With the growth of online forex trading, the criteria for opening a forex account have become simpler. Opening a forex account today is basically as easy as opening a bank account.

You do, of course, need to locate a forex broker first. Every forex trade goes through and is handled by a brokerage, which could be a specialist forex broker or the same brokerage you use to trade and transact in the stock market.

You will need to fill in a short questionnaire about your financial information and intentions to trade. You’ll also have to have an ID, and your forex account institution needs the minimum deposit.

The simplest answer is that the forex is open to trading all the time, but depending on where you are in the world, it opens and closes at different hours at any given location. Greenwich Mean Time, commonly abbreviated as GMT, is the base reference time for all opening and closing times worldwide.

A forex broker serves as a middleman between you and the interbank network. If you don’t know what the interbank is, it’s a word relating to the banks’ networks that interact with each other.

A forex broker would usually provide you with a quote from the banks they have credit lines and access to forex liquidity from. Many forex brokers use multiple pricing banks, and they will be giving you the best available one.

A forex chart is a visual way of reading market movements over a given period of time. Looking at a forex chart, you can see rectangular symbols that look like candles – these signify the price of opening and the price of closing. The top is the open price, for the black ones, and the bottom is the closing price.

To forecast potential exchange-rate changes using past market data, traders need to look for trends and signals. Previous price fluctuations allow trends to appear which technical traders attempt to recognise and, if accurate, will indicate where the exchange rate is going next.

A green candlestick means that that day’s opening price was lower than that day’s closing price (i.e. the price rose during the day); a red candlestick indicates that the opening price was higher than that day’s closing price (i.e. the price fell during the day).

Strong patterns of candlesticks are at least three times more likely to resolve in the direction indicated. Reliable trends are at least twice as likely. Weak patterns are at least 1.5 times more likely to resolve in the direction indicated. That means that possibly two out of five trends would fail.

A dragonfly doji is a type of candlestick pattern which, depending on past market action, may signal a potential price reversal to the downside or upside. It is created when the prices for the assets are the same whether high, open, or closed. In both cases, the direction must be checked by the candle following the dragonfly doji.

A person can make a living trading the forex market, but the real question is whether this is likely.

Day trader success tests have shown that most will lose money in the long run. Nevertheless, some people make a good living trading currency pairs and have been doing so for years with success.

A weekly chart is the price series for a traded security where each candle, line, or bar on the chart reflects the price overview for a single trading week. The most common types of charts used by traders and investors are bar charts and candlestick charts.

The top of each bar shows the highest price of the currency during that time, while the bottom displays the lowest end of the scale. A little tick on the left side of the bar shows the opening price of the currency, while a tick on the right side represents the closing price.

No. Despite the multitude of YouTube videos and promotional advertising, it’s not easy to trade forex. When you find any place dealing in the forex market at the edge, there is a sign warning people it’s easy to lose money. The flip side is, it’s possible to make substantial sums of money when you educate yourself and control the risk by being fiscally responsible.

Fortunately, the demand in forex is only two-dimensional. It just goes up and down because decisions about buying and selling are based on one of two movements.

In reality you are not trading currency. You buy and sell predictions on pairs of currencies. When you use the EUR/USD as an example and forecast that the euro will rise against the US dollar, you will be rewarded if your prediction is correct. If your forecast is incorrect then at that point you don’t make money on that trade and may actually lose your capital.

Forex is traded through a forex broker. Traders can go online to sign up and download a trading platform (such as MetaTrader 4 or 5), onto their computer or mobile device and immediately start trading.

Pip stands for Point In Percentage. It is the slightest increase a currency pair can pass through. For instance, if the EUR/USD is going from 1.1000 to 1.1001, the increase is one pip.

Though the charts look identical, the forex market is so large that it is not controlled by anyone. Because of the nature of the stock market, the market is dominated by large companies and banks.

You make money purchasing pairs of currencies and selling them. Depending on how the market is doing, you choose whether to buy or sell a currency pair. For instance, if you are trading the EUR/USD and you believe that the Euro will benefit against the US Dollar, you buy. If you think that the euro is going to lose traction, you sell.

You just don’t. Even the most experienced pros tend to lose at trades. The forex market is extremely volatile, and can very easily shift up and down. However, you can make a well-educated guess on how the market will shift using various tools. The three tools are technical, fundamental and sentimental.

Technical research is the use of the charts to analyse price changes.

Fundamental analysis makes use of economic, social and political factors to estimate supply and demand results.

And sentimental analyses are based on gut feeling. It depends on what the trader thinks the market will do, based on previous experience.

Invest 400 dollars, and get started. You have the option of opening a demo account and pretending to trade, but since you have no cash in the game, your results will be a lot different than when you trade with your own money.

Trading with a demo account is like playing a video game, the acts don’t have any repercussions, so there’s no real motivation to learn how to trade profitably. If you have any of your own money on the table, then it becomes real. However, it is advisable first to spend some time demo trading before committing your hard-earned cash into a live trade.

You would become much more conscious of how to trade effectively, and eventually become a much stronger trader.

You can do it too if you just want to spend some money and let a skilled trader trade for you. It’s called mirror trading. Simply sign up with a broker for a forex account and then sign up with a mirror trader and you will be able to copy what he is doing.

Trading can take as little as 15 minutes a day depending on how you’re trading. You could set up your morning and evening trades and go to work in the daytime. You should also set a ‘take profit and stop loss point when you position your trade.

If your ‘take profit hits the market, the money is deposited into your account. Alternatively, monitoring the market and taking advantage of small changes may take several hours a day.

You need forex tools at the very basic level (such as MetaTrader 4 or 5), that you download from your broker. You may also want to use additional analytics software to help you assess how the forex market is likely to shift, if you want to improve your game a bit.

In the context, you can do it while you have another job. Set your morning and evening trades, and let the market trade during the day. For most brokers, you can start trading with as little as $200, but it’s suggested to start with a very low of $400. The more money you spend, the greater the profit you can earn. Losing money in this market is also very easy so the secret to success is good risk management.

Not exactly. The forex market is mainly speculative. There is no exchange of money in physical form. Similar to playing a video game, FX trades look true, but they’re just a machine entry. Nonetheless, the money gained or lost for any trade is real.

Price shifts with supply and demand. There are indicators that will tell you where the supply is higher than the demand (oversold), and where the demand is higher than the supply (overbought). As per the indicators you should take action accordingly.

Trendlines, which link a series of highs or lows are the most common way of identifying trends. You have an uptrend when you can attach a set of low points chart sloping upwards. Higher highs and higher lows also mark an uptrend.

Like businesses, national governments compete for their activities in the forex market, international exchange payments and the management of their foreign reserves. Central banks meanwhile influence the forex market by raising interest rates to manage inflation.

One factor influencing whether the value of a given currency goes up or down is the amount of circulating money, and relative inflation. For example, if a country starts printing money, the value of that currency is diminished by the inflation, and its value falls compared to other world currencies.

The short answer to this question is yes and no, Forex markets cannot crash entirely, but at any time, different currencies can crash. Forex crashes are very different from stock-market crashes in that forex crashes typically impact a common currency.

Experts advise you to concentrate on max. two or three currency pairs. Most new traders try to trade every single pair under the sun, and as a result, their skills cannot really grow.

Moving averages are one of the most common ways to recognise patterns in the market. A moving average is put on the chart and when the price is above the moving average level, it is perceived as bullish. If below, it is bearish.

The most frequently traded pairs in this forex include the euro, the Japanese Yen and the British Pound, as well as the US Dollar and the Euro.