what's forex??

Question

Can someone give me the "idiot's" break down of Forex how it works and how I can get into it? Thanks!

I'm going to let the votes choose the best answer for this one :-) there are too many good answers and I just can't decide! Thanks to all who took the time out!

Answer 1

Forex stands for 'Foreign Exchange' and is a financial market.

The currency trading (FOREX) market is the biggest and the fastest growing market on earth. Its daily turnover is more than 2.5 trillion dollars, which is 100 times greater than the NASDAQ daily turnover. (click here to read full market background by Easy-Forex™).

Markets are places to trade goods. The same goes with FOREX. The Forex goods (or merchandise) are the currencies of various countries. You buy Euro, paying with US dollars, or you sell Japanese Yens for Canadian dollars. That's all.


I copied and pasted this but there are a lot of very helpful articles regarding forex for beginners, forex/economic news, central bank and major currency news and tips regarding foreign exchange. Its located in the forex resources section of the site. Hope this helps!

Answer 2

Forex is an abbreviation for the Foreign Currency Exchange which have been in existance for over 100 years but only became available to the general public 8 years ago in 1998... Due to the availability of the internet.. And it slowly been evolving into an industry of it's own.
Prior to 1998, The largest Banks and Financial Institutions of the world moved hundreds of millions of dollars between the Euro, Swiss Frank, Japanese Yen, British Pound and so on, capitalizing on the constant fluctuations of Currency Exchange rates between countries.
To give you an idea as to the size of this marketplace... There is more money trades on the forex markets in one day than all the worlds stock markets combined in 90 days? 2 trillion dollars... To put that into perspective... The US Annual Budget is 2.7 Trillion.
The advantages of trading Currencies over Stocks

I now setting up a course for people who want to learn Forex and also provide them with capital to trade. Reply back if you are interested.

Answer 3

To resume a little bit about currency trading, forex or foreigh exchange market is a descentralized market known as the most liquid, the biggest, volatile and also profitable in the world, there are no entities handling the price, not even the government can control the offer/demand of this market because it size, beyound this concept, there are things you get to know about the market that will help you to enter in this amazing world, first of all, you cannot operate the market by yourself, there are banks most common known as brokers that are able to offer you to open a trading account, once you register with the broker that is 100% online in most common cases, you need a proof of identity, your id scanned is ok, and a proof of residence that is an utility bill no older than 6 months to confirm your address, these two documents are required by any broker you need, later you will be able to download the trading platform, there you can deposit your investment amount, but before to do that, listen this, you can start to trade from nothing, i mean without knowing about trading, there are demo accounts that works the same way of a real one and you can select the amount of your interest to trade, with no risk you can start practicing this amazing market.

How the trading terminal works.

In this case and because the time i have trading are many years, i prefer and recommend to use metatrader platform, this is a 100% free platform provided for around 90% of the forex brokers, the platform works with almost every tradable active in the market, even options, commodities, stocks, futures through CDFs or Contract for Difference, that make trading a little more easy for inndividual traders.

www.tradingoptions.tk

Answer 4

www.BabyPips.com is a "learning" web site, check it out.

CAUTION:
Trading Foreign Exchange (trading currencies) is one of the most challenging forms of speculative investing.

Some quick facts;
95% of all the people that try Forex lose most or all of their accounts. Of those people that make money.... they only get 60% of their trades correct.
"Drawdowns" will scare the daylights out of you. They may also make you go brooke in seconds.

The brokers will tell you how easy it is. All the brokers are poor to bad. Your job will be to pick a broker that's the least worst.

I'm not against trading FX. I'm simply suggesting that you take at least a year before you trade 1 penney. When you've see the "charts" you may think to yourself (what's so hard, I'm going to be great in this......)....... that type of thinking will cost you big.

Work hard, take your time and this can be very rewarding.

Consider yourself warned.

Answer 5

The forex options market started as an over-the-counter (OTC) financial vehicle for large banks, financial institutions and large international corporations to hedge against foreign currency exposure. Like the forex spot market, the forex options market is considered an "interbank" market. However, with the plethora of real-time financial data and forex option trading software available to most investors through the internet, today's forex option market now includes an increasingly large number of individuals and corporations who are speculating and/or hedging foreign currency exposure via telephone or online forex trading platforms.

Read more here:http://past.is/GVNW

Answer 6

"common sense" and "bear" have it right.. it is very risky and risk management is the key to forex success... the 2 percent rule is a rule... not a guideline. hahaha like was said, get a practice account, go at least a year before you invest any at all.. if you cannot make money in a play account, you cannot in a real account.. come join the rest of us in this market of markets!! You have a lot of interesting reading and learning to do in the next year!!! a lot more than you would think!!
There are a lot of "free" lessons on the internet, read and study all of them.... ALL OF THEM! The market will soon make sense to you... at first you may make a lot, then the next month or two forget how to win a few pips, then back to gaining, then losing, until you finally know how to do it for real.
I would make one suggestion............ Learn how to "sit on your hands".. meaning know when to keep your hands off the mouse to click on a trade. there are times to be in the market and times to sit it out... learn the difference from the start. Don't trade because of boredom... learn to get up and leave the computer. You will miss some good trades, sure, but you will miss more bad ones! Learn the diff between a "trending" market and a "ranging" market... as a beginner, only trade in a trending market and only with the trend.. never guess the end of a trend or the beginning of another. "the trend is your friend until the end".

Answer 7

HI
Forex trading or trading in forex is a form of exchange for buying and selling currencies on a decentralized platform over the globe. From a beginner point of view to understand forex trading, let’s keep it this way, it involves buying and selling of different currency pairs. Different currencies are combined together and pairs are formed like EUR/USD, USD/JPY, USD/CHF. Traders either buy or sell these currency pairs in forex trading. However like stock markets forex trading is not centralized.
For more please go through https://www.fideliscm.com/About_Forex_Trading.aspx

Answer 8

The foreign exchange market is the "place" where currencies are traded. Currencies are important to most people around the world, whether they realize it or not, because currencies need to be exchanged in order to conduct foreign trade and business. If you are living in the U.S. and want to buy cheese from France, either you or the company that you buy the cheese from has to pay the French for the cheese in euros (EUR). This means that the U.S. importer would have to exchange the equivalent value of U.S. dollars (USD) into euros. The same goes for traveling. A French tourist in Egypt can't pay in euros to see the pyramids because it's not the locally accepted currency. As such, the tourist has to exchange the euros for the local currency, in this case the Egyptian pound, at the current exchange rate.

try trade with forex http://goo.gl/pXm58g

Answer 9

FOREX = Foreign Exchange

Answer 10

You trade currency, this is done in pairs that is you for example trade in pairs Euro vs. Dollar, Dollar vs Yen etc... some exotic pairs are a bit more complicated because three currency's are involved that is lets say you are trading the New Zeland Dollar vs the Swiss Frank the US dollar would also be a factor as it is the currency in the middle.

Currency Trading is very risky, but you can start whats called a mini account and pratice with as little as $250-$300 dollars.
Also, most of the currency trading business have free pratice accounts in which you get to play with $50,000 (fake money).