xStation 5: Terminal

*Since the recording of these videos, negative balance protection has come into force from 02.10.17. This means that whilst trading losses cannot exceed funds in your account, your capital is still at risk.

Terminal

From this lesson you will learn:

• What the terminal is and its features

• How to reverse, close and edit a position

• What margin level is and how it’s calculated

xStation 5’s Terminal allows you to manage and monitor all your trading activities. You will find information about open positions, pending orders, trading account history, cash operations, overall balance, equity and your margin details.

Every trader needs a journal or diary to record and keep track of their positions and trading history. Your terminal is your digital diary, and keeps track of every trade you ever place.

Opening positions

In the first ‘Open positions’ tab you can see all the details of your open trades.

Details like:

• Position: name of traded instruments and number
• Type: here you can have ‘Buy’ for long position, ‘Sell’ for short position
• Volume: the amount of lots
• Time: this is the time at which the position was opened
• Open price: price at which the position was opened
• SL/TP: stop loss and take profit levels if set
• Market price: the current price of traded instruments
• Commission: cost of opening the position if charged
• Swap: charged or added swaps points
• Profit: the current position profit/loss

If you have several positions on the same instrument they’ll be grouped together. By left-clicking on the open positions line you can expand or collapse all items in group.

Expand Gold group:

Collapsed Gold group:

Closing positions

By left-clicking the red arrow on the group line, you can close multiple trades in just one click. You can choose between ‘Close all’, ‘Close profitable trades only’ or ‘Close losing trades only’.

If you have more than one open trades group, you can easily expand all or collapse all positions and groups by right-clicking .

Let’s click on ‘Expand all’:

By using the red Close button you’re able to close all your trades from all the groups. This feature enables you to execute decisions quickly and easily.

Personalise table view

By right-clicking in the open positions window you can open personalise your table’s view to add or remove some extra columns.

Personalise table view will appear:

• Order: transaction unique number
• Symbol: instrument symbol
• Margin: amount of deposit which has been set aside to secure the position
• Comment
• Open origin: information about on which XTB platform position was opened.

xStation 5 allows you to change the order of columns to fit your personal preferences. Simply drag and drop column to the left or right in ‘Open positions’ tab.

Stop Loss and Take Profit

From ‘Open positions’ tab you can easily manage Stop Loss and Take Profit levels.

To add, remove or change stop loss and take profit levels, simply expand your order by left-clicking on it and selecting the ‘+’ symbol under either the stop loss or take profit column, and a new window will appear:

The Stop Loss form window contains:

• SL/TP: value in price.
• Pips: value in pips, for a Stop Loss negative value, or Take Profit positive value
• In GBP: the value expressed in the base currency of the account
• Trailing stop: turn on and off trailing stop, for stop loss orders only

Double up and Reverse position

Each open position can be doubled up simply by clicking once on the ‘double position’ icon:

A new position will be opened at the current market price. Your position can also easily be reversed by one-clicking on the ‘Reverse position’ button.

Pending orders

In the ‘pending order’ window, you can modify or remove pending orders if you’ve set any.

Here, you can view all information about a pending order, just like in the open positions tab. To edit a specific pending order, double-click on it (or right-click and select ‘Modify’) and a new window will appear.

To remove the pending order simply click ‘x’ on the order line:

History

The history tab shows you a list of all your closed positions. At the bottom you can select and modify the time interval of your chosen period:

You can also export your trading history to an Excel file.

Cash operations

The cash operations tab has all information on all closed positions, charged commissions, deposit and withdrawals from your account. You can also export your cash operation history to an Excel file.

Account summary

The account summary window is located at the very bottom of the platform.

It contains summarised data for your entire trading account:

• Balance: the amount of the money you have in your account before opening positions
• Equity: your account balance plus the profit/loss of your open positions
• Margin: how much money has been set aside to secure the open positions
• Free margin: the difference between your account equity and the margin set aside to cover open positions. This indicates the amount of available funds to make new trades
• Margin level: is the ratio of equity to margin expressed in percent.
• Profit: profit / loss of all currently opened positions.
   

If your account margin level reaches 100%, you can still close your open positions, but you cannot open any new positions.
 

Margin Level = (Equity / Margin) x 100

At XTB, your margin close level is set to 30%, which means if your margin level falls below this level, the platform starts to close your losing positions automatically. This is an automatic safety mechanism to help protect your account funds and prevent losses from deepening. It starts by closing the biggest losing position and stops when your margin level returns to at least 30%.