Saturday, October 31, 2009

Is Foreign Exchange Currency Trading Too Risky For Your Investment Blood ?

By Arthur U. Fellon

The story was once told by a proud father of his young boy who previously had no business sense or acumen what so ever. It seems that this young lad had parlayed a meager sum of his money and cash into a rather large sum of funds simply by changing his wealth on a regular basis from one currency to another. As the young fellow instructed his father. Anyone can do it. You simply read the newspaper for current currency rates. It does not cost anything. Then I went to the bank and purchased traveler's checks , which to his good fortune his bank included in his service fee package. If the paper told me that dollars went up , I cashed in my US dollar denominated Amex travelers checks. If British pound sterling was low , I would use those funds to buy units in that currency. Add in Japanese Yen and E.U. European money into the mix , and all in all you have a simple explanation of forex , foreign currency trading. Interestingly the young man was able to place down a substantial down payment for a substantial new home in Coquitlam Canada.

In business and investments , money is always changing hands . What goes up and some point goes down. Buy low and sell high is the refrain. This is the whole point of the exercise - to buy specific currencies when they are being sold at a lower rate than would be expected and sell these same holdings either at a higher value at a given point in time , and yet at other times to even dump holdings before times get even worse for the party in question. No trader can ever be right 100 % of the time , just as no stock broker can be unfailingly accurate each and every trade. It is a numbers game overall - the winner picks the best and wisest choice in the highest percentages of trades. Its a simple as that.

It used to be that forex - the trading of foreign currencies was a highly specialized series of financial products only available to major corporations and governments. If a retail customer was "lucky" enough to get involved via a syndicate setup at their stock brokerage of choice - that was their good or bad fortune. The national banks of many large or even unsubstantial countries are also involved in these commodities , either as fiscal policy to shore up or regulate varying national and international currency levels and values. Major firms would also "hedge" their bets by purchasing different brands and forms of financial valuations and instruments in an effort to remove risks and variations in their export product pricing levels.

Not to get caught up for rank forex foreign currency novice and beginner traders who think that but of course markets - be they of retail goods, consumables , investments , stocks , bonds and in this case foreign denominated currency holdings are driven by strict facts and analysis of these facts think again. Most markets are driven by greed and human emotion and emotions. Put panic , and investors getting carried away with their limited skills and perceptions as well as the human foible of overextending themselves financially and you have a recipe for disaster for some , and huge profits to made on forex trading conversions for others. The refrain for some of "how much lower can this currency go" - be it Mexican Pesos , US dollars or others - is that often the bottom has not been reached yet.

There are ways to protect you in such a volatile market such as stop loss trading. This is where you set a lower limit below which you do not want to pass and if the currency pair drops below this your trade will be made, there by protecting you from any further drop in the currency value. - 23309

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