Category: Advantages

The forex market never sleeps. Open 24 hours a day, 5 days a week, you can trade whenever you want to, not when the market dictates. There is no waiting for the opening bell or scrambling to get your order executed before a daily close. Trading begins with the opening of the Sydney session and closes with the New York session, by which time it starts all over again, round the clock. This means you can be as active or passive as you’d like, and trade on your own schedule – be it morning, noon, or night.

No matter if the market is rising or falling, you can trade, and some forex trading strategies even depend on the latter. You can find opportunity in any market condition and you can trade when you believe the price of a currency pair is going up or when you anticipate it going down. Some traders even thrive on high volatility periods. Although carrying more risk, these sudden price changes can be advantageous if timed right. Whether you’re following longer market trends or trading day to day movements, there is plenty of trading opportunity to be found.

Given the sheer size of the forex market and the amount of participants, no single institutional trader (no matter how big) can control market prices for an extended time period. The market quickly calibrates itself and levels the playing field. Additionally, the forex market is decentralized and there are no middlemen. You trade directly with another participant in the market and a retail forex broker simply facilitates this connection. Essentially the market is influenced directly by the economy itself, not one person or a company. You can’t corner it and you can’t control it, and that means that you’re not as small a fish as you may think.

The forex market is enormous, we’ve got that. But why is this such a good thing? One word – liquidity. What this means is that given the large volume being traded at any given moment, under normal market conditions you don’t have to wait. With a click you can buy and sell as you please, since there will usually be someone on the other end willing to trade back. You can even automate your trading. Of course the market does have its quiet hours, but generally there are always trades to be made, especially if trading popular pairs like USD/EUR and other majors.

Forex trading isn’t just for the big shots. Getting started as a forex trader doesn’t cost a lot of money, especially when compared to trading stocks or options, and it’s part of its appeal to a large number of people globally. Even without much start-up capital, forex trading is accessible to the average individual. Equiti offers trading accounts with only $500 minimum deposit, and leverage up to 1:500 is available*. This doesn’t mean that you’ll be a good trader right away, it does take time and trial to learn and become skillful, so it’s advisable to take it slow and warm your way in. Read our forex education section to build your trading knowledge

The foreign exchange (forex) market is the largest financial market in the world, and it’s not going to cede that title anytime soon. It’s not hard to see why the forex market is used as a snapshot of global trade and economic activity. On average, between $4 and 5 trillion (yes, that’s trillion with a T) is traded daily. That’s about $200 billion an hour, $3 billion a minute, $50 million a second. And with traders of all sorts participating from all over the world, it truly is the single most accessible and global trading market.