Forex Market

The forex market trades more volume than another other financial market, with over $2 trillion changing hands daily. Its traditional major participants include:

  • Central banks.
  • Major international banks.
  • Multinational corporations.
  • Institutional fund managers.
  • High-net worth individuals.

 

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Most of the huge trading volume seen in the forex market still occurs in the interbank market between the largest international banks. These financial institutions employ professional forex traders whose job includes executing forex transactions in the millions of dollars, sometimes trading billions of dollars per day.

Such forex professionals typically trade either for their employer’s proprietary account or to satisfy orders from their bank’s customer desk. To execute a forex trade, they either tend to use the phone or direct lines to other major banks, or they might use electronic dealing systems like Reuters Dealing 3000 or EBS, or the more traditional interbank forex brokers that charge a commission for their deal-matching services.

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Nevertheless, other forex market access options exist for personal forex traders. These choices now include trading currency futures priced on exchanges like the Chicago IMM, in addition to the growing phenomenon of online forex brokers and gambling options like forex spread betting.

The Online Forex Market

Interestingly, with the relatively recent advent of online trading in the new millennium, the formerly-exclusive forex market has now been opened up to participation by independent professional and amateur forex traders. Often, such smaller forex market participants only need as little as a hundred dollars on deposit with a forex broker to start trading forex on margin for their own accounts.

This growing phenomenon truly promises to become the financial wave of the future, as people looking to increase their nest eggs by gambling, increasingly turn to the highly-efficient forex market to speculate on exchange rate movements.

Advantages of the Forex Market

The forex market offers a number of advantages to the smaller personal speculator who wishes to gamble on financial market movements. Some of these advantageous characteristics generally include the following:

  • Large, deep and hence highly-liquid market.
  • Tight dealing spreads.
  • Low volatility (relative to many stocks).
  • Tendency of currency pairs to trend over time.
  • Availability of competitive online trading in small, custom sizes.
  • Possibility to automate trading.
  • OTC and exchange-traded currency options market available.
  • Transparency of market-moving information and economic data.

 

New to Forex?

 

Overall, the once-exclusive forex market has undergone a massive transformation in the first decade of the new millennium, as the largely-unregulated market opened wide up to participation by virtually anyone with a computer, Internet connection and the ability to install and operate basic software. Nevertheless, this ongoing process still has a long way to go as popular awareness of this new opportunity to speculate grows, and only time will tell just how the already-massive forex market will weather the almost inevitable attempts to regulate it that may arise in future.