Importance of Forex Education

In the world of currency trading, knowledge is the key to become a successful trader.  If you enter the world of real time forex trading without the necessary knowledge and skill then you are almost guaranteed to lose money. However, if you take the time to learn what you are doing before you start trading with your own hard earned money then you will go a very long way towards minimizing your risks and maximizing your earnings potential.

Some have carefully studied the foreign exchange market over the years, had their forex tutorial and have planned their investments according to predicted changes. The shrewdest of investors have profited immensely, as they were able to learn the market, see disaster coming and knew exactly what to do in order to minimize their losses. Of course, learning all of these financial aspects would involve a solid Forex education.

Though Forex is a very lucrative market, where everybody can make forex money, all must bear in mind that it is not like a one day millionaire, where money will flow overnight. IF you want all things to be as fast as you can, you must think twice. Stop for a while and have Forex Training first before battling in the real world of forex.

Forex training will be your first step to success. Not only that, it will be your foundation in every trade you made and whenever you are lost, you can always count on your former knowledge about forex. Forex education brings the knowledge of professionals into your personal trading. Forex training helps you know where to enter a currency based on the direction it is taking and how to forecast that direction. Forex Training allows you to learn how to trade currencies with or without a coach. As you trade, your Forex training can truly help you become the master of your money.

Forex training sessions are designed to give new and experienced traders all the necessary tools to start buying and selling currencies in the Forex market. Forex training program would not only be for beginners who want to learn how to start day trading, but also for more experienced traders who already had some stock or futures trading experience. Forex training will help you succeed in your currency trading as you learn to trade the Forex like a pro.

Not that long a go finding a foreign exchange tutorial was not that easy a thing to find. Finding a Forex training was next to impossible because accessibility to the Forex market was limited to banks and large financial institutions only. Online trading has opened the doors to many more, including individuals who benefit the most from having a tutorial.

Nowadays there are many places to look for a Forex tutorial. Not only are there individuals providing these services, but also organizations and institutions as well. They offer these services in many different ways, such as online and in a classroom. This allows those looking for a tutorial to find one that suits their needs the best.  We recommend tutorials offered at babypips.com and ibfx.com.

Advantages of Forex Trading

Foreign Exchange Market is a market where traders buy and sell currencies with the hope of making a profit when the values of the currencies change in their favor. People are making vast amounts of money from Forex trading. The Forex Market has a big potential for everyone, ranging from large corporate firms to ordinary, everyday people like you and me. Bu how does it differ from those confusing markets like stocks, options or traditional futures?

Here are some distinct advantages of trading Forex:

Continuous, 24-Hour Trading

The currency exchange is a 24-hour market. You may decide to trade after you come home from work. Regardless of what time-frame you want to trade at whatever time of the day, there would be enough buyers and sellers to take the other side of your trade. This feature of the market gives you enough flexibility to manage your trading around your daily routine.

Liquidity And Efficiency

An average day in the Forex market sees approximately 1.9 trillion US dollars worth of trade. It is 30 times larger than the combined volume of all U.S. equity markets. This means that 1,498,574 skilled traders could each take 1 million dollars out of the FOREX market every day and the FOREX would still have more money left than the New York Stock would have daily! The currency market is the most liquid market in the world and the funds that you invest are liquid. You can cash them anytime you want. No waiting for days to get your stocks converted into hard cash.

Forex market is extremely quick! It takes not more than 1 to 2 seconds to complete your transactions because it is all done electronically, online and in real time.

Transparency

Forex is a very transparent market. Unlike equity markets, where analysts have an unfair advantage over the layman because of their insider knowledge, the relevant information for Forex is equally available to every one through international news. Currencies are representations of how strong the economies are and how global trade affects them. Therefore, all Forex traders are in a position to make pertinent decisions according to the current market situations.

When you are trading stocks, you may have experienced events where one piece of news accelerates or decelerates the price of the underlying stock you may have bought into. Perhaps a director has been kicked out by the shareholders of a company or the company has just released a new product and big investors are buying the shares of a particular company. Share prices can be drastically affected by the actions or inactions of one or a few individuals. So if you are relying on television reports and newspapers to get your news, most of the opportunities or warnings will have come too late for you to take advantage by the time you get them.

