. It looks like a trend. On a chart holding two hundred pips, the same move is a small step. The picture changes, the market does not.

This matters because the eye reads proportion, not numbers. A candle that fills half the screen feels important. The same candle on a wider view looks ordinary. The fix is to set the chart to a longer time frame before judging any move. On the phone, switch from the fifteen-minute chart to the four-hour or daily chart. Note the high and the low of the past week. Write both numbers down. Then return to the shorter chart and compare the move against that range. If the move is a small part of the weekly range, it is small.

The phone can place every order type the desktop terminal can. It can set a stop loss, a take profit, and a limit order. It can close part of a position. What it cannot do is show enough of the chart at once to judge the wider range without extra taps. That is a limit of the screen, not of the account. The order is the same order. The information behind it is thinner.

A stop loss is an order that closes the position at a chosen price to limit the loss. On a narrow chart, a stop placed just below the last few candles may sit inside the normal daily movement. The price can reach it without changing the wider picture. A stop placed against the weekly range is a different decision. The phone makes the first easy and the second awkward, because the weekly range is off screen. The app will accept either stop. It will not warn you which one you chose.

The practical rule is to make the decision where the range is visible and place the order where it is convenient. Use the phone to enter the order, set the stop and check the fill. Use a wider chart, on the phone or elsewhere, to decide the size and the stop level first. If you cannot see the weekly range on the device in your hand, the device is not the place to choose the trade. It is still a fine place to send one you have already chosen.