When it comes to turning a profit, the FX trading industry is slightly different to many other financial markets. Most Forex brokers advertise themselves as not charging a commission for Forex trading, and in almost all cases - this is completely true.

But we all know that Forex brokers wouldn't be providing us with the facility to trade Forex for absolutely no reason. There still has to be a profit for them in some respect. Indeed - even thought it might not be obvious at first, your FX broker is earning money on every trade that you place. Continue reading below to find out how.

Many traders who started out in equity trading will be well familiarized with the profit model that equity brokerage firms employ. This model is applied as follows:

Traditionally, this model has worked well. However, for Forex trading, the model is more difficult to apply. This is because of the vastly varying amount of money which can be traded in an individual trade. For example - one trader might be trading a mini lot - of 10,000 currency units, whereas another trader might be using 10 standard lots for a total of 1,000,000 currency units.

To get around this problem, Forex brokers use a spread-based profiting scheme.

The spread is the difference between the bid and ask prices shown when a currency pair is quoted. Essentially, in Forex trading, this spread is artificially inflated by the Forex broker. This is how they make their profit. Each and every time you place a trade, the broker is able to take a small amount of "commission" out of the bid / ask spread for themselves - because the price that is really being executed on is "better" than the price that you are seeing on your screen - by a small amount.

This is why we talk about the spread of a currency pair in pips. The EUR/USD for example often has a spread of 1 to 2 pips - however on the actual spot market, the spread is only 0.1 or 0.2 pips - hence the ability for the Forex broker to profit.