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| Introduction To Forex Trading |
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Thursday, September 6, 2007
I began trading shares first and then I moved on to trading currencies; therefore, most of the examples I will be using in this book are derived from trading currencies. If you do not know a lot about currency trading, allow me to introduce it to you. It is what I trade and I believe that it is one of the best markets to trade because of its efficiency. The transaction costs to execute a trade are minimal and most brokers provide you with the tools and data you need to make your trading decisions, they usually provide them for free. The market is open 24 hours a day which allows you to design your trading hours around your daily commitments. It is very volatile, which is great for those people who are looking for day-trading opportunities. The foreign exchange market is the market in which currencies are bought and sold against one another. People may loosely refer to this market under different labels, including foreign exchange market, forex market, fx market or the currency market. The foreign exchange market is the largest market in the world, with daily trading volumes in excess of $1.5 trillion US dollars. All transactions involving international trade and investment must go through this market because these transactions involve the exchange of currencies. It is the most perfect market that exists because it has a large number of buyers and sellers all selling the same products. There is a free flow of information and there are little barriers to participate. The currency exchange market is an over-the-counter (OTC) market which means that there is not one specific location where buyers and sellers can actually meet to exchange currencies. Instead, transactions are conducted by phone, fax, e-mail or through the websites of brokers who specialize in currency trading. The major dealing centres at the time of writing are: London , with about 30% of the market, New York , with 20%, Tokyo , with 12%, Zurich , Frankfurt, Hong Kong and Singapore , with about 7% each, followed by Paris and Sydney with 3% each. Because of the fact that these centres are all over the world, foreign exchange traders can execute transactions 24 hours a day. The market only closes on the weekends. THE MAIN 'PLAYERS' IN THE FOREX MARKET The five broad categories of participants are: consumers, businesses, investors, speculators, commercial banks, investment banks and central banks. Consumers, including visitors of countries, tourists and immigrants, do need to exchange currencies when they travel so that they can buy local goods and services. These participants do not have the power to set prices. They just buy and sell according to the prevailing exchange rate. They make up a significant proportion of the volume being traded in the market. Businesses that import and export goods and services need to exchange currencies to receive or make payments for goods they may have bought or services they may have rendered. Investors and speculators require currencies to buy and sell investment instruments such as shares, bonds, bank deposits or real estate. Large commercial and investment banks are the 'price makers'. They are the ones who buy and sell currencies at the bid-and-offer exchange rates that they declare through their foreign exchange dealers. Commercial banks deal with customers on one hand, and with the Interbank or other banks, on the other hand. They profit by utilizing the bid-and-offer spread. The bid price is the exchange rate that the buyer is willing to buy and the offer price is the exchange rate at which the seller is willing to sell. The difference is called the bid-offer spread. They also make profits from speculating about whether the exchange rate will rise or fall. Central banks participate in the foreign exchange market in their effective duty as banks for their particular government. They trade currencies not for the intention of making profits but rather to facilitate government monetary policies and to help smoothen out the fluctuation of the value of their economy's currency. WHAT CURRENCIES TO TRADE IN THE FOREX MARKET You can trade any country's currency by exchanging it to another country's currency, however the list below are the ones that are the most popular and are usually made available by most online brokers for you to trade. ISO * CODE Currency Symbol AUD Australian Dollar a.k.a. 'Aussie' or 'Oz' A$ CAD Canadian Dollar Can$ CHF Switzerland Franc a.k.a 'Swissi' SwF DKK Denmark Krone Dkr EUR European Dollar a.k.a 'Euro' € GBP Great Britain Pound a.k.a ' Sterling ' or 'Cable' £ HKD Hong Kong Dollar HK$ JPY Japanese Yen ¥ MXN Mexican Peso Mex$ NOK Norway Krone NKr NZD New Zealand Dollar a.k.a 'Kiwi' NZ$ PLN Poland Zloty z dashed l SAR Saudi Arabia Riyal SRls SEK Sweden Krona kr or Sk SGD Singapore Dollar S$ THB Thailand Bhat Bht or Bt USD United States Dollar $ ZAR South Africa Rand R * ISO-International Organization for Standardization To trade the currencies above, you need to trade currency pairs. Think of these currency pairs as your trading instruments – instruments that you can buy or sell. Listed below are the most popular currency pairs that people trade: 1 AUD/JPY Australian Dollar – Japanese Yen 2 AUD/USD Australian Dollar – US Dollar 3 EUR/CHF European Dollar – Switzerland Frank 4 EUR/GBP European