The value of currencies on the other hand is affected by so many factors and so many participants that the likelihood of any one individual or group of individuals drastically affecting the value of a currency is minute. Because of its sheer size, the currency market is hard to manipulate. The ability for people to engage in ‘insider trading’ is virtually eliminated. As an average trader, you are less disadvantaged. You are likely to be playing on relatively equal ground along with all the other traders and investors whom you are competing against.

Volatility

Trading opportunities exist when prices fluctuate. If you buy a share for $2 and it stays there, there is no opportunity to make a profit. The magnitude of level of this fluctuation and its frequency is referred to as volatility. As a trader, it is volatility that you profit from. Large volume transactions and high liquidity combined with fewer trading instruments generate greater intra-day volatility in the currency market that can be exploited by day-traders. The high volatility of the currency market indicates that a trader can potentially earn 5 times more money from currency trading than trading the most liquid shares.

Volatility is a measure of maximum return that a trader can generate with perfect foresight. Volatility for the most liquid stocks are between 60 to 100. Volatility for currency trading is 500. (Source: Oanda.) The foreign currencies market is moving in trends, and you can identify these trends – as they repeat in cycle- with the technical analysis.

Low Startup Costs and Transaction Costs

A currency transaction typically incurs no commission or transaction fees. For a forex trader, the spread is the only cost he or she needs to cover in taking on a position. In addition, because of the currency market’s efficiency, there is little or no ‘slippage’ costs.

Recent developments now allow a minimum account deposit of $250. This mini-account offers lower leverage, but also lower profit and loss. Once a broker learns to trade profitably, this can easily be built into a larger and fully leveraged account.

A minimal $300 investment can realistically be compounded into a $30,000 account in six months, with access to proper training. Brokers naturally offer conservative training courses, so the trader should look elsewhere for more advanced mentoring. Much training is available on the internet, and a website called Precise4XSuccess.com offers access to cutting-edge successful strategies developed by a mathematician. Not all successful strategies are made public. Do your due diligence to find the methods that work for you.

Leverage

There are not a lot of banks or people who would lend you money so that you can use it to trade shares. And if there are, it would be very hard for you to convince them to invest in you and in your idea that a certain share is going to go up or down. Therefore, most of the time, if you have a $10,000 account, you can only really afford to buy $10,000 worth of stocks.

In currency trading however, because you use ‘borrowed money’, you can trade $10,000 of a currency and you only need anywhere between fifty (For a margin lending ratio of 200:1) to two hundred dollars ( For a margin lending ratio of 50:1) in your trading account. This makes it possible for an average trader with a small trading account, under $10,000 to be able to profit sufficiently from the movements of the currency exchange rates. This concept is explained further in The Part-Time Currency Trader.

Profit From A Bull And Bear Market

When you are trading shares, you can only profit when the price of a stock goes up. When you suspect that it is about to go down or that it is just going to be moving sideways, then the only thing you can do is sell your shares and stand aside. One of the frustrations of trading shares is that an individual cannot profit when prices are going down. In the currency market, it is easy for you to trade a currency downward so that you can profit when you think it is going to lose value. This is easy to do because currency trading simply involves buying one currency and selling another, there is no structural bias that makes it difficult to trade ‘downwards’. This is why the currency market has been occasionally referred to as the eternal bull market.

Forex Market Hours

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 Overview

What is Foreign Currency Exchange?

The first part of this currency trading tutorial looks at the history behind foreign currency exchange. Currencies from many different countries were backed up by gold about one hundred years ago. It was called The Gold Standard. This basically meant that to print certain amount of paper money a predetermined amount of gold was needed. Also you could walk into the bank and request that your currency bills would be converted to gold. Then you could leave the bank with the gold.

The Foreign currency exchange (FOREX) market is a cash (or “spot”) market for currency. This market emerged at the beginning of the 70′s decade. The reason was that currencies where not backed up by gold anymore. They began floating freely. Their value depended on forces of supply and demand due to economic factors, speculation, etc. This originated the Forex Market.

Historically, the FX market was available most to major banks, multinational corporations and other participants who traded in large transaction sizes and volumes. Small-scale traders including individuals like you and I, had little access to this market for such a long time. Now with the advent of the Internet and technology, FX trading is becoming an increasingly popular investment alternative for the general public.

How is it traded?

