Home > Forex for beginners > What is FOREX (Foreign Exchange)?
What is FOREX (Foreign Exchange)
|
|
Investments usually deal with 4 major pairs: Euro against US dollar, US dollar against Japanese yen, British pound against US dollar, and US dollar against Swiss franc or EUR/USD, USD/JPY, GBP/USD, and USD/CHF used to sign these pairs accordingly. These major pairs are considered as Forex market's "blue chips". You will not receive any dividends on the currencies. Well known "buy low - sell high" gives the profit for currency trades.
In case you have a forecast that one currency would get higher to another you can exchange the second one for the first one and wait for the profit. If you are lucky to see the trades following your forecast you can make an opposite transaction and to exchange currencies back gaining the profit.
Forex transactions are carried out by Forex brokerage companies, also known as major banks dealers. Forex market is worldwide and your European colleagues may make a transaction with Japanese traders when it's time for you to sleep in the North America. There are 3 shifts for the major institutions to work in due to 24-hours a day activity of the Forex market. It's possible to ask for overnight execution for take-profit and stop-loss orders of the client.
Foreign exchange market (also called Forex of FX to shorten the name) is the oldest market in the world. It is also seen to be the largest one. Being currencies' primary market working 24-hours a day, Forex is also the largest market with highest liquidity. This is an interbank market carrying out spot (or cash) transactions. The currency futures market, to be compared with Forex is traded only 1% as much.
Forex market doesn't have any exchange center unlike the stock market. Forex trading seem to go after the sun around the world, from banks of the United States to other parts of the world like Australia, New Zealand, the Far East or Europe and back to the US some time later.
High minimum amount of transaction and strict financial requirements used to make this interbank market unavailable for small speculators. The only dealers of currency markets were banks, huge-amount speculators and largest currency dealers. They had an ultimate access to this market dealing with lots of primary exchange rates of the world currencies, the market with an extremely high liquidity along with an unusually strong nature of trends.
Nowadays small traders have an opportunity to purchase the small lots (units.
