For the last couple of years, the online gold trading business is a proven money making instrument for people who understand the market conditions. The gold spot price has broke through the historical price of $1,200 per troy ounce in 2010. The lasting gold market uptrend is anticipated to carry on for some time despite the fact that you can find several retracements when the gold price arrived at the $1200 level.

During the period when the stock market crashes along with the financial meltdown, many investors and traders have lost a lot of money. Smart investors then went on to trade forex as it's a bigger market and many people believed that they can earn money fast and easy.

As soon as those investors and traders tried forex trading, 90% of them actually lost money and then they come into conclusion that generating money from trading is very tough. So is it true that making money from trading is difficult?

The fact is, without any basic understanding of the market, it's without a doubt most likely be really tough for individuals who would like to earn some money in trading. On the other hand, the wise and savvy investors are different. They are the ones who know which market will rise during a financial meltdown, so online gold trading is the so called 'holy grail' market that they made a ton of money from.

So how do you trade spot gold online?

Well, many traders are unaware that spot gold trading is actually available on some of forex broker's Metatrader 4 (MT4) trading platform. Various forex brokers like Alpari, FXDD etc allow spot precious metals to be bought and sold against the U.S dollar on the Metatrader platform.

In gold spot trading, the symbol is XAUUSD and XAU simply represent one ounce of gold. Here's an illustration, the gold spot market quote can be something like 1200 XAUUSD, which means that one troy ounce of gold is equal to $1200 USD.

How can we be positive that precious metals are on a uptrend for the long term?

Precious metals are industrial metals, which mean that the industrial sectors have a high demand for it. After the economy has recovered from financial meltdown, recession, unemployment etc, industrials expand their production and therefore the prices of gold and silver rise along with the demand.

The next biggest event is that the government debts have been increasing to trillions and thus the U.S dollar keep declining. But what government did was to print trillions of dollars to pay for their debts. When this happens, inflation occurs and the value of the dollar dropped.

When event like inflation occurs, the smart investors knew that gold is the perfect tool to grow and protect their wealth, so they rushed to buy gold without hesitation. When that happens, gold price shoots up. This is always happening throughout the history.

What's the biggest benefit of online gold trading?

Just like forex trading, leverage is also offered to spot gold trading. In forex, one standard lot of contract is $100,000. In gold trading, a standard lot is equal to 100 troy ounces of gold.

For example, you plan to buy 1 standard lot of gold. But as the spot gold trading comes with a leverage feature, let's say 100:1, instead of buying one standard lot of gold for $120,000, you only need $1200 in your margin account for 1 standard lot!

Now the price of gold went up to $1,205, so the standard lot of gold contract will make you $500 profits ($120,500 - $120,000). Can you imagine buying 100 troy ounces of physical gold? You have to fork out around $120,000 and it's not even inclusive of storage fees!

This is the time to get into online gold trading and ride on the up gold trend. Though you can buy physical gold, you are being wiser than other investors by utilising on smaller capital.