Saturday, July 4, 2009

Forex Education for Beginners: The Forex Market

By Bart Icles

There are a lot of websites today that offer forex education but only a small number are free and not all of them are worth reading. As the forex market attracts more and more investors, more and more people are looking for ways to understand the basics of this lucrative market. However, they often find themselves lost in forex education online materials.

To start your forex education, you must first have an understanding of what forex is. Forex is a term used to refer to the foreign exchange or currency exchange market, which is deemed the largest financial market in the world. It is also the real-time buying of one currency and selling of another. Currencies are often traded to be able to buy and sell products and services in some foreign country. They are also traded so that profits made in foreign currencies can be converted into the domestic currency. Others trade currencies for profit. Investors who engage in this kind of currency trading are often called "speculators".

Most speculators believe that the best trading opportunities are posed by the most commonly traded currencies that are referred to as "majors". The majors are also often the most liquid currencies. In the forex market, currencies are traded in pairs. Popular currency pairs include EUR/USD or Euro and US Dollars, and USD/JPY or US Dollars and Japanese Yen.

Each day, forex trading begins in Sydney and moves around the world as each day begins in other financial centers like Tokyo, Singapore, London, and New York. This enables the forex market to operate 24 hours a day for five days a week. In turn, investors are able to conduct business and respond to fluctuations in the value of currencies in real-time, may it be day or night. The forex market is also considered as an over the counter or an inter-bank market. Forex transactions are typically made between two counterparts through an electronic network or the telephone. This manner of exchange decentralizes forex transactions, which is very unlike of stock markets and futures markets.

There are still many other things that a would-be forex investor needs to learn. After having an idea of what the forex market is and how it works, it is essential to learn how to read forex quotes and how they work. A good forex education would also enable a new investor to familiarize himself more with the different forex jargons and the important things to learn about margin trading.

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