Welcome. In this article I am going to answer the basic question: what is Forex? Some of you have probably heard something about it or read some information containing the term. Basically, Forex refers to the international currency market, where a currency is bought or sold. This market is available 24 hours a day, from 11 p.m. on Sunday to 10 p.m. on Friday (according to Central European Time). The market itself is very liquid, which means that the orders we make are done almost immediately. What is good in Forex is the fact that the market is strongly leveraged which means we can operate with a large amount of money having much less. In Forex we usually order contracts of currency pairs buying for instance EURUSD (more about making orders next time). To make an order we need to have a broker, who arranges the operation. The broker makes a trading platform available. Many brokers also provides the possibility to make orders on the phone. I should add here that the broker set us a lever with which we can open the order as well as the amount of money we use to open the order. It’s worth mentioning that the trading platform commonly used here is MetaTrader to which I am going devote a special guide.

The market itself is closely connected with some terms such as: lot, swap, leverage, stop loss, take profit, pips, spread and many other which should be explained. Currently in Forex it is possible to invest gold, silver, oil or stock indexes including WIG20, or some shares mostly large U.S. companies. When making orders we mustn’t forget that the lever can bring us large profits as well as large losses. Many brokers enables opening a demo account with virtual cash, where you can perform in most cases the same operation as in the real account. Personally, I recommend to start whit virtual account and check how it all work in practice.

If you come over operating the trading platform your investment strategy should be developed. Many people skip this step and influenced by strong emotion make ill-considered decisions. If we know how it all works, what the risk is, and we have learned a lot about an investment strategy, we can then open a real account. Before opening a real account make sure whether the broker provides the some conditions as he used to in the demo account. If you need a broker, you ought not to have a problem. There are many of them who do not necessarily use the same trading platform. I hope I have managed to explain the subject. I invite all off you to familiarize yourself with the subsequent articles.