Dollar – Great Britain Pound 5 EUR/USD European Dollar – US Dollar 6 EUR/JPY European Dollar – Japanese Yen 7 GBP/CHF Great Britain Pound – Switzerland Frank 8 GBP/USD Great Britain Pound – US Dollar 9 USD/CAD US Dollar – Canadian Dollar 10 USD/CHF US Dollar – Switzerland Frank The currencies on the left can be exchanged for the currencies on the right. _____________ This is an excerpt, modified from the book: The Part-Time Currency Trader, featuring examples of how to trade these currency pairs. - END OF ARTICLE - Please include the paragraph below if you are republishing this article online or in print. About The Author: Marquez Comelab is the author of the book: The Part-Time Currency Trader . It is a guide for working men and women interested in trading currencies in the forex market. It explains everything you need to know to create your own trading methodology; touching on the basics and preparation before expanding onto the topics of market analysis, tools, trading systems, risk management strategies, discipline and psychology. See: http://www.marquezcomelab.com . His other articles can also be found at http://www.thefreedomtochoose.com ; along with other helpful trading, business, investing and self-improvement articles. The Benefits of Trading The Forex Market Historically, the FX market was available most to major banks, multinational corporations and other participants who traded in large transaction sizes and volumes. Small-scale traders including individuals like you and I, had little access to this market for such a long time. Now with the advent of the Internet and technology, FX trading is becoming an increasingly popular investment alternative for the general public. The benefits of trading the currency market: It is open 24-hours and it closes only on the weekends; It is very liquid and efficient; It is very volatile; It has very low transaction costs; You can use a high level of leverage (borrowed money) with ease; and You can profit from a bull or a bear market. Continuous, 24-Hour Trading The currency exchange is a 24-hour market. You may decide to trade after you come home from work. Regardless of what time-frame you want to trade at whatever time of the day, there would be enough buyers and sellers to take the other side of your trade. This feature of the market gives you enough flexibility to manage your trading around your daily routine. Liquidity And Efficiency When there are a lot of buyers and a lot of sellers, you can expect to buy or sell at a price that is very close to the last market price. The currency market is the most liquid market in the world. Trading volume in the currency markets can be between 50 and 100 times larger than the New York Stock Exchange (Source: Oanda.) When you are trading stocks, you may have experienced events where one piece of news accelerates or decelerates the price of the underlying stock you may have bought into. Perhaps a director has been kicked out by the shareholders of a company or the company has just released a new product and big investors are buying the shares of a particular company. Share prices can be drastically affected by the actions or inactions of one or a few individuals. So if you are relying on television reports and newspapers to get your news, most of the opportunities or warnings will have come too late for you to take advantage by the time you get them. The value of currencies on the other hand is affected by so many factors and so many participants that the likelihood of any one individual or group of individuals drastically affecting the value of a currency is minute. Because of its sheer size, the currency market is hard to manipulate. The ability for people to engage in 'insider trading' is virtually eliminated. As an average trader, you are less disadvantaged. You are likely to be playing on relatively equal ground along with all the other traders and investors whom you are competing against. Note about price gaps: For those people who have already traded other markets, you probably know about price 'gaps'. 'Gaps' occur when prices 'jump' from one price level to another without having taken any incremental steps to get there. For example, you may be trading a share that closes at $10 at the end of today but due to some event that happens overnight; it opens tomorrow at $5 and continues to go downwards for the rest of the day. Gaps bring about another degree of uncertainty that may meddle with a trader's strategy. Probably one of the most worrying aspects of this is when a trader uses stop-losses. In this case, if a trader puts a stop-loss at $7 because he no longer wants to be in a trade if the share price hits $7, his trade will remain open overnight and the trader wakes up tomorrow with a loss bigger than he may have been prepared for. After looking at a couple of forex charts, you will realize that there are little price 'gaps' or none at all, especially on the longer-term charts like the 3-hour, 4-hour or the daily charts. Volatility Trading opportunities exist when prices fluctuate. If you buy a share for $2 and it stays there, there is no opportunity to make a profit. The magnitude of level of this fluctuation and its frequency is referred to as volatility. As a trader, it is volatility that you profit from. Large volume transactions and high liquidity combined with fewer trading instruments generate greater intra-day volatility in the currency market that can be exploited by day-traders. The high volatility of the currency market indicates that a trader can potentially earn 5 times more money from currency trading than trading the most liquid shares. Volatility is a measure of maximum return that a trader can generate with perfect foresight. Volatility for the most liquid stocks are between 60 to 100. Volatility for currency trading is 500. (Source: Oanda.) In this respect, currencies make a better trading vehicle for day-traders than the equity markets. Low Transaction Costs A currency transaction typically incurs no commission or transaction fees. For a forex trader, the spread is the only cost he or she needs to cover in taking on a position. In addition, because of the currency market's efficiency, there is little or no 'slippage' costs. 