Online forex trading is now very popular, that mainly in the way of margin trading. The most commonly seen method is for investors to open an account with a forex broker and deposit an initial capital, which is also deemed as so called “margin deposit”.
The Dollar Index measures the value of USD to see if the dollar is stronger or weaker against six other currencies. Acronyms of the Dollar Index in the financial market include USDX, DXY and DX—the trading code in Futures. USDX now includes Euro (EUR), Japanese Yen (JPY), British Pound (GBP), Canadian Dollar (CAD), Swedish Krona (SEK), and Swiss Franc (CHF). However, since Euro had not been launched when USDX was introduced, the index had a currency basket of ten currencies including Deutsche Mark, Italian Lira, French Franc, Dutch Guilder and Belgian Franc in the earlier years.
A reserve currency refers to foreign exchange reserves held by a central bank or financial institutions of a country. Constituting a certain ratio, foreign currency is an important part of foreign exchange reserves of a country. Foreign exchange reserves are used in international trading and investment as well as repayment of foreign debts owed by the government. On the issuance of local currency, foreign exchange reserves also serve as a basis of the currency’s level of confidence. Higher or lower foreign exchange reserves influence the stability of exchange rate of the local currency.
Forex is the short form of “foreign exchange”. Forex trading, so called FX trading, is referring to those transactions of foreign currency. International trade requires a considerable amount of foreign currency for settlement, so “Forex” also means the foreign currency used as international settlement.
In the forex market, exchange rates are given in currency pairs. The most important concept to understand this quote is “the relative value of the two currencies.” For example, in the currency pair EUR/USD, EUR is called the base currency and USD is called the quote currency.
In the forex market, each currency is uniformly represented by three English letters. This is actually a set of currency codes, ISO 4217, an international standard developed by the International Organization for Standardization to denote currency names. At the international trading level, ISO codes are used by people for the convenience of quotation, reading, communication, etc. Banks and corporations around the world also use currency codes, and it’s not hard to see banks publish each currency exchange rate by using currency code rather than any translated name or currency symbol.
Currencies that are frequently traded and commonly seen in the forex market are called “major currencies”, based on the volume of global transactions. According to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS)2019 statistics, the most commonly traded currencies, from the highest volume to the lower, are US dollar, Euro, Japanese Yen, British Pound, Australian Dollar, Canadian Dollar, Swiss Franc, Chinese Yuan.
Margin trading is originally a hedging financial arrangement, in which buyers and sellers provide “margin”, a certain amount of deposit, to guarantee the fulfillment of future contracts.
Most of the online forex transactions are carried out by margin trading. In this article, we explain how leverage works in trading.
The use of leverage is derived from margin trading. It comes from the fact that both the buyer and the seller deposit “margin” as a guarantee to fulfill the contract in the future. Since margin is mostly calculated as a proportion of the contract size amount, that proportion is the “leverage concept”.
