1.1 What is Forex 什么是外汇?

What Is Forex?

If you’ve ever traveled to another country, you usually had to find a currency exchange booth at the airport, and then exchange the money you have in your wallet (if you’re a dude) or purse (if you’re a lady) or man purse (if you’re a metrosexual) into the currency of the country you are visiting.

You go up to the counter and notice a screen displaying different exchange rates for different currencies. You find “Japanese yen” and think to yourself, “WOW! My one dollar is worth 100 yen?! And I have ten dollars! I’m going to be rich!!!” (This excitement is quickly killed when you stop by a shop in the airport afterward to buy a can of soda and, all of a sudden, half your money is gone.)

When you do this, you’ve essentially participated in the forex market! You’ve exchanged one currency for another. Or in forex trading terms, assuming you’re an American visiting Japan, you’ve sold dollars and bought yen.

Before you fly back home, you stop by the currency exchange booth to exchange the yen that you miraculously have leftover (Tokyo is expensive!) and notice the exchange rates have changed. It’s these changes in the exchange rates that allow you to make money in the foreign exchange market.

The foreign exchange market, which is usually known as “forex” or “FX,” is the largest financial market in the world. Compared to the measly $22.4 billion a day volume of the New York Stock Exchange, the foreign exchange market looks absolutely ginormous with its $5 TRILLION a day trade volume. Forex rocks our socks!

Let’s take a moment to put this into perspective using monsters…

The largest stock market in the world, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), trades a volume of about $22.4 billion each day. If we used a monster to represent NYSE, it would look like this…

Angry Trading Monster Jealous Of Forex

You hear about the NYSE in the news every day… on CNBC… on Bloomberg…on BBC… heck, you even probably hear about it at your local gym. “The NYSE is up today, blah, blah”. When people talk about the “market”, they usually mean the stock market. So the NYSE sounds big, it’s loud and likes to make a lot of noise.

But if compare the NYSE with the forex market. Its just funny…Because the forex market trading volume is by far bigger.

==Forex Average Daily Trading Volume==

The currency market is over 200 times BIGGER! It is HUGE! But hold your horses, there’s a catch!

That huge $5 trillion number covers the entire global foreign exchange market, BUT retail traders (that’s us) trade the spot market and that’s about $1.49 trillion. So you see, the forex market is definitely huge, but not as huge as the media would like you to believe.

Do you feel like you already know what the forex market is all about? We’re just getting started! In the next section, we’ll reveal WHAT exactly is traded in the forex market.

What is traded in forex?

The simple answer is MONEY.

Because you’re not buying anything physical, forex trading can be confusing.

Think of buying a currency as buying a share in a particular country, kinda like buying stocks of a company. The price of the currency is a direct reflection of what the market thinks about the current and future health of the Japanese economy.

In forex trading, when you buy, say, the Japanese yen, you are basically buying a “share” in the Japanese economy. You are betting that the Japanese economy is doing well, and will even get better as time goes. Once you sell those “shares” back to the market, hopefully, you will end up with a profit.

In general, the exchange rate of a currency versus other currencies is a reflection of the condition of that country’s economy, compared to other countries’ economies.

By the time you graduate from this School of Pipsology, you’ll be eager to start working with currencies.

Major Currencies

Currency symbols always have three letters, where the first two letters identify the name of the country and the third letter identifies the name of that country’s currency.

Take NZD for instance. NZ stands for New Zealand, while D stands for dollar. Easy enough, right?

The currencies included in the chart above are called the “majors” because they are the most widely traded ones.

什么是外汇?

外汇市场，也称为“FOREX”或“FX”市场 ,是全球最大的金融市场，其日交易量达到 4 兆美元。巨大的交易量，使得任何一个机构都没有能力操纵这一市场，价格的走动有规律可循，对普通的投资者比较公平.

除此之外，与期货和证券市场相比，外汇市场与它们有一点本质的区别，这点区别同时也是其它市场的局限性——交易在一天结束时被中断，只有在第二天早上重新开始。因此，如果您是在俄国市场进行交易，而有些与市场相关的重要事件在美国发生了，当早上开市的时候，可能与您所希望的会完全不一样. 外汇市场每天24小时不停工作，外币交易在一周内的工作日中不会中断。几乎在每个时区（伦敦，纽约，东京，香港，悉尼等）都有愿意对外汇提供报价的交易商。

从1971年直到几年前，这个市场的真正投资者是银行，跨国公司和大型经纪公司。如果独立个人希望把资金投入到该市场，那么他应该同银行合作，投入大约一百万美元的资金，以满足获得五百万到一千万美元交易的需要。在经纪商那情况稍微好一些，他们可以把最低保证金存款降低到二十五万美元。但是今天，外汇交易市场已经对小型投资者开放。与先前银行和经纪商要求的巨额资金相比，现在的保证金需求已经大大地降低了，终于，使得众多个人可以与参与到这个市场,而小的投资者可以利用互联网的优势，而在过去，它只可能被大型参与者所使用。

了解外汇交易

外汇交易是指投资者利用货币之间兑换率的变动而进行的买卖。您可以通过我们提供的网上外汇交易平台直接进行外汇交易。对于投资者来说，最好的机会总是交易那些交易量最大的货币，即“主要货币 ”。今天，85% 的外汇交易是主要货币，包括美元，日元，欧元，英镑，瑞郎，加元和澳元.

外汇是以货币对形式交易，每一种货币，都有国际统一的符号，例如：欧元/美元 (EUR/USD) 或美元/日元 (USD/JPY)。“外汇交易”是买入一种货币，同时卖出另外一种货币。比如，您预测欧元/美元 (EUR/USD) 将升值，则您会买入 EUR/USD，意味着您买入了欧元，同时卖出了美元.

为什么外汇市场吸引投资者?

流动性;外汇市场每天交易所吸收的资金远远地超过了其它任何市场的数量。高度流动性是对投资者最强大的吸引力，它使得投资者可以按当前的市场报价自由开仓和平仓，而且几乎没有数量的限制。

不间断的运转;对市场参与者根本性的吸引力是它的每天24小时不间断运转。在外汇市场，参与者不象在其它很多别的市场，需要进行等待才能对各种发生事件作出反映，而在外汇市场不需要.

灵活的操作;在外汇市场，交易人可以用一个希望的定期期限建一个新的定单.

低廉的交易费用;外汇交易没有各种佣金，除了自然的市场价差 bid/ask.

确切的报价;由于市场高度的流动性，大多数的交易可能是按统一市场价执行的。这避免了期货中的不稳定性和其它货币投资中，在某个时间只可以按市场价交易一定数量的资金.

网络技术的发展提升了行业的发展

在以前，外汇交易一直由大型银行和其他金融机构独享，个人投资者基本无缘这一市场。但从上世纪 90 年代末期，互联网的迅速发展和普及，极大的降低了投资门槛及成本，使个人参与外汇投资成为可能。

原来只有金融机构才能付得起成本的道琼斯新闻、路透社行情、专业图表工具等，现在只要开户就可以免费使用。

原来必须到银行才能完成的交易行为，现在坐在家里或者办公室，轻轻点击鼠标就可以在几秒钟内完成。

何谓欧洲货币体系？

什么是直盘、交叉盘？

货币对之间的关系

外汇市场的组织形式

常见外汇名词解释

更多外汇相关百科词典