hey traders alex long here and welcome to your forex trading for beginners video series what we're going to do in this video series here is we're going to teach you everything that you need to know in order to be a successful fx trader i'm going to assume no prior knowledge so i'm going to take you from the very beginning all the way through to the very end so that is teaching you exactly what the forex markets are what their unique characteristics are all the way through to teaching you some advanced analysis techniques and obviously a very good trading strategy at the end to allow you to get started trading these markets now what i'm not going to do is i'm not going to focus too much on some of the theoretical nonsense that you can find in a million and one and other different fx videos out there i'm literally going to focus on the things that are going to make a difference to your trading to the things that are going to allow you to go out there to take a trade and to essentially make money trading the fx markets now in this video we're going to start off by talking a little bit about what the forex markets are you know what a currency trade is and essentially how you can get started and get involved in these markets so what are the fx markets the first thing to understand is it is the the largest and most liquid financial market in the world and the reason that that's important is that unlike other markets like let's say the sports market or maybe the the penny shares market and things like that you know you're not going to ever have an issue with liquidity you're always going to be able to get into and out of your trades literally at the click of a button you're not going to find yourself putting or putting on an order and waiting for the market to fill your order and sometimes you might get a price that's not favorable to you you're always going to be able to get into and out of the markets very very quickly which is a massive benefit for us as traders for us to know that our our money is always liquid there's never really going to be a situation where we're not going to be able to get out of the market very very quickly the other thing to understand about these markets is it it is a 24-hour market so the market trades from sunday evening uk time all the way through to sunday uh to sunday to friday evening uk time okay so i can actually get into a trade from around 10 o'clock in the evening depending on the broker that you're trading with but generally speaking from around 10 o'clock in the evening uk time i can take a currency trade and fx trade all the way through to 9 9 30 in the evening on a friday you know i'll be able to take a trade there so that window from sunday evening through to friday evening i can trade these markets and the great thing about that is that that means wherever you're located whatever your schedule is you're going to be able to get involved in these markets now granted during that that window from sunday through to friday okay they are going to be broken down into different sessions which we'll talk about later on in this video series so there are going to be times that are going to be better for trading than others but and that's really if we're only looking at short-term trading approach but if you're taking a bit more of a passive approach a longer time swing trading approach you're trading then essentially it means that you can get into and out of the markets and you can trade and benefit from the market fluctuations at any point in time during that from that sunday through to friday period so whatever your schedule is you're going to be able to find a way to make money here now in terms of a currency transaction believe it or not you've probably already been involved in one yourself whether you know it or not okay when you go on holiday all right so imagine you're going to the us and you're going from england so you you've got pounds you're going to want to do things in the united states you're going to need to change your pounds four dollars all right it's a perfectly normal thing or if you were going to holiday in spain you would need to change your pound for euros but essentially we've all been there where we can't spend the money in the country that we live in or the currency that we live in we can't spend it when we go on holiday naturally because they've got a different currency so what happens is is that you will exchange your pounds your home currency for the currency where you're going on vacation and i'm going to use pounds as the example here because i live in the uk and i live in pounds so if i wanted to go to the us i would have to exchange my pounds for dollars and when i go to exchange my pounds for dollars the currency exchange or the bank or whoever it is i'm using to to facilitate that transaction will give me a price so for example we'll use round numbers to make things easy they may say to me i will give you one dollar 25 cents for every pound that you give me okay which means that my one pound is worth 1.25 so if i if i give them 100 pounds they will give me 125 back okay and then so on and so forth as you increase your monetary amount but the point is is that when you do that when you go on holiday you're actually taking part in a currency transaction so it's not something that's new to anyone the only difference is us as currency traders what we look to do is we look to benefit we look to profit from the the small fluctuations in the exchange rates so even though you know when i go when i start out and i go out on holiday the exchange rate might be one dollar 25 to every pound and when i come back maybe the exchange rate has dropped so it's now at 1.20 or to 1 pound okay now when i'm going on holiday and i'm coming back obviously i don't take much notice of that i'm just kind of all right that is what it is you know here's the money i want to exchange it back because i'm back in england i now need to live in pounds but as a currency trader actually we will take a view on what direction that flood currency fluctuation is going to take over the next week the next two weeks the next month whatever your time horizon is and we'll talk about that a little bit later but we take a view on that and then if we're right we make money and if we're not right then we lose money and essentially that is a currency transaction that is what we do as currency traders we simply take a view on which direction that market is going to go over a certain time period now before we wrap up this video one more thing you have to understand about these markets which is very very important and it's something that affects these markets probably more than others and why i'm going to try to influence you to maybe take a little bit of a longer time view in these markets rather than being somebody that wants to day trade the minute candles or the two-minute candles you know even though you can make money trading very very short term in these markets it's a little bit more difficult and the reason that it's more difficult is that there's a lot of different participants in the forex market so whilst there are speculators like myself like yourself you know the some of the the big funds the banks and things like that there are speculators there are people that are looking to trade these markets with a profit motive there are also organizations out there that get involved in the currency markets not from a profit motive perspective but simply because they need to because they need to repatriate funds so if you imagine apple doing business in the united kingdom they have to do business in pounds but at some point they want to bring their profits back from the uk into the us and in order to do that they will have done that in pounds they will need to get involved in a currency transaction where they exchange their pounds for dollars and that's going to have a little bit of a short-term impact on the markets which is one of the reasons that it's much easier to trade if you're taking a little bit more of a longer-term view because then those little fluctuations that occur for no other reason all right so it's very difficult to read these things no other reason than just repatriating funds um that's why you want to take a little bit more of a longer term view um when you're trading these markets but again we're going to look at all of that as we progress through this video series here but for this first video just want you to understand a little bit about what these markets are now you understand what these markets are we'll start to look a little bit more at how they're priced how they're framed and then eventually obviously we'll start looking at how you analyze the markets to essentially make money from them so i hope you enjoyed this video and i look forward to catching you in the very next video
