There are three important concepts in Forex trading that you must understand in order to find your way in the currency markets. These concepts are "Pips", "Volume", and "Buying" and "Selling Short". They may look more like four concepts but buying and selling are like the two faces of the same coin so we can consider them as a single concept.
Lets first talk about what Pips are. It is common when reading literature about forex trading to find statements about how many pips a day you can make using some trading system or the other. In short, currency pairs prices will go out to 4 significant digits. For example; if one currency pair is trading for 1.3458 then an increase to 1.3459 would be a "one-pip" increase in the price of this particular currency. This is an increase of one hundredth of a percent of the value of the currency pair you are trading. And depending if you have a regular or mini account, each pip will have a value of $10 or $1.
Now lets talk about what Volume is; the Trading Volume is a quantity that tells forex traders how much money is being traded at one particular moment in the market. The currency markets are known by their high trading volume during most of the time markets are open. Usually there are spikes in the volume during some type of news breaks and during the time New York stock exchange is open. The volume of transactions in Forex, even in a slow day, will always be much higher than the volume traded in other large exchanges at their full capacity.
Perhaps the most obvious of the concepts in forex is that of Buying. It refers to the acquisition of a particular currency pair to open a trade. Selling short refers to the selling of a particular currency to open a trade. When you Buy, you do this because you are expecting the price of the currency pair to increase with time, i.e., you buy cheap to sell high. In the case of Selling short, it’s a bit more complicated, but just at the beginning. Here the way to make money is to initially sell a currency pair that you think will lose value in a given period of time and then, once it happened, you will buy it back at the new price but now you can sell it at the previous greater price the currency had when you opened the trade, so you earn the difference in prices. It may seem kind of tricky for new traders to grab this concept of earning by Selling but once you are in front of your trading station it will look much simpler.
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Written By: Adrian Pablo