'Slippage' is the cost involved when traders enter the market at a price worse than the level they wanted to get into. For example, a trader wants to buy a share at $2.00 but by the time, the order gets executed, his gets to buy the shares at $2.50. That fifty cents difference is his slippage cost. Slippage cost affects large-volume traders a lot. When they buy large quantities of a commodity, it oversupplies the market with buy orders. This applies a pressure for the price to go up. By the time they get to buy all the quantities they wanted, the average price they got their commodities would be higher than the price they intended to get them for. Conversely, when they sell large quantities of a commodity, they oversupply the market with sell orders. This applies a pressure for the price to go down. By the time they finish selling all their commodities, their average selling price is less than what they initially intended to sell them for. Due to lower transaction costs, minimum slippage and strong intra-day volatility, individuals can trade frequently at small costs. As an approximate, you may only expect to have a spread of 0.03% of your position size. To give you an example, you can buy and sell 10,000 US Dollars and this will only incur a 3-point spread, equivalent to $3. Leverage There are not a lot of banks or people who would lend you money so that you can use it to trade shares. And if there are, it would be very hard for you to convince them to invest in you and in your idea that a certain share is going to go up or down. Therefore, most of the time, if you have a $10,000 account, you can only really afford to buy $10,000 worth of stocks. In currency trading however, because you use 'borrowed money', you can trade $10,000 of a currency and you only need anywhere between fifty (For a margin lending ratio of 200:1) to two hundred dollars ( For a margin lending ratio of 50:1) in your trading account. This makes it possible for an average trader with a small trading account, under $10,000 to be able to profit sufficiently from the movements of the currency exchange rates. This concept is explained further in The Part-Time Currency Trader. Profit From A Bull And Bear Market When you are trading shares, you can only profit when the price of a stock goes up. When you suspect that it is about to go down or that it is just going to be moving sideways, then the only thing you can do is sell your shares and stand aside. One of the frustrations of trading shares is that an individual cannot profit when prices are going down. In the currency market, it is easy for you to trade a currency downward so that you can profit when you think it is going to lose value. This is easy to do because currency trading simply involves buying one currency and selling another, there is no structural bias that makes it difficult to trade 'downwards'. This is why the currency market has been occasionally referred to as the eternal bull market. This is an excerpt, modified from the book: The Part-Time Currency Trader. - END OF ARTICLE - Please include the paragraph below if you are republishing this article online or in print. About The Author: Marquez Comelab is the author of the book: The Part-Time Currency Trader . It is a guide for working men and women interested in trading currencies in the forex market. It explains everything you need to know to create your own trading methodology; touching on the basics and preparation before expanding onto the topics of market analysis, tools, trading systems, risk management strategies, discipline and psychology. See: http://www.marquezcomelab.com . His other articles can also be found at http://www.thefreedomtochoose.com ; along with other helpful trading, business, investing and self-improvement articles. Avoiding Forex-Related Frauds and Scams A lot of people have been 'burnt' from scam operations on the Internet. Their sites may look so perfectly legitimate that you doubt whether they would have gone through all that trouble building a trading platform just to steal your money. Beware. The first thing I look for is the geographical location of the broker. If I find that they are based in a country where the financial industry is, in my opinion, relatively unregulated and under-developed, I quickly forgo signing up. This is terrible news for honest brokers in those countries, but your job as a trader is to protect your capital. If you lose that, then you cannot trade. The onus is on them to convince you that they will do the right thing by you as an investor. I started out with an Australian broker. Currently I am using an American one. I have not tried UK-based brokers but the British financial