Forex Basics for Beginners

By now, you’ve probably heard a bit about forex. But briefly hearing people talk about it or reading articles about it isn’t enough. If you’ve been exposed to information about forex trading but you still aren’t sure what it is or what it has to offer people who want to invest their money, we’re here to help.

The short guide below covers some basics about forex, and once you know more, you can more easily determine if this is a path that you’d like to take to try growing your money.

Forex Is Based Around Currencies from All Over the World

First off, forex is all about foreign exchange, or currency exchange. You’re already familiar with this if you’ve travelled internationally and had your currency converted. For instance, if you took a trip from Australia to the United States, you probably had some of your money changed from AUD to USD so you could spend it easily while you were in the country.

Also, when you made that exchange, you likely noticed that you didn’t get the same number of U.S. dollars as the Australian dollars that you had. That’s because different currencies have different values when they are compared to one another. In other words, one currency might have a higher value and be worth more than the other. Well, with forex, you trade currency pairs, such as the AUD and USD, and you do it all based on how you predict the currencies will behave.

Tracking Currencies and Their Behaviors

Currencies’ values fluctuate against one another, which is why forex involves trading pairs of currencies. There are a lot of currency pairs that you can choose from, but many beginners will opt to stick with currency pairs that involve major currencies like the EUR, USD, AUD, and GBP.

Basically, as a forex trader, you want to use charts and other data to see how a particular pair of currencies, such as the AUD and USD, are valued against one another. By tracking their values over time, you can get a better idea of how one currency’s value looks against the other currency’s value.

Your goal is to accurately predict whether a currency’s value will go up or down when compared to the value of the other currency in the pair. For instance, you might predict that the AUD would increase in value over the USD, and you would make your trades based on that assumption.

When Can You Trade in the Forex Market and What Do You Need?

Now that you have a better idea of what forex is and what it basically involves, you might be wondering what you need to do to get started, and when you can do your trading. Well, the nice thing about the forex market is that it is open 24 hours a day, 5 days a week, so you have quite a bit of flexibility when it comes to determining when you will trade.

In terms of what you need to begin, it’s a matter of finding a high-quality broker that offers a great trading platform that’s easy to use. Once you sign up with a broker and gain access to a platform and other helpful tools, including a demo account to get the hang of things before you start trading real money, you could get going right away.