Many people ask me why I trade Forex, Well I think like most people when I was introduced to Trading I didn’t know about the Forex market. It was just natural to go looking in the stock exchange for trades. However, I found my trading was very limited, by the time I got home from work in the evening all the action was over. I moved to Forex mainly to take advantage of the 24-hour opening hours, I would often be found at my computer in the middle of the night waiting for the next bar to appear.
Unlike Futures, there are no trading exchanges as such. Trading is being done from major banking establishments around the world, With futures you are generally limited to trading only for a few hours that they are open, if major news breaks and the price starts going against you when the market is closed, you could end up losing big time while you are forced to wait for the market to open. With Forex you will always have an opportunity to trade 24 hours per day 5 days a week. As the sun wakes up each country on its journey it also wakes up the markets in New York, London, Europe, Asia, Australia to name a few.
The Currencies of the world are traded against each other, the most popular being the Euro the US and Australian dollar, British Pound, Swiss Franc and the Japanese Yen.
Because of 24 hour trading, it is rare to see large gaps in price like stocks have on the opening and you often see prices in currencies trending more than stocks.
There are many advantages in trading Forex rather than Stocks, expensive Data providers that you need with Stocks is exchanged for free charting software offered by many Forex brokers. With over $1.5trillion (that’s 46 times bigger than all the future markets put together!) being traded in a single day you are always sure of a trade, With Low transaction costs, no commissions or exchange fees is it no wonder more and more traders are turning to Forex.
Beware though, even with all these advantages trading is a high risk game and should only ever be trading with money you can afford to lose. With a good Trading Strategy and Money Management in place there is no reason not to join many Traders profiting from trading the Forex markets