The Basics

What is Forex?

Forex is short for foreign exchange – the transaction of changing one currency into another currency. This process can be performed for a variety of reasons including commercial, tourism and to enable international trade.

Forex is traded on the forex market, which is open to buy and sell currencies 24 hours a day, five days a week and is used by banks, businesses, investment firms, hedge funds and retail traders.

What is the forex market?

Only a tiny percentage of currency transactions happen in the “real economy” involving international trade and tourism like the airport example above.

Instead, most of the currency transactions that occur in the global foreign exchange market are bought (and sold) for speculative reasons.

Currency traders (also known as currency speculators) buy currencies hoping that they will be able to sell them at a higher price in the future.

Compared to the “measly” $200 billion per day volume of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), the foreign exchange market looks absolutely ginormous with its $6.6 TRILLION a day trade volume.