Online Forex -Currency Trading

Foreign exchange currency trading is also known as Forex trading, or FX, and has no single physical marketplace like the New York Stock Exchange does on Wall Street in New York or the Tokyo Stock Exchange does in Japan. The New York Stock Exchange and the Tokyo Stock Exchange online traders are limited to making purchases during the actual trading hours governed by New York Stock Exchange hours or the Japanese Stock Exchange’s Tokyo hours. In contrast online Forex trading gives traders access to the online Forex trading community through an electronic series of different online trading platforms. Online Forex trading and online accessibility are nicely compatible because the world’s foreign currency exchange market is a 24-hour market, and the internet makes online forex trading a 24 hour possibility open to anyone with a computer, a telephone line and money. Anyone, any corporation or any bank can log onto an online account at any time, and trade foreign currency through online forex trading.

Online forex trading is primarily the purchase of one currency from a particular country, using the currency of a different country. This exchange involves currency from two different countries at once. It can mean purchasing Japanese currency with Australian currency or purchasing German currency with Spanish currency. While that sounds simple, in fact, approximately $1.9 trillion is traded on Forex daily, making Forex online trading the biggest exchange worldwide. Although anyone can participate in Forex online trading, the key players are usually banks – commercial and investment – and exchange traded futures and registered futures commission merchants.

Finding The Right Currency Trading Course

To many courses now days spend to much time on the history of Forex foreign exchanges and less time on the practical side to investing. A good currency trading course should dwell on the practical theories and analyses that can help you actually perfect a strategy to make it in the field of foreign currency exchange.

A currency trading course should be Open to ideas and recognize, and teach, the fact that there is no one solution to every problem. It must teach you to think on your own and develop your own theories and ideas regarding how to achieve success in the foreign currency market.

Practicality drives most people to invest in the foreign market exchange, so practicality should definitely be included as a necessary quality of a currency trading course.

A good currency trading course would expose you to a hands on approach to the reality of the environment, or at least something similar to it. It may be fun discussing ideas, but you cannot truly learn until you get right in it's face.

Another thing to look for in a currency trading course is the confidence it implants the people in it with. One thing you need in currency trading is confidence, and it is imperative that a good currency trading course give you a confident attitude to follow through with decisions you make. You need that confidence in order to risk your money if you want to make it in FX Currency Exchange.

A currency trading course can help prepare you for the exciting world of currency trading. Every decision is unique and depends on you to follow your instinct, coupled with your knowledge in order to truly succeed in Forex currency trading.

Becoming a Currency Trader - 3 Vital Tips For Success

So you want to become a currency trader and make big profits? Well, the good news is everything about currency trading can be learned, by those people who can get the right currency trading education. Here we will give you 3 vital tips for currency trading success.

1. Your On Your Own

Success rests on your shoulders.

If you think you can follow expert news stories, or buy success from someone else, you're wrong. Success comes from within and no one else can make you rich.

Becoming a currency trader is not easy and you wouldn't expect it to be, with the rewards on offer but it's not hard either.

You simply need to get the right forex education and work smart.

If you have a desire to succeed, a willingness to learn and accept responsibility for your actions, you can get past first base.

2. Mindset is More Important Than Method

Forex trading is essentially simple.

A robust simple method combined with discipline is all you need to succeed.

Your forex trading system should be simple - simple systems tend to be far more successful than complicated ones, as they are more robust in the face of brutal ever changing market conditions.

Having a good method is only part of being successful as an FX trader, you have to have the right mindset as well and this is the hard bit!

This means having confidence in what you are doing which leads to the discipline to apply your trading method and stick with it, when you hit a losing streak.

This is why you can't follow anyone else to success and you have to have knowledge and confidence in what you are doing. If you don't, you simply will never acquire the vital trait of discipline.

It's mental discipline that separates winners from losers in forex trading and we cannot stress how vital this trait is.

3. You Have To Have This!

95% of traders lose with their forex trading strategies and you have to have an edge.

An edge is "the something" that will help you win while the vast majority of traders fail and if you don't know what it is you don't have one!

All successful traders have different edges but they all have confidence in them and see their edge as something that sets them apart form the majority of losing forex traders.

If you don't have an edge you wont win - period.

Becoming a currency trader is not easy - but it's not hard.

Anyone can be successful if they have the right mindset and they want to be but most people simply don't want to do what is necessary for success.

The effort you put in can lead you to an income that is simply life changing. It is the final frontier of the free economy and can help you build real wealth quickly.

Forex Factory - How To Prepare For Your Trading Session

The Forex Factory web site is a very popular site among developing Forex traders as shown by an Alexa rating of around 5,400 most visited sites on the web. Any site within the first 100,000 gets serious traffic!

Forex Factory provides 3 main services listed in my personal order of importance:

* Calendar

* News

* Forum

Calendar

The main attraction of the Forex Factory calendar of upcoming economic reports and fundamental announcements is that it is so visual and easy to read.

A color coding system gives an indication at a glance as to how volatile the announcement is expected to be:

* Yellow - Low Impact

* Orange - Medium Impact

* Red - High Impact

Another good feature of this calendar is the ability to customize the time to your own time zone. So instead of having to add or subtract a certain number of hours from GMT to arrive at the time of the economic report in your country, you can set the calendar according to your time zone and see the time accurately displayed.

This feature saves some confusion and prevents a newer trader from leaving a trade in around a volatile news report because of getting the time mixed up!

News

A number of news reports are featured daily from authorities and advisors in the financial markets.

Within a few minutes the trader can come up to speed on the latest economic factors that might impact the market.

Forums

The Forums at Forex Factory have a huge appeal as indicated by the thousands of users online each day.

The forums are divided into various themes including:

General Discussion

Trading Systems

Broker Discussion

Forex Beginner Questions and Answers

How To Get The Best From Forex Factory

For me, the calendar is by far the most useful feature at Forex Factory. I consult it each day in preparation for the next trading session and make sure I am out of the market around volatile news releases (flagged by the red icon) and also many times the medium impact reports (flagged by the orange icon). The News feature is also useful to get a broad overview of market sentiment. At the same time caution is needed if you use technical analysis as your main trading tool as the comments and opinions of others can sometimes blur your own analysis and lead to flawed trade entries.

You may have detected a perfectly good trade setup and the trade is going well. Then as it starts to stall the comments of a news analyst come to mind and you exit prematurely from what could have been a very profitable trade.

So it is good to view the News objectively and coordinate it with your own technical analysis.

Forums - Be A Little Cautious

For newer traders the discussion forums can be helpful in bouncing ideas off other newer traders. One of the main benefits is encouragement and motivation from hearing how others are getting on.

However, as to whether you can get good trading tips and strategies from the forums is in my mind a little doubtful.

After I attended a Forex seminar run by a licensed professional who trades the Forex every day and is a fund manager, I noted his comment that the really successful Forex traders rarely have time to visit online forums and participate in discussions. They are too busy making money on the Forex!

So as long as you approach forum discussions with the realization that most participants are also in the learning stage, you can evaluate their comments and suggestions accordingly.

There is no doubt Forex Factory (forexfactory.com) provides an excellent group of services for newer Forex traders. Definitely use the calendar to the full and depending on your level of expertise, use the News and Forums features to gain a better perspective of daily market activity.