Why we’re educating Nigerians on forex trading

Alpari is one of the world’s leading forex brokers, offering clients a full range of modern financial instruments and technical solutions for online trading and investment. The company has been operating on financial markets since 1998, developing sustainably to become an industry leader.

For the past few years, the maximum annual trading turnover of Alpari companies exceeded $2.5 trillion and today, the company offers its services to over one million clients across more than 150 countries around the world.

The Chief Executive Officer, Alpari Research and Analysis, Roberto d’Ambrosio, said the company is here to train many people in Nigeria to know what forex is all about and to get confidence in the business.

“Our approach is to respect the people in Nigeria, which is experiencing recession. We are not here to convey any kind of incredible message but to just show them what our pattern has been from the beginning, show that what we use is a platform and is the same platform they will have and it is up to them to use it rightly.”

About Alpari

Alpari is an international group of companies, active in the investment and forex trade industry. It’s a long lasting player in this industry and one of the biggest and has been around since 1998, a long period of time in this industry, and it has global presence. It has more than one million clients in 130 countries around the world. So we can say with confidence that Alpari is one of the major players in this industry and when it comes to Nigeria, it also has a very strong local presence with offices in Lagos and Nigeria.

Alpari Analysis Company in which I’m the Chief Executive Officer, comprises a group of people dedicated to financial market analysis and research and industry trend research. We are consulted by company boards and we deliver research to not only the clients but also to the general public. We are here for the second time around for series of workshops in which we shared our views. Our company is made up of professionals. What we do is just to show people how to be professional, starting from the very basics because many people in Nigeria need to know what forex is all about and to get confidence. It is very important to know what you are handling so that you don’t make mistakes.

Building confidence in Nigerian forex traders

Unfortunately, they are right in some sense because non-ethical players in the field have approached them, providing them some kind of investments in forex and promising incredible return overnight. Mostly, these people operate under a very shady company, which you cannot even identify. For instance, I am a public person, you can find me everywhere, we are public figures and if you go to our website, you will find us and you can be sure that there are people here you are dealing with. The other kind of approach is the one where they take your money and disappear.

But Alpari is such a huge company that cannot disappear. It is regulated in many jurisdictions and was licensed by one of the most difficult regulators – Central Bank of Russia – and is also licensed in Europe. So there is a complete different approach here. In our workshops, we will never tell people to invest here, you will get double; you will never hear this kind of thing from us. We will give them the tools and teach them how to use them without making any kind of loss.

Our approach is to respect the people of Nigeria, which is experiencing recession. I know that because I know Nigeria very well, since I grew up in Lagos. So we are not here to convey any kind of incredible message but to just show them what our pattern has been from the beginning, show that what we use is a platform and is the same platform they will have and it is up to them to use it rightly.

Of course, for those seeking only to invest part of their money, Alpari gives responsibility to do that but always in control of the investment. They can invest, they can take up their money whenever they want, they can choose the managers to entrust their money to, so they are always in control, which is not the case with that kind investment that lacks trust as you mentioned before. Alpari is not fraudulent but comes with opportunities and interest.

Nigeria operation

Alpari came to Nigeria in May 2014 and is growing. People are beginning to understand that this is not a game but an investment, a way to diversify their investments and also pursue the opportunity to become traders themselves. So they need some education; this is what we are doing here – to deliver knowledge and education. This is the core part because many times, all the misunderstanding comes from the fact that you are not completely aware of what you are doing because if you know, then your choice will be based on what you know. If you just choose because somebody is lying to you, that is where the problem comes but given the right education, one could make the right choice.

Education format

We at Alpari Research Analysis want to spread this knowledge as much as possible. It is done under Alpari broker here and we came through that and it is open to everybody. We have been very clear in our communication online and we encourage people to come and they can register the same day as well, so it is open to non-clients and everybody. Of course, you cannot come and say it you’ve got all the knowledge even if training will last for up to five hours or even more. But we have a training room so people can continue once they decide Alpari is their partner.

