Forex, is short for forex exchange. Some $1.9 trillion US dollars are traded every single day on the forex exchange market, making that market the largest market in the world by cash volume of trades executed.
By comparison, the New York Stock Exchange trades on average about $45 bilion dollars everyday. The forex exchange market is also noted for its extreme liquidity compared to other types of markets.
The popularity of forex trading in Malaysia has seen an unprecendented rise year after year. This is mostly due to the internet and online brokers that allow anyone with a few hundred dollars to trade forex online.
In Malaysia, many people have been trying to capitalize on this. They are the ones conducting free seminars with the ultimate aim of selling the public their forex trading course. Having attended some of these seminars, we can safely tell you that 90% of them don't know what they are talking about. They are simply trying to get you to buy a product. This is the Forex scene in Malaysia.
The forex exchange market is truly an international one as trading is done 24 hours a day, 5 days a week. Currency quotes are a means of determining the currency pair's value at a point in time. Always denoted as a pair, a quote gives the forex trader the value of one currency against another. It is the difference in value between two currencies over time that makes the forex trader a profit or a loss.
To gain an understanding on how forex trading works as well as the types of trading strategies as well as forex signals, please refer to our forex trading article. There are a variety of forex products available to the Malaysian public. Some of the most popular of them are spot forex, forex futures, forex options as well as forex swaps. The most popular of these instruments with regards to online forex trading in Malaysia is undoubtedly spot forex and to a lesser extent, forex futures.
There is no single large market that unifies the entire forex exchange market. Rather, the forex market is a spiderweb of numerous smaller markets that are all interconnected. The largest markets are based in London, New York and Tokyo. However, forex exchange markets worldwide are not all open at the same time. A day in forex trading begins with the asian markets, moves on to the european markets and ends up at the american market while the whole process begins anew.
Forex traders are usually offered a very high leverage, sometimes as much a 1:400. As such it is very easy to make or lose large amounts of money in minutes. It is this aspect of forex that ultimately makes forex trading so enticing to newcomers. However, the journey is fraught with danger and the vast majority of new forex traders usually go on to blow many accounts before they start making consistent profits.
