Bulletin boards

Market-related bulletin boards and chat rooms aren’t hard to find. Those catering specifically to forex and currency trading are not as plentiful, however.

Additionally, message boards are only helpful if they’re active and full of participants. A board doesn’t help if a legitimate post is greeted by more silence than somebody trying to use pesos in London, or a Swiss franc in Toronto.

Unfortunately, when it comes to the Internet, you have to go through a lot of coal to find a diamond. While discussion sites focusing exclusively on the FX world can be found with a simple Web search, discovering the ones that actually have some substance requires a little more research.

One of the best boards are the forums at MoneyTec (www.moneytec.com/forums/index.php). There are more than two dozen forums, divided into several categories (e.g., Main Discussion, Trading for a Living, Trading Styles and Strategies, Tools of the Trade, etc.), and many have thousands of views and hundreds of replies.

That’s a good sign, because it indicates questions will get answered, or at least generate a discussion. There’s nothing more frustrating to a person with a legitimate comment or question than to post it and get no responses, forcing the poster to try again at another site.

Additionally, the site is easy to navigate. Threads are listed singularly, one after the other, and reading the replies can also be done in an easy, organized fashion. MoneyTec is also good because it is completely devoid of advertisements on the main forums page, although some forums are sponsored. (Some of the posts are from firms and individuals trying to sell a product, but this is the case at any message board.)

Judging from the posts we looked at, it seemed users at MoneyTec had developed a sense of community — it was obvious in many cases certain posters had become familiar with each other, as posts mentioned other members by name and some asked specific questions of specific posters.

Plus, there were very few posts that strayed from the main topic of the thread. This is often the death of message boards — interspersed with legitimate conversation are posts that add nothing to the discussion, and only serve to discredit or otherwise blur the poster or the message. This can cause new posters to avoid a site, preventing the site from growing and eventually minimizing or negating its effectiveness.

Oanda.com, (www.oanda.com) also features a bin/msgboard/ultimatebb.cgi). It has eight forums and the threads inside are lively and active. Forex News (www.forexnews.com/forum/forum.asp) has a decent forum as well — active, but poorly organized.

Another good site is the Forex Forum section of Forex Factory (www.forexfactory.com/forexforum). Forex Forum only has three main forums — General Forex Discussion, Town Square and Forex Related News. But the General Forex Discussion forum is lively, with almost 400 threads as of mid November. What’s better, many of the threads have multiple replies, and when we checked, the entire first page (18 different topics) had been replied to within the past week.

ForexForum.net (www.forexforum.net) has a fair amount of forums, but only minimal participation. Although people are reading the posts (as evidenced by the number of views), very few are taking the time to respond.

Elite Trader (www.elitetrader.com), a site originallydesigned for stock traders, has since branched out into other instruments, including forex, and the site — which claims more than 30,000 members — is consistently crowded. While forex forums — FX Trading and FX Brokers — comprise only two of the dozens of forums at Elite, both feature heavy traffic and plenty of responses. One thread in the FX Trading forum was started on Aug. 16, 2004, and was still going strong as of late November — it has more than 2,000 responses and 48,000 views. Those are the kind of eyeballs you’re looking for if you have a serious topic worthy of discussion.

Although Elite Trader isn’t specifically designed for forex trading, it’s probably the best option for forex traders looking for a place to share ideas and questions.