Forex Trading in South Africa

The average daily turnover of the forex trading market is up to 5 trillion USD, several times more than any stock market in the world. The high volatility makes FX one of the most exciting markets for traders.

The forex market is open 24 hours a day, 5 days a week. It starts with the New Zealand opening, followed by Australia, Tokyo, and London, and finally closing in New York. Forex (FX) means the exchange of one currency for another. There are always investment opportunities in the FX market, if the investor is optimistic about the trend of a particular currency, they may go short/sell or go long/buy it. Each investor needs a forex trading platform to access the markets to trade forex.

Forex prices fluctuate constantly, this can be due to several scenarios, including political turbulence, interest rates being increased/decreased, stock market movement, economic environments, military affairs, and many other factors.

Participants in the forex market include commercial institutions, investment banks, hedge funds, governments, issuers of banknotes, transnational organisations, and private investors from many different countries. The high liquidity these participants generate (the amount of money available to buy or sell) provides a steady flow of forex investment opportunities.

Once you have familiarised yourself with the forex market through demo trading, the next step of your journey begins when you open a profile account with a trustworthy broker. You can complete a profile at this stage so your broker can identify you. The profile opening process requires your name and login information, such as email and phone contacts.

For most brokers, there are clear menus to let you download the required forex trading platform to install on your trading station. You could however, choose to use the browser version of your broker’s trading portal. A browser-based portal is convenient for traders who want to access one trading account on more than one device.

Next up, ensure that your account is completely verified before you fund the account. Always confirm whether you are using a demo account or a live trading account every time you want to trade forex. You can then refer to the same strategies you perfected in demo trading to identify opportunities for your first trade. Once you place your first few trades, stay calm and adjust your positions according to how the market environment behaves.

To become a good forex trader, you first must master what currencies to trade and when to trade them. This requires consistency in training through a demo account. During demo trading, learn the important aspects of forex trading, such as fundamental analysis, technical analysis, and money management.

Fundamental analysis lets you understand how currency pairs react to certain news events and announcements. In other words, you become a better forex trader if you know whether some news is good or bad for the currencies you want to trade. Technical analysis, on the other hand, lets you identify certain patterns and trends whenever you use your forex trading platform.

You must have the right money management routines to be among the best. You have to protect your trading account by committing manageable lot trade sizes. Never get too confident when you have a good run of profits or too scared when a few trades go against your predictions. You can always go back to your demo account to polish your strategy even as you continue to operate a different account to trade forex.

There is a misconception that forex is an easy way to make overnight riches. The truth is that you will only make money on some trades. You can succeed in forex trading only if you have the discipline to stick to a working strategy. Poor money management is where most people struggle in their forex trading careers.

Furthermore, it is not wise to measure success in forex according to how much you can earn in one trade. A longer-term perspective helps as you trade forex for small, consistent profits instead of making poor decisions while chasing one or two golden chances.

Unless you are a trading genius, getting rich by forex trading is like winning a lottery. You can grow your wealth steadily if you invest in the right training tools, commit enough time, and master the psychological implications. Some new traders quit too early simply because they needed to accept that there are winning days while some go wrong. To be on the right side, you aim to make money on forex by targeting small but consistent gains with modest risk exposure.

Currencies are typically exchanged in the foreign exchange market. The forex market is a global exchange that remains open 24 hours daily, from Monday to Friday. Because it is not a physical exchange market, all the trading activity occurs over the counter (OTC). It is the biggest financial market in the world, making it attractive for investors who want its liquidity.

Forex investment draws the interest of speculators and people who want to hedge their wealth against certain economic events that make currencies fluctuate. Like stock traders, forex traders pick opportunities by buying currencies they think will appreciate in value. Conversely, a currency pair will also draw much attention if it consistently keeps losing value.

All the price movement on the forex market is driven by demand and supply forces, meaning the quotes are not set by a central exchange somewhere.

A pip (percentage in point) is the smallest whole unit of price measurement for an exchange rate quote. It also measures the movement between the bid and the asking price. One pip is the same as a hundredth of a percent or 0.0001. When you trade forex, the price movement for most currency pairs is quoted up to four decimal places. For example, if the price of the GBPUSD moves from 1.1655 to 1.16556, it is said to have gained 1 pip. However, prices of pairs using the Japanese Yen are often quoted to two decimal places.

Therefore, pips are a way to measure price movement down to four decimal places to determine whether you are moving towards a profit or loss and by how much difference.

Pips are also a good measure of distance to a price target. You can use a fixed number of pips to set an exit price or a stop-loss every time you open a new trade. Pips play an important role in risk management during forex trading as a price movement measurement.

The value of a pip (pip value) is done by multiplying one pip (0.0001) by the standard lot size. One standard lot size is 100,000 units of the base currency.

The pip value = (0.0001 x traded amount) / spot price