Forex Trading - A Basic Overview

Forex trading is becoming more popular as time goes by. Perhaps you have heard of forex trading, or heard things such as "the dollar fell sharply against the yen". Not sure what all this means? Here is a basic overview of forex trading.

The foreign currency exchange market (forex) is the largest market in the world. Much larger than the stock market! Some of the reasons for its popularity are that leverage allows maximum usage for your money and there is very high liquidity. The forex market is also open 24 hours a day, although some hours are much better trading times than others.

Forex is traded on margin. This means that you can control a large amount of money for a small bit of cash. With a 1% margin, $1000 in cash would leverage you one hundred thousand in the forex market trading. What this basically means is that your rate of return (or ROI) is going to be 100% for each percentage change upwards. Of course, this means that your loss would be equally as great if the market went against you.

Forex trades are always done in pairs. You always purchase one currency at the same time as you sell another. While there are many pairs in the forex market, there are really four major currency pairs: USD/JPY, USD/GBP, GBP/USD and USD/CHF. These pairs see the most market activity.