Forex Strategy Course Online Lesson - Basics of Forex Trading

Forex, short for the Foreign Exchange market, is the largest financial market in the world. More money changes hands on the Forex market each day than on the stock market for an entire month! With the right forex trading strategy, you can become a successful forex investor. However, before you can learn real Forex trading strategies, you need to learn the basics of forex trading. This online forex lesson will teach you the elementary concepts.

The Forex market trades money, or currency, between different countries. You can think of it as a currency exchange market where people exchange large sums of, say, US dollars for British pounds. There are many currencies traded on the Forex market, and the most popular to trade are the US dollars, British pounds, European euros, Japanese yen, Swiss franc, Canadian dollar, New Zealand dollar, and Australian dollar. The symbols for these currencies on a Forex chart are USD, GBP, EUR, JPY, CHF, CAD, NZD, and AUD, respectively. A successful Forex strategy involves predicting how the relative strengths of the currencies will change in the future.

There are many reasons why investors prefer the Forex market to the stock market. Here are a few:

1) Because the Forex market is a global market, it is open 24 hours a day. Major centers are located in NY, London, and Tokyo, so there will always be an institution ready to process orders. Unlike stocks, you can buy and sell at any time.

2) Trillions of dollars trade hands every day in the Forex market. This means that the market has high liquidity, and your orders are usually instantly processed. Another side effect is that no single institution can use unethical Forex strategies ("game" the market) since the market is enormous.

3) Forex offers high leverage or margins than stocks. With stocks, you cannot have a leverage of more than 2:1, which means you can only borrow a small amount of money from your broker. Forex brokers can offer up to 200:1 leverage, which means a small amount of cash can go a long way. A successful Forex trading strategy will increase your portfolio much, much faster than with stocks. On the flip side, though, it is also much easier to lose all of your money in Forex markets.

In summary, the Forex market gives investors an opportunity to profit from currency exchange. Forex strategies can take advantage of fast-paced, highly-leveraged trading to generate rapid profits, but this comes at the price of higher risk.