Forex trading for beginners
Forex trading can be an exciting and lucrative activity, but it can also be tough, especially for beginners. Newcomers underestimate the important of financial education, tend to have unrealistic expectations, and struggle to control their emotions, pushing them to act irrationally and impair their overall performance.
What is the Forex market?
The Foreign Exchange market, also called the Forex or the FX market, is an over-the-counter market where the world’s money is exchanged. Many players trade the Forex market, such as institutional investors, central banks, multinationals, and commercial banks, among others.
As a retail trader, you can access this market with a Forex and CFD broker and make money by buying or selling currency pairs. Currencies are always quoted in pairs – for instance, in the EUR/USD currency pair, the EUR is the “base” currency, while the USD is the “quoted” currency. The quoted currency is always the equivalent of one base currency. If the EUR/USD exchange rate is worth 1.1222, then you will get $1.1222 for €1.
In our example, we can see that the EUR/USD has 4 decimals. This is typical of most currency pairs, except those that involve the JPY, which only display 2 decimals. When a currency pair moves up or down, the change is measured in “Pips”, which is a one-digit movement in the last decimal of a currency pair. When the EUR/USD moves from $1.1222 to $1.1223, the EUR/USD has increased by one “Pip”.
When you look at a currency pair quotation on your broker’s platform, you will see two prices: a selling price on the left (bid price), and a buying price on the right (ask price). The difference between both prices is called the “spread”. This “spread” is pocketed by the broker, and is one of the main ways in which they make money.
The Bank for International Settlements declared in its last triennial survey that the daily average trading volume of the Forex market reached more than 5 trillion US Dollars. It also shows that, due to this huge volume, the Forex market is the most liquid market in the world. Liquidity refers to how easy it is for traders to open and close their trading positions without affecting the price of the underlying asset. Liquidity is a good indication of how active a market is.
The concept of liquidity also works hand-in-hand with volatility, which measures the way in which market prices change. Volatility is something to be welcomed, as it is volatility that gives traders the opportunity to make profits, especially for short-term traders like scalpers and day traders.
