Welcome to your first Forex trading lesson

In this section, you will be introduced to the Spot or Cash Forex market.

The word Forex is derived from the words foreign exchange and is one of the names of the international currency market. Forex is the largest financial market in the world, trading up to $4 trillion in turnover every day. This tremendous turnover is more than the combined volumes of the leading stock markets around the world on any given day. This trade volume creates a very liquid market that is desirable to trade in.

Unlike many other markets, Forex is a decentralized exchange with no central location in which transactions are cleared. It is primarily traded through banks, brokers, dealers, financial institutions and private individuals throughout the world. And since these financial centers are located in different time zones, Forex is available to trade 24 hours per day.

Trades are executed through the Internet using trading platforms. The development of personal trading platforms and the smaller transaction costs caused a sudden increase in retail investors. With the advent of the Internet and growing competition it is now easily within the reach of most investors.

Just like other investment alternatives, foreign exchange offers traders/investors a market where they can buy or sell a specific currency pair. The currency pair may be the Euro versus the US Dollar, the US Dollar versus the Japanese Yen, the British Pound versus the US Dollar, the Euro versus British Pound, or a number of other currency combinations.

For active traders and investors, foreign exchange should be no different than other investment products such as equities, commodities or fixed-income. Because of globalization in the economic world and consolidation of whole economic regions (i.e. the European Union), including currencies in a portfolio helps to diversify assets and can reduce risk.

One of the goals of our intro to Forex tutorials is to give investors or traders the fundamental information they may need to get started trading in the foreign currency markets. You can learn basic Forex knowledge right here with our informative Forex tutorials for beginners. These Forex tutorials may help you understand the basics of historical price action, technical analysis, charting fundamentals and FX trade strategy. These free tutorials are a great way for a novice Forex trader to learn more about the technology, fundamentals and various ways Forex markets change with new information. You can learn the basics like What is Forex? and then move on to some of the more technical Forex trading terminology. You can find out how traders use different currency pair spreads and changing exchange rates to take advantage of the forex market. You can get your Forex basics now by watching our Forex tutorials videos, reading our blog and following our FX trade analysts.