They give a lot of education about what forex is, how to use tools, the platform, what kind of trading you can do and we have the training room here with organised courses. So they can access Alpari Research Analysis channels on YouTube, where we do a lot of education and analysis. We are also on twitter and facebook. Forex is a tool basically for somebody to earn an additional income. So we teach people with various forex tools to earn additional income for themselves whether you are a businessman, working class or anybody.

Partnering government

It solely depends on whether the states or the Federal Government will give us opportunity to partner with them. At Alpari, we are promoting free education, enlightening people. So far, we have done some training with some companies here in Nigeria to educate their staff. We also partner with Oracle Nigeria; we are doing some presentations with them and also with MTN. So there are lots of partnerships we can offer.

Investing in forex

There is very deep and detailed conversation going on right now and that is why we are inviting people to our seminars and workshops to give them that knowledge. With that knowledge, they can make a choice. We are always telling our clients the truth about forex trading. I will advice you to do a proper learning to attain the knowledge and once you acquire that knowledge, you can be participating and you can be practicing on our domain account. On the domain account, you are not investing real money, you are using the visual money to trade but when you feel you are confident enough, you can then start as low as N1,000 or any amount. You are using a none account because when you make a deposit in naira, we are converting your naira to the US dollar so that you can have access to the international forex market, which will enable you to trade. And here, you can start with as low as N1,000.

Grassroots benefitting from forex training 

There are few things we have to consider in structuring our educational programmes, which is infrastructure. The rural areas may have infrastructural deficit to a great extent and that could be a disadvantage in trading forex and the kind of services we provide. One of those keys is communication access, which is internet infrastructure. If these rural areas don’t have internet infrastructure, they at disadvantage already. The next infrastructure or access we are talking about is access to laptop or tablet because these are key and relevant to the kind of education we provide. They must have access to laptop and internet. But if the government is willing to provide some of these infrastructure, we can come in with our own contribution to help economic development and show them how they can be in rural areas and still participate in the international forex business. So we are open to partnering with the government. We once did this in Calabar when NITDA, one of the government agencies, came in to mobilise a lot of youths that were interested in this programme and partnered with Alpari to provide the education and we had like a five-day training. After the first one, we did another one where we taught people how to participate in forex market. But at the moment, we are getting more partnership proposals from private sectors and more companies are partnering with Alpari. If government can do this, there will be much more growth.

Forex trading is very lucrative and interesting. The knowledge you need to participate is not rocket science. We have the professionals in our company and we are here to provide a lot of supports. We have a lot of tools, if you log on to our website, you will see a lot of professional tools you don’t have access to as an individual but by the time you become a client at Alpari, you will have access to all of them.

xperienced in this business and if you check our track records, you will see that we have pioneered a lot of trading products in this business like our signature product, which is the palm account. Alpari pioneered it and all other brokers are now copying it. If you are partnering with or choosing who is leading the industry, I think you will choose people that pioneered cutting-edge products and Alpari is one of those brands. Then you will look at other kinds of account we provide; we give you quick access to liquidity providers.

being an international broker firm means we do not directly participate in trading for clients. What we do is to produce platform for you to trade but in a case where you don’t know how to trade by yourself, we have the educational arm, which guides you on how to perform this trade. Our key competence is that we provide the platform to trade, we provide you the education to learn how to trade but we still have cases where people don’t have the time or patience on how to trade by themselves, that is what motivated us to pioneered palm account system. This palm account system is for people that have taken the pains to learn how to trade forex profitably. Some of them are profitable while some of them are not because it is a very transparent system.

So people that don’t have time to trade can go to that place; there are traders like you and I, but these are not Alpari staff but they scattered all over the world. So by the time they look at this system account that managers operate, the palm account is a kind of account where investors look at a manager and his trade history and trust it, then they can choose the manager to manage for them and it now becomes a shared risk and reward kind of investment.