WHAT IS FOREX MARKIT?

What is Forex?

To put it in very simple terms, the foreign exchange market is a currency market, where investment banks, institutions, commercial companies, and individual investors go to buy, sell, and ultimately swap one currency for one another.

Different currencies are used in different places around the world. In the United States, we use the US dollar, which is our currency. In Australia, the official currency is the Australian Dollar. In Great Britain, they use the Pound. Europe uses the Euro.

All of these currencies have a different value, which is dependent on other currencies.

So what is forex?

Forex is the foreign exchange market. The foreign exchange market is a virtual market where investors buy and sell currencies for other currencies.

If you’ve traveled out of your home country before, you’ve interacted with the foreign exchange market and you didn’t even know it.

If you were to travel from the United States to Canada, you would trade your US Dollars for Canadian dollars at a bank, airport teller, or any currency exchange service. In trading your US dollars for Canadian Dollars, you participated on the global forex market.

But we’re just small fry in this massive global market.

You see, we’re just individuals. We don’t have tons and tons of money like banks, institutional investors, hedge fund managers, or mega-corporations. In comparison to these oversized professionals, we’re merely a drop in the bucket.

Mega-corporations rely on the foreign exchange market to trade in their currencies that they earn all around the world. Walmart, one of the largest retail companies in the world, has stores in 44 countries around the globe, even though it is based in the United States.

When it earns money in France, the company isn’t paid in dollars. Walmart gets paid in Euros. The company has to trade its Euros in for dollars to account for profits and losses.

Naturally, Walmart participates in the foreign exchange market to convert its foreign currencies into its home currency.

You Don’t Have to Be Big to Trade Forex

But you don’t have to be a Fortune 500 company to trade on the foreign exchange market. In fact, many traders make money in foreign exchange in buying and selling currencies for a profit. We’ll get to this in the following tutorials, but the point needs to be made that:

1. There are many reasons currencies are swapped for one another
2. You don’t have to be a millionaire or billionaire to trade forex

By now you’re probably wondering how we establish a price for money. We’ll get to that in the next tutorial