Banks facilitate forex transactions for clients and conduct speculative trades from their own trading desks. When banks act as dealers for clients, the bid-ask spread represents the bank's profits. Speculative currency trades are executed to profit on currency fluctuations.
The foreign exchange or forex market is the largest financial market in the world – larger even than the stock market, with a daily volume of $6.6 trillion, according to the 2019 Triennial Central Bank Survey of FX and OTC derivatives markets.1 The digital site where one currency is exchanged for another, the forex market has a lot of unique attributes that may come as a surprise for new traders. In this article we will take an introductory look at forex, and how and why traders are increasingly flocking toward this type of trading.
There are 180 different kinds of official currencies in the world. However, most international forex trades and payments are made using the U.S. dollar, British pound, Japanese yen, and the euro. Other popular currency trading instruments include the Australian dollar, Swiss franc, Canadian dollar, and New Zealand dollar.
The forex market not only has many players but many types of players. Here we go through some of the major types of institutions and traders in forex markets:
Currency can be traded through spot transactions, forwards, swaps and option contracts where the underlying instrument is a currency. Currency trading occurs continuously around the world, 24 hours a day, five days a week.
The greatest volume of currency is traded in the interbank market. This is where banks of all sizes trade currency with each other and through electronic networks. Big banks account for a large percentage of total currency volume trades. Banks facilitate forex transactions for clients and conduct speculative trades from their own trading desks.
Central banks, which represent their nation's government, are extremely important players in the forex market. Open market operations and interest rate policies of central banks influence currency rates to a very large extent.
A central bank is responsible for fixing the price of its native currency on forex. This is the exchange rate regime by which its currency will trade in the open market. Exchange rate regimes are divided into floating, fixed and pegged types.
ForexTB MT4 is an ordinary MetaTrader 4 trading platform. This is a third party application owned by MetaTader company. ForexTB traders don’t have to pay for it. Actually, no retail trader pays for MT subscription. This is a feature that a broker normally pays for. The broker buys this subscription from MetaTrader and gets the license to offer this trading platform to its customers. The fee is rather big, but nobody said it’s cheap to become a broker.
Once you download an MT4 application from the ForexTB website, you start using the app ForexTb paid for. Mt4 is probably the most well-known app among forex traders. Not the prettiest one, is you ask my opinion about design, yet the functionality of the platform really is impressive. With ForexTB MT4 you gonna have access to all the features that MT worked on for decades. All kinds of built-in and custom indicators, Expert Advisors, charting tools, dozens of timeframes will help you improve your trading experience. Moreover, MT4 developers had enough time since 2005 to fix all the possible bugs and do all the necessary improvements to the platform. Yeah, I understand I sound like an MT4 fan but I warned that I really am, so that’s yet another opinion of an experienced trader that tried some other trading platfroms too.