Monday, March 8, 2010

Learn Forex - How To Make Money Trading Forex, The Trade Process

On the forex market we are trading currencies, exchanging a currency for another. So we buy a currency hoping its value will increase compared to the value of the one we are selling. Yes, we, at the same time, buying a currency and selling another currency. An example may be a little more understandable.

We have dollars and want to buy euros. The pair traded here is EUR/USD, and the exchange rate is 1.25. You can read it like this : 1 euro equals 1.25 dollar. We hope that the euro value will be higher so that later we will buy more dollar. The exchange rate increase to 1.35, in this case we bought 1 euro using 1.25 dollar, and it now equals to 1.35 dollar. So we exchange our 1 euro back into dollars and now have 1.35.

We bought 1 euro for $1.25 and sell it back for $1.35, we made a 10 cents profit. Of course on the forex market you will not buy only one euro, this will be few hundreds or thousands, depending on your budget and the leverage offered by the broker.

Exchange rates are always moving. When I say that you "hope" the value will increase, many factors can be used to predict the rate, based on technical or fundamental analysis. This is not the topic of this article so let's have another example of a selling trade.

We take the same pair (EUR/USD) as above starting with the same exchange rate (1.25). We want to sell euros so we can buy it later at a lower price. Here we hope, or know that the value of the euro will depreciate. We sell one euro for $1.25. The exchange rate drops to 1.15. That means that now we only need 1.15 to buy our euro back. We exchange our dollars back into euros and again, make a 10 cents profit.

When you buy or sell, you always buy or sell the base currecy. The base currency is the first one in the pair. In the pair EUR/USD, the base currency is the euro and the USD is called the quote currency. When you decide to buy, you buy euro and sell dollars. When you decide to sell, you sell euros and buy dollars.

Think that you always need to exchange something two times. If you buy something and want to make a profit from it, you would prefer to sell it at a higher price. And so, if you are selling something that you will need to buy again, you would prefer to have it at a lower price.

Learn Forex - Is Forex Trading The Ultimate Home Business Opportunity ?

That's true, you can be a trader at home. Forex, or Foreign Exchange Market is by far the largest financial market in the world. About $2 trillion are traded EVERY DAY. The Forex market is the currency market, where a currency is traded against another. Quick example : you buy a dollar and sell euros. Not that easy to understand. But can we do this from home ? Yes, we can. About ten years ago, you would need millions of dollars to start trading. Now you can start with a few hundreds of dollars.

What you need is your computer and an internet connexion. You can trade from the comfort of your home, without having to deal with any boss or clients. You will only deal with money. Then you can start selling dollars and buying euros and make a profit. You have to find a broker, where you will open an account and funding it. You will also have the possibility to get a demo account and practice, with fake money but in the real time market. I strongly recommend you practice a few months before thinking of "live" trading.

It is not that easy, it is extremely risky if you don't know anything about trading. First rule : don't invest what you can't afford to lose. Forex is not a game, there is a lot of parameters to take in account, and human factor is one of the most important in this business.

You may have already understood it, currencies are traded by pairs. The european Euro versus the US Dollar, The US Dollar versus the Japan Yen, etc. When you buy a currency, you want to sell it later at a higher price. When you sell a currency, you want to buy it later at a lower price. This is how you make profit. Think like you were buying a foreign company share. You always want to buy low, and always want to sell high.

What you are looking to when trading currencies is the exchange rate. This will tell you your next move. Buy or sell. Currencies are part of the economy of each countries. When the value of a currency is increasing, this means the economy is going better as before. The exchange rate can be viewed as the country's economy compared to another economy. This is why economic factors can help you to predict your next move. If you know that a currency will increase, you will buy it and expect to sell it at a higher price, a higher rate.

You can choose the pair you want to trade, but the most people trade the main currencies, Euro, Dollar, British Pound, Japan Yen. And you can only choose to trade one pair only if you want. You are the only person that will make the decision. Hope you are making the good ones, profit can be huge, as well as losses.

Like any business, forex trading has to be taken seriously. Lots of people are trading the forex and some are earning thousands of dollars every day. But it needs a lot of training, education and analysis before reaching such results. It can be the perfect business and actually it is for advanced traders.