The second part of this currency trading tutorial looks at how currencies are traded. Currencies are always traded in pairs. The most popular currencies and their symbols are:

Symbol	Country	Currency	Nickname
USD	United States	Dollar	Buck
EUR	Euro members	Euro	Fiber
JPY	Japan	Yen	Yen
GBP	Great Britain	Pound	Cable
CHF	Switzerland	Franc	Swissy
CAD	Canada	Dollar	Loonie
AUD	Australia	Dollar	Aussie
NZD	New Zealand	Dollar	Kiwi

A currency can never be traded by itself, so you can’t trade a USD by itself. You always need to compare one currency with another currency to make a trade possible.

The most commonly traded currency pairs are:

EUR/USD ("Euro") Euro / US Dollar
USD/JPY ("Dollar Yen") US Dollar / Japanese Yen
GBP/USD ("Cable") British Pound / US Dollar
USD/CAD ("Dollar Canada") US Dollar / Canadian Dollar
AUD/USD ("Aussie Dollar") Australian Dollar/US Dollar
USD/CHF ("Swissy") US Dollar / Swiss Franc
EUR/JPY ("Euro Yen") Euro / Japanese Yen

The currency on the left is called the base currency. The currency on the right is the counter currency. For example, when you place an order to buy EUR/USD pair, you are actually buying the EUR and you are selling the USD. When you place an order to sell EUR/USD you are selling the EUR and you are buying the USD. Buying or selling a currency PAIR means buying or selling the base currency, and doing the opposite with the counter currency.

It might seem a little confusing, but actually it is easier to treat the currency PAIR as one item. It means when you place trades you simply sell or buy the pair. The base/counter concept is only important for fundamental analysis.

Currencies are traded in dollar amounts called lots. For a “standard” account, one lot (called a standard lot) is $1,000 and controls $100,000 in currency. For example, when you place an order to buy one lot of EUR/USD, you are buying the EUR and simultaneously selling the USD. The margin you must put up to place the order is $1000 (for a standard lot). You are going long the EUR and expecting it to strengthen against the USD. For every increase of $0.0001 in the EUR, you make one “pip” (price interest point) equivalent to $10 per lot traded.

Similarly, for a “mini-account” when you place an order to sell one mini-lot (one-tenth of a standard lot) of EUR/USD, you are selling the EUR and simultaneously buying the USD. You are going short the EUR and expecting it to weaken against the USD. The margin requirement is $100.00 per mini-lot. For every decrease in the EUR of $0.0001 you make one pip equivalent to $1 per mini-lot traded.

The broker makes money off the spread which is the difference in the quotation ask and bid prices. You buy the base currency at the ask price and sell it at the bid price. Generally, the major currency pairs have relatively low spreads. The EUR/USD is commonly two to three pips and the GPD/USD is commonly four to five pips. For example, the current bid/ask price for EUR/USD is quoted at 1.2322/1.2324. This means that you can buy 1 EUR (the base currency) for $1.2324 USD (the counter-currency). You buy at the ask price. You can sell 1 EUR for $1.2322 USD (you sell at the bid price). You will pay the broker the spread or $1.2324 – $1.2322 = $0.0002 = 2 pips. For a standard lot, the broker fee (in this example) is $10 x 2 pips = $20 per standard lot for a roundtrip trade (1 buy and matching sell or 1 sell and matching buy). For a mini-lot, the fee would be $1 x 2 pips = $2 per mini-lot for a roundtrip trade. The broker fee is automatically deducted from your account.

Obviously, if you buy (go long) a currency pair, you expect the base currency to increase in price. Your objective is to sell later at a price higher than you purchased and make a profit. On the flip side, if you sell (go short) a currency pair, you expect the base currency to decrease in price. Your objective is to buy later at a price that is lower than the price you originally sold, and thus make a profit off the difference.

To decide when to sell or buy you will need to learn technical analysis and/or fundamental analysis.
In currency trading you can make money both, when the currencies go up or down.

How can I get started?

Finally, the last part of this currency trading tutorial will show you how to get started in trading FOREX. You can easily open an online account by selecting one from many available FOREX brokers. You can, and should open a demo account to practice (and learn) for several months for free. The practice account makes simulated trades using real-time data. This is called “paper trading.” You should not trade your real account until you have proven to yourself that you can be profitable in your demo account.

Once you get started, you can trade currencies from just about anywhere. About all you need is a computer with internet access to your trading account. Many brokers also provide free charting software.

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