Forex is the short form of “foreign exchange”. Forex trading, so called FX trading, is referring to those transactions of foreign currency. International trade requires a considerable amount of foreign currency for settlement, so “Forex” also means the foreign currency used as international settlement.
In the forex market, exchange rates are given in currency pairs. The most important concept to understand this quote is “the relative value of the two currencies.” For example, in the currency pair EUR/USD, EUR is called the base currency and USD is called the quote currency.
In the forex market, each currency is uniformly represented by three English letters. This is actually a set of currency codes, ISO 4217, an international standard developed by the International Organization for Standardization to denote currency names. At the international trading level, ISO codes are used by people for the convenience of quotation, reading, communication, etc. Banks and corporations around the world also use currency codes, and it’s not hard to see banks publish each currency exchange rate by using currency code rather than any translated name or currency symbol.
Currencies that are frequently traded and commonly seen in the forex market are called “major currencies”, based on the volume of global transactions. According to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS)2019 statistics, the most commonly traded currencies, from the highest volume to the lower, are US dollar, Euro, Japanese Yen, British Pound, Australian Dollar, Canadian Dollar, Swiss Franc, Chinese Yuan.
Margin trading is originally a hedging financial arrangement, in which buyers and sellers provide “margin”, a certain amount of deposit, to guarantee the fulfillment of future contracts.
Most of the online forex transactions are carried out by margin trading. In this article, we explain how leverage works in trading.
The use of leverage is derived from margin trading. It comes from the fact that both the buyer and the seller deposit “margin” as a guarantee to fulfill the contract in the future. Since margin is mostly calculated as a proportion of the contract size amount, that proportion is the “leverage concept”.
Overnight interest is a term commonly used in online forex trading. Rollover, swap fee, overnight funding, in fact, all refer to the same thing. Generally, if the investor has an open position at 5 PM EST (summertime), there will be the overnight interest “cost” as settlement occurred. Such “interest” includes the “rate differential” of that trading product (currency pair) as well as the financing cost of the trading platform.
In the forex market, the smallest unit used to quantify the movement in the currency quote is called “a pip”, and the difference between the bid-ask prices is called “spread”.
Once you’ve looked at the idea of “pip” in forex trading, you should also pay attention to the value of each pip, so-called pip value. Because forex trading involves different currency pairs, investors will find that the profit and loss for each pip of some currency pairs are different from those of others. Therefore, it is necessary for investors to calculate the actual profit and loss per pip more accurately before the trade order placing, in order to avoid strategies mistaken.
