Why I'm Learning to Trade Forex

Copyright (c) 2008 Steven Magill

Learning to trade forex seems simple ands easy on the surface, but all the successful people who have spent time learning to trade forex properly will tell you that there's much more to it than meets the eye. They are only partly right.

While you are learning to trade forex, bear in mind that you are embarking on an activity that has a daily turnover on average of between $1.5 trillion to $2.5 trillion. That's a lot of money! One billion is one thousand million, and a trillion is one thousand times that again. There's a lot of money to be made, so learning to trade forex is certainly a good skill to have.

Forex is an acronym for foreign exchange. Forex trading continues day and night without a break; as one market closes, others open and this keeps going on and on all over the planet.

Trading is done on the differences between currencies and is always done in pairs. You can trade the American dollar against the British pound, or the Japanese yen against the European euro, or any of the other world currencies.

Learning to trade forex properly does not mean jumping in and trying your hand. You will probably lose everything with a method as poorly thought out as that. There are three attributes that you must learn to employ to have any chance of being successful: patience, discipline and simplicity.

Trading in forex has risks, big risks sometimes. For this reason the online forex companies offer you the chance to trade with a demo account. This is exactly the same as the real thing, but no real money is involved.

This kind of training is invaluable. This cannot be stressed enough. Practice on demo accounts for as long as it takes for you to consistently make profitable trades. There will be some losses of course, but you must get to the stage where you are profiting more often than losing. Then, and only then, consider trying to trade for real.

If you keep it simple, discipline yourself to only trade a low percentage of your overall trading amount, and have the patience to see slow but steady profits, then you will have gone past the learning to trade forex stage and have entered the realm of the sensible and usually successful trader.

The foreign exchange market, also known as the forex or FX market, in the form that we know it was established as recently as 1971. Prior to that there were the fixed currency exchanges.

Trading in foreign exchange is conducted on a twenty-four basis for five days of the week, every week. It is a global currency market, though the big three of the US dollar, the Japanese yen and the European euro tend to dominate. Learning to trade forex is therefore something that's not limited to certain times. The market is active constantly during the working week.

Currencies are traded in pairs and are identified by three letters. The first two letters usually identify the country involved, and the third letter identifies the currency of that country. For example, USD is the American dollar, JPY is the Japanese yen, and GBP is the British pound. Learning to trade forex is not difficult if you don't let it be so.