Forex Trading Articles

How To Be A Foreign Exchange Trader

1 year ago
by Admin in
Being a forex or foreign exchange trader no longer means you have to work for a bank in one of the world’s financial centers. These days you can trade on your own behalf, from anywhere.

Since the rise of the internet many people are doing this from their own homes, making money in their spare time or even making a full time income. But what is forex trading and how does it work?

A foreign exchange trader deals in currencies. He or she will sell one currency that seems to be falling in value, to buy another that seems to be rising. There are always two currencies involved in a trade (a currency pair) because when you want to buy dollars you have to have another currency to exchange for them.

In the beginning it is best to be involved with just one currency pair. Most people start out trading in the EUR/USD market, that is the euro against the US dollar. This is the biggest forex market. There is plenty of information available for this market and it tends to have lower costs and be relatively stable.

Nevertheless forex is a very volatile market. This means that the prices can rise and fall steeply and quickly. The risk is high. It is easy to lose money. In fact, some losses are inevitable, so you should manage your account so that you never risk too much on one trade. You can use stop losses so that your broker will automatically sell if the price goes a certain way against you. The aim is not to have no losses, but to make sure that your profits are higher than your losses so that you end up with a net gain.

You will need access to a computer with a high speed internet connection any time that you want to trade. Unless you use a robot to control your currency trading, you will also need time where you can concentrate on learning a profitable system and then on trading itself. You pretty much need to be able to lock yourself away in a room to do this, at least for a couple hours a day. It is no good trying to trade from your desk at your day job with your boss interrupting you, or using a computer in the family den with kids climbing on your knees wanting to play games. You must be fully concentrated on the movements in the market or you could miss the right moment to either open or close a trade.

If you are a cautious person who likes a solid investment with predictable low returns, you should not become a currency trader. Forex traders are people who enjoy risk and love the challenge of trying to turn a profit in a fast moving market.

It helps if you are strongly focused on your goals and not easily swayed by emotion. It is important not to let fears of losses or dreams of huge wealth divert you from your strategy. You also need to stay aware of financial news, not only in your own country but in all of the major world powers, because this will affect the forex markets. With these characteristics and a good trading system in place, a foreign exchange trader can reap substantial gains from his or her investment.

Foreign Exchange Markets: What You Need To Know

1 year ago
by Admin in
The foreign exchange markets are situated all around the world. Currency trading is a global activity. Every country in the world uses money and needs to change that money into other currencies in order to trade or interact with other nations.

Currency exchange happens at every level of society. As an individual, you may have changed money when traveling on business or on vacaation. Or maybe you have sold something on eBay to somebody in another country. Their payment comes in to your account in their own currency, and the bank or other payment processor such as PayPal changes it for you. That is currency exchange at the root level.

Foreign exchange or forex trading has a different purpose, however. When you are trading on the foreign exchange markets you are not buying another currency because you need it. You are buying it in the hope that it will rise in value, so you can change it back and end up with more money than you started out with.
Of course, it is risky. The price movement could go against you and then you would end up with less money instead of more. So you will want to gather plenty of information about currency trading before you start.

Forex trading began in the 1970s when the major currencies were deregulated so that their values were no longer fixed. The banks and large investors quickly saw the potential for making money from the changing prices.

The main forex marketplaces are the big financial centers of the world. London sees the highest activity with New York second and Tokyo third. Other major players are Sydney, Zurich and Frankfurt.

Originally you had to be in one of those places to trade money, or at least have a telephone connection with a broker who was there. It was very difficult for somebody who was not on the spot to act fast enough to react to the sudden fluctuations in price that can happen in the forex markets.

But modern advances in technology have changed all of that. Since the rise of the internet it has been possible to trade on your own account from anywhere. This means that it has become easier and easier for the little guy to get a piece of the action.

While some people never think about foreign currency from one overseas trip to the next, others are studying charts and financial information or even using automated software in the form of forex robots, like the Forex Megadroid Robot to make money from the rising and falling prices with the aim of becoming financially free by trading on the foreign exchange markets.

Forex Market Hours: Can You Trade Currency 24/7?

1 year ago
by Admin in
The forex market hours stretch from Monday morning in Sydney, Australia to Friday afternoon in New York. During that time the market is open somewhere around the globe at all hours of the day or night.

However it is not a 24/7 market because it does shut down on weekends. 24/5 would be more accurate.

