Forex is the knowledge and business of making money through exchanging foreign currencies. Forex is not a new business and its history is as old as the history of money.
There are people who have been making money through Forex from many years ago. Fortunately, with the help of computer and internet, Forex trading has become much easier. You can sit at your personal computer and trade from home without having to make any phone call or referring to any bank.
How is it possible?
There are broker companies that enable you to buy and sell different currencies through the Internet and some simple softwares. For any trade that you make, you pay a small commission to the broker company that you are trading through it.
You need to find a good, reliable and well-known broker company and sign up for an account with it. Then you have to fund your account. You use the money you have in your account to trade. Any profit that you make, will be added to your account and vise versa. Then you can withdraw the money you have made.
What currencies can you trade?
In Forex, you deal with currency pairs. There are four main currency pairs: British Pound and USD (GBP/USD), Euro and USD (EUR/USD), USD and Japanese Yen (USD/JPY), USD and Swiss Frank (USD/CHF).
In each currency pair, the first currency works as the commodity and the second one works as the money. For example when you choose the GBP/USD to trade, if you buy, you buy British Pound against USD and if you sell, you sell British Pound against USD. It doesn’t matter what currency you have in your account. The trading software makes the exchanges automatically.
How can you make money?
Buying cheap and selling expensive or selling expensive and buying cheap is the base of making money in Forex. For example If you buy GBP against USD when each GBP is equal to 1.9554USD and then sell it when it is 2.0235USD, you have made a profit. I don’t want to focus on more details in this article and explain how the profits and the money you make will be calculated. I will talk about these issues in other articles.
But the big question is that how you can know the best time to buy and how you can know that if you buy, the price will go up and you will make a profit. This is the most important question that makes you a successful trader.
he foreign exchange market (currency, forex, or FX) is where currency trading takes place. It is where banks and other official institutions facilitate the buying and selling of foreign currencies. [1]FX transactions typically involve one party purchasing a quantity of one currency in exchange for paying a quantity of another. The foreign exchange market that we see today started evolving during the 1970s when worldover countries gradually switched to floating exchange rate from their erstwhile exchange rate regime, which remained fixed as per the Bretton Woods system until 1971.
Presently, the FX market is one of the largest and most liquid financial markets in the world, and includes trading between large banks, central banks, currency speculators, corporations, governments, and other financial institutions. The average daily volume in the global foreign exchange and related markets is continuously growing. Traditional daily turnover was reported to be over US$3.2 trillion in April 2007 by the Bank for International Settlements.[2] Since then, the market has continued to grow. According to Euromoney's annual FX Poll, volumes grew a further 41% between 2007 and 2008.[3]
The purpose of FX market is to facilitate trade and investment. The need for a foreign exchange market arises because of the presence of multifarious international currencies such as US Dollars, Euros, Japanese yen, Pounds Sterling, etc., and the need for trading in such currencies.