What Is Forex?

The Forex market is a non-stop cash market where currencies of nations are traded. Foreign currencies are constantly and simultaneously bought and sold across local and global markets. Foreign exchange market conditions can change at any time in response to real-time events.

Why Forex?

• 24 hour trading, 5 days a week with non-stop access to global Forex dealers.
• An enormous liquid market making it easy to trade most currencies (1.7 trillion US dollars exchanging hands every day of the week).
• Volatile markets offering profit opportunities.
• Standard instruments for controlling risk exposure.
• The ability to profit in rising or falling markets.
• Leveraged trading with low margin requirements.
• Many options for zero commission trading

The Majors

The most commonly traded currencies are referred to as “Majors”; over 85% of daily transactions on Forex trading involve the Majors. These seven currencies are the US Currency (Dollar, USD), Japanese Yen (JPY), Euro (EUR), British Pound (GBP), Swiss Franc (CHF), Canadian Dollar (CAD) and Australian Dollar (AUD).

How Can I Participate?

From 1971 until recently, the real owners of this market were banks, a multinational corporation and large brokerage houses. If an individual investor wanted to invest in the market, they would have to invest about a million dollars together with a bank to satisfy the requirement of acceptable transaction size of 5 to 10 million dollars. Brokerage houses would provide a little better option of reducing the required deposit to a quarter of a million dollars.

Today, Forex market is open to the small individual investors. Unlike the previously required enormous deposits, current significantly reduced margin requirements has, at last, become affordable for almost any person allowing them to run with the big dogs. Aside from that, small investors may use Internet to their advantage, making this market just as easily accessible as it used to be only for high rollers.