If you need to know the exact times that the markets open and close, you have to take time zones into consideration. It is very simple when expressed in UTC. This is Universal Coordinated Time, formerly known as Greenwich Mean Time. This is the standard (winter) time in Greenwich, London which is the point of zero longitude on the globe.

So, the normal forex market hours are 22.00 Sunday UTC to 22.00 Friday UTC. This is 10 pm in the UK in winter time.

New York is 5 hours behind the UK so the global forex market opens and closes at 5 pm Sunday/Friday in New York, 2 pm on the US west coast, 11 pm in Germany, 8 am Monday/Saturday in Sydney.

Things get a little complicated when you start to try to take summer time daylight saving into account. This makes one hour difference in countries that observe it. But daylight saving operates in a different way in the southern hemisphere countries such as Australia which have summer time from September to March instead of March to September.

The hours of the different major national markets are as follows:

Sydney: 10 pm to 7 am UTC
Tokyo: 12 midnight to 9 am UTC
London: 8 am to 5 pm UTC
New York: 1 pm to 10 pm UTC

Or we can express that in EST (Eastern US time):

Sydney: 5 pm to 2 am EST
Tokyo: 7 pm to 4 am EST
London: 3 am to 12 noon EST
New York: 8 am to 5 pm EST

You can see that these correspond to 24 hour cover.

However, this does not necessarily mean that trading will be good at all of these times. Just after a major market opens, the prices can be very volatile and unpredictable. Many traders will stay out of the forex market for up to an hour four times a day when the financial markets are waking up in these major cities.

The US dollar is the most traded currency by a long way, involved in 2.5 times as many trades as its nearest rival the euro. This means that events in the USA have a greater impact on the financial markets than events in other countries. The New York market tends to slow down around 3 pm local time (8 pm UTC) and if you are involved in a US dollar pair, this can be a good time to stop trading for the day.

So theoretically you can trade 24 hours a day from Sunday night to Friday night. Automated software in the form of a forex robot can even make this physically possible. However, a cautious trader will choose his times and will not be active during all of the forex market hours.

Forex Currency Trading For Beginners: The Ins & Outs

1 year ago
by Admin in
For a beginner forex currency trading may seem to be a whole new world but in fact the basics are quite easy to learn. You just need to understand the buzz words and trading terms and grasp a basic understanding of how the markets work.

Making big money in a short time is what forex currency trading is all about! It is possible for investors to make a lot of money very fast because the rates of exchange on the foreign market can rise and fall quickly. This means of course that it is risky and there is also a chance of losing a lot, just like most things in life that have the potential of big returns.

As you will know if you have ever exchanged currency for a vacation, the rates are constantly changing. For example you may change $100 into another currency planning to travel, and then find that you do not need it and change it back. The rate will probably have changed in the meantime and you may even have made a profit.

Forex traders deal in currencies hoping to make a profit all of the time, but instead of changing money at the bank they use a broker. Most transactions these days are handled online. In many ways it is not so different from stock trading. There is the same potential to trade in margins where a small balance held by your broker can control much larger deals.

One difference from stock exchange trading is that forex traders are not limited to dealing in their own country. You can trade any two currencies regardless of where you live. This also means that the market is international. Because of time zone differences, it is open 24 hours a day from Monday morning in Australia to Friday afternoon in New York.

Each currency is represented by 3 letters: USD for the US dollar, GBP for the British pound, EUR for the Euro, JPY for the Japanese Yen, CHF for the Swiss franc, CAD for the Canadian dollar, AUD for the Australian dollar etc. The exchange rate between two currencies may be expressed like this: USD/CHF 1.14. This means that to buy one US dollar you will need 1.14 Swiss francs.

If you want to start out in forex trading you will need to look for a broker or investment management company that you trust. It is worth shopping around and checking online forums for recommendations. Check out how long the company has been in business and what your rights and liabilities will be. Read all of the fine print.

You will probably also want to use a bot to do your trading for you. This is automated forex trading software that can trade 24 hours a day according to rules that you set for it. There is usually a demo option so that you can test out the whole system for a while before you let it trade with real money. There are many forex robots on the market and most of them come with full instructions for beginner forex currency trading. Read more about the Forex Megadroid Robot here – Forex Megadroid.

Forex Mentalist is live!

1 year ago
by Admin in

Hi folks,

Well, I finally did it and got my own website and blog. It’s still a bit ‘bare bones’ at the moment, but I hope to be adding content to it over the coming weeks and months. Making some serious dough from forex is what we all want, and hopefully I will be able to share some tips and strategies with you (and you with me if you’ve got ‘em).

Talk soon,

Mike.

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