Forex Course

With this free 15-lesson video course you will learn about the most important concepts about Forex

The foreign exchange market, also known as Forex (short for Foreign Exchange), FX or Currency Market, is a global, decentralized market in which currencies are traded.

This market was born with the aim of facilitating the monetary flow derived from international trade. It is by far the largest financial market in the world, moving a daily transaction volume of around five trillion US dollars (USD), more than all other stock markets on the planet combined. It has grown so much that, currently, the total number of operations in foreign currency that are due to international operations of goods and services represent an almost residual percentage, most of them being due to the purchase and sale of financial assets. Consequently, this market is quite independent of actual trade operations, and the variations between the price of two currencies cannot be explained exclusively by variations in trade flows.

According to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), preliminary global results from the 2019 Triennial Banking Market Foreign Exchange and Derivatives Trading Survey show that trading in foreign exchange markets averaged $6.6 trillion per day in April 2019. This is up from $5.1 trillion in April 2016. In that year, for the first time in 15 years, the volume of foreign exchange trading has contracted between two consecutive triennial BIS surveys. The decline in operations by leveraged institutions and "fast money" traders, as well as reduced risk appetite, has led to a significant decline in spot market activity. This has been partly offset by increased activity in currency derivatives, mainly for hedging purposes