What is Traded?

The simple answer is MONEY.

Because you're not buying anything physical, this kind of trading can be confusing.Think of buying a currency as buying a share in a particular country, kinda like buying stocks of a company. The price of the currency is a direct reflection of what the market thinks about the current and future health of the Japanese economy.

When you buy, say, the Japanese yen, you are basically buying a "share" in the Japanese economy. You are betting that the Japanese economy is doing well, and will even get better as time goes. Once you sell those "shares" back to the market, hopefully, you will end up with a profit.

In general, the exchange rate of a currency versus other currencies is a reflection of the condition of that country's economy, compared to other countries' economies.

By the time you graduate from this forex academy, you'll be eager to start working with currencies.
Currencies Are Traded in Pairs

Forex trading is the simultaneous buying of one currency and selling another. Currencies are traded through a broker or dealer, and are traded in pairs; for example the euro and the U.S. dollar (EUR/USD) or the British pound and the Japanese yen (GBP/JPY).
When you trade in the forex market, you buy or sell in currency pairs.

Studying Forex is crucial for beginners.

Studying Forex is crucial for beginners.
This is why we created the forex academy.
The forex academy is designed to help you acquire the skills, knowledge, and special abilities to become a successful trader in the foreign exchange market.

What is Forex?

Ok let us give this example. If you've ever traveled to another country, you usually had to find a currency exchange booth at the airport, and then exchange the money you have in your wallet (if you're a dude) or purse (if you're a lady) into the currency of the country you are visiting.

You go up to the counter and notice a screen displaying different exchange rates for different currencies. You find "Japanese yen" and think to yourself, "WOW! My one dollar is worth 100 yen?! And I have ten dollars! I'm going to be rich!!!" (This excitement is quickly killed when you stop by a shop in the airport afterwards to buy a can of soda and, all of a sudden, half your money is gone.)

When you do this, you've essentially participated in the forex market! You've exchanged one currency for another. Or in forex trading terms, assuming you're an American visiting Japan, you've sold dollars and bought yen.

Before you fly back home, you stop by the currency exchange booth to exchange the yen that you miraculously have left over (Tokyo is expensive!) and notice the exchange rates have changed. It's these changes in the exchanges rates that allow you to make money in the foreign exchange market.

The foreign exchange market, which is usually known as "forex" or "FX," is the largest financial market in the world. Compared to the measly $74 billion a day volume of the New York Stock Exchange, the foreign exchange market looks absolutely ginormous with its $4 TRILLION a day trade volume

Algorithmic trading

In electronic financial markets, algorithmic trading or automated trading, also known as algo trading, black-box trading or robo trading, is the use of computer programs for entering trading orders with the computer algorithm deciding on aspects of the order such as the timing, price, or quantity of the order, or in many cases initiating the order without human intervention.

Algorithmic trading is widely used by pension funds, mutual funds, and other buy side (investor driven) institutional traders, to divide large trades into several smaller trades in order to manage market impact, and risk Sell side traders, such as market makers and some hedge funds, provide liquidity to the market, generating and executing orders automatically.

A special class of algorithmic trading is "high-frequency trading" (HFT), in which computers make elaborate decisions to initiate orders based on information that is received electronically, before human traders are capable of processing the information they observe. This has resulted in a dramatic change of the market microstructure, particularly in the way liquidity is provided.

Algorithmic trading may be used in any investment strategy, including market making, inter-market spreading, arbitrage, or pure speculation (including trend following). The investment decision and implementation may be augmented at any stage with algorithmic support or may operate completely automatically ("on auto-pilot").

A third of all EU and US stock trades in 2006 were driven by automatic programs, or algorithms, according to Boston-based financial services industry research and consulting firm Aite Group.As of 2009, HFT firms account for 73% of all US equity trading volume.

In 2006 at the London Stock Exchange, over 40% of all orders were entered by algo traders, with 60% predicted for 2007. American markets and European markets generally have a higher proportion of algo trades than other markets, and estimates for 2008 range as high as an 80% proportion in some markets. Foreign exchange markets also have active algo trading (about 25% of orders in 2006).[6] Futures and options markets are considered to be fairly easily integrated into algorithmic trading,with about 20% of options volume expected to be computer generated by 2010.Bond markets are moving toward more access to algorithmic traders.

One of the main issues regarding HFT is the difficulty in determining just how profitable it is. A report released in August 2009 by the TABB Group, a financial services industry research firm, estimated that the 300 securities firms and hedge funds that specialize in this type of trading took in roughly US$21 billion in profits in 2008.

Algorithmic and HFT have been the subject of much public debate since the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission implicated them in the May 6, 2010 Flash Crash,when the Dow Jones Industrial Average suffered its second largest intraday point swing ever to that date, though prices quickly recovered. A July, 2011 report by the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO), an international body of securities regulators, concluded that while "algorithms and HFT technology have been used by market participants to manage their trading and risk, their usage was also clearly a contributing factor in the flash crash event of May 6, 2010."