A Quick Guide For Those New To The Forex Market
Friday, July 30th, 2010This blog article is aimed at those who are brand new to the forex market, and are looking to find out some more information. So what exactly is forex trading?
The phrase actually comes from pushing together the words ‘foreign exchange’, hence, forex. The forex market trades currencies from every country in the world, with brokers and individuals buying and selling 24 hours a day, and their profit being decided on the rise of fall of the currency they are trading with. For this reason, the foreign exchange quotes currencies in pairs (hence why you hear terms like ‘the pound is up against the dollar’ etc)
The goal of the investor trading on the forex market is to make money from foreign currency fluctuations in value, often dictated by real-life events. For you to make a profit on the forex market, you should only be trading when you think the value of the currency you’re buying will increase agains the currency you want to sell. If this occurs, and your currency has risen against the other, then you will need to sell back the lower currency to ‘lock in’ your profit.
In order to open an account to trade on the foreign exchange, you will often need either a CFD or spread betting account already open, which you can use to trade from. Some online trading sites will allow you to set up a dummy account before actually trading; this is an excellent idea for anyone new to forex trading and should certainly be taken advantage of. There are huge amounts of resources available both online and in the physical world; you can utilise books, training videos, blogs, etc. to give you a better grounding in the process before you start trading. This is an extremely pertinent point for those that are brand new to forex trading; the better informed you are, the higher your chances of making a profit.
Spend some time practising and trading on your dummy account and see how your virtual balance looks after a few weeks. This is usally a good indicator of how well you’ll do when trading on the real market. It’s easy to see why forex trading is so popular, as it allows true 24-hour trading, 5 days a week with uninterrupted access to forex dealers worldwide. If you do trade on the markets for real, you should make sure you take advantage of the risk minimisation protocols available to you. Use stop losses, limit orders and the like to ensure you don’t end up losing the house!