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Forex trading for beginners – Basics
Forex market or currency market (or simply FX) is the place where currency trading takes place. It primarily facilitates the exchange (buy / sell) of currencies from one to another and is the backbone of international trade and investment between countries – major banks being the main parties involved. For example, if a US company has to import something from Japan, it has to pay in Japanese Yen and and hence need to convert the US dollars into the acceptable currency. This happens on a continuous basis round the clock to help with global trades and hence make a mammoth US $7 trillion daily turnover which is bigger than any stock market turnover.
Basically, when you buy a particular currency (e.g. US Dollar), it is exchanged against another (e.g. Euro) and hence the entity that is traded is known as a pair. For example USDEUR is a pair whereby you are trading US Dollars against Euro and you buy (or sell) that pair at something like 1.5000 per pair.
Just like the stock market, you buy or sell – not shares but pairs.
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Difference between Forex trading and Stock trading
Many of us are familiar with the stock markets and share trading. The currency trading is slightly different from stock trading because of the following reasons.
- In the stock market, there are too many companies and their stocks that you need to track. But in the currency market, you mainly deal with those leading currencies in the world. Fourteen of these major currencies count for majority of the transactions. They include US Dollar (USD), Euro (EUR), Japanese Yen (JPY), British Pound (GBP), Canadian Dollar (CAD), Australian Dollar (AUD), New Zealand Dollar (NZD) and Swiss Franc (CHD). The other currencies are traded as well but these are trader’s favorites and high volume currencies
- The stock market is active only for a certain number of hours per day and you transact in a particular stock market (e.g. NYSE) at a given time. But currency trading is done 24 hours a day in some market or other and you don’t need to worry about where you are trading. The trading system takes care of this part and simplifies things for you
- Because of the leveraging (margin trading), even a small amount such as $50 can get you exposure to buying 1000s of units of a particular pair
- Even a small change (such as 0.0001) in the price can result in a significant return on your investment due to leveraging
- Volume is so high that buy and disposal is easier
- Usually there is no account opening fee or even brokerage charges – the forex company’s commission is only the difference between the sell and buy price at any time (buy price will be always slightly more than the sell price at any time)
- There is no physical shares, documents or dematerialized form of the traded currencies maintained anywhere. The trading system just keeps your buy-sell status
- Due to the huge volume nature and global span, currency market cannot be manipulated by traders where as stocks, sometimes, can be manipulated by insiders and market makers
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How to forex trade?
In order to trade forex you need to open an account with one of those online forex tradingagencies. There are plenty of them to choose from and I found that eToro is a good platform for the reasons mentioned in the next section. Once you sign up, all that you have to do is to add money to your forex trading account and start trading. Money transfer to the account can be via PayPal, Credit card, bank – wire transfer and many other online money transfer options. Of course, after signing up one still has the option of continuing with the practice account without adding any real money to your account.
It is a matter of couple of minutes before you start trading but wait till you do your homework. All your money can disappear in no time if you are not careful. This is why practice trading accounts are useful. Most trading platforms allow a practice account whereby you can trade using virtual money but use real time features such as price quotes, charts etc.
- You can open an eToro forex trading account with as low as $50 initial deposit
- On top of your first time deposit (FTD) they will add a welcome bonus of 25%. i.e. if you start an account with $1000, they will add $250 and hence you are already starting on profit. The bonus has a cap of $1000 (There are companies who give even 100% bonus but beware of their hidden costs)
- No hidden costs or brokerage charges
- You get a personal account manager (PAM) assigned to you if you start an account with at least $500. This means that you will get regular phone calls on trading ideas based on global economic and forex news
- Leverage up to 400 times and it allows micro-lots (see Forex terminologies below)
- eToro provides an excellent web based trading tool as well as a fast desktop based trading tool
- You can add or withdraw funds via PayPal. This may be one of the major criteria for bloggers who already have their blog income in PayPal. Many other platforms don’t support PayPal transfer
- Excellent customer support – via phone, email as well as live chat
- The practice account to get used to forex trading is very good and uses realtime data
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