industry is one of the best. Companies that are based in countries such as Japan , Germany and France are probably just as good too, if their website speaks your language. Notice any license numbers that they may have registered with regulatory bodies that act like government watchdogs who oversee the finance and investments industries. These are organisations that impose strict rules to safeguard your investment. Some of these rules may include the requirement that brokers segregate all customer funds from the operational funds of the business. Your money is required to be put in highly-reputable banks and the funds are only withdrawn from these accounts upon specific withdrawal requests. Take note that there are some fake regulatory bodies being thrown around in cyber-space as well. Take a look at how long they have been operating for. Try and search out any reviews or comments made about them. See if you can find forums where traders have discussions about their brokers. Below is a list of things to keep in mind to help you avoid being a victim of a scam: • Stay Away From Opportunities That Sound Too Good To Be True There are people who may have just acquired a large amount of money just and recently are the same and are shopping around for safe investment vehicles. These may include retirees who have access to their retirement funds. It is understandable why retirees would be drawn to 'high-return, low-risk investments'. This is also what makes them very vulnerable. If you identify yourself to be one of these people, be careful. A lot of deceitful characters are after your money. Furthermore, only allocate a tiny amount of your money to trading until you can start growing it. Not all people can trade successfully, so it is a venture you should take on haphazardly. It is your life savings at risk. • Avoid Individuals Or Organizations Who Claim To Predict Or Guarantee Large Profits Any form of trading is hard. Trading currencies is no different. Be wary of statements that make it sound easy. Statements like: • "Whether the market moves up or down, in the currency market you will make a profit"; • "Make $1000 per week, every week"; • "We are out-performing 90% of domestic investments"; • "You'll make returns of 70% a year"; • "Here is a no-risk strategy". If they could make such returns, why would they even bother letting you know about it. • Be Wary Of Companies Who Downplay Investment Risks Hold your wallet tight and zip up your purse when companies say that written risk disclosure agreements are routine formalities imposed by the government. Watch out for statements like: • "With a $10,000 deposit, the maximum you can lose is $200 to $250 per day"; • " We promise to recover any losses you have ". • Be Wary Of Companies That Claim To Trade In The 'Interbank Market' Do not believe it when some people say that they have access to the 'Interbank market' or that they can give you access to trade in that market because that's where bargain prices can be obtained. This is not true. The 'interbank market' is not a place, it is not a physical building. It is simply a loose network of currency transactions that are negotiated between big financial institutions and other large companies. • Ethnic Minorities Are Often Targeted Ethnic newspapers and television 'infomercials' are sometimes used to attract Russian, Chinese and Indian minorities. Sometimes these ads offer so-called 'job opportunities for account executives to trade foreign currencies', whereby the recruited 'account executive' is expected to use his own money to trade currencies and would often times be encouraged to recruit members like their friends and family to do the same. • Seek Out The Company's Background Check any information you receive to be sure that the company is who they claim to be. If at all possible, try and get the background of the people operating the company. Do not rely solely on oral statements and promises made by the company's employees. • If You Are In Doubt, It Is Not Worth Risking Your Money If after trying to solicit information and at the end of it all, you are still in doubt about the credentials of a particular company, my suggestion is to start looking elsewhere. You may find further information by contacting government 'watchdogs' because they keep up to date with trends and reports regarding scams and other fraudulent activities. Please check the resource section of this site for the information of organizations that regulate the securities industry, sorted by country. There is also a list of brokers that you may want to look at. This is an excerpt, modified from the book: The Part-Time Currency Trader. - END OF ARTICLE - Please include the paragraph below if you are republishing this article online or in print. About The Author: Marquez Comelab is the author of the book: The Part-Time Currency Trader . It is a guide for working men and women interested in trading currencies in the forex market. It explains everything you need to know to create your own trading methodology; touching on the basics and preparation before expanding onto the topics of market analysis, tools, trading systems, risk management strategies, discipline and psychology. See: http://www.marquezcomelab.com . His other articles can also be found at http://www.thefreedomtochoose.com ; along with other helpful trading, business, investing and self-improvement articles. |
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