A currency trader, also known as a foreign exchange trader or forex trader, is a person who trades currencies on the foreign exchange. Forex traders include professionals employed to trade for a financial firm or group of clients, but they also include amateur traders who trade for their own financial gain either as a hobby or to make a living.

Forex trading demands that you keep a close eye on constantly changing exchange rates in order to be successful. Learn more about how these markets work and what it takes to do well as a forex currency trader.

What Is a Forex Currency Trader?

Forex traders use currency exchange rates to try to profit from trading foreign currencies. As currencies rise or fall in value in relation to each other, traders try to predict these changes and buy or sell accordingly.

Trading in foreign currencies is riskier than many other forms of investing, and not something in which just any trader should engage. With the chance of big profits comes the risk of huge losses, so it's important to understand how this market works before you decide to become a forex trader.

How the Forex Market Works

The foreign exchange currency market, also known as forex, is the world's largest financial market. More than $5 trillion are traded on the exchange every day—that's 25 times the volume of global equities.﻿﻿ The majority of the world's currency is traded through this huge, highly decentralized marketplace. It has several trading centers, but the main ones are located in Tokyo, London, and New York. This allows the market to operate 24 hours a day, five days a week.﻿﻿

Currencies on the forex are represented by three-letter abbreviations, such as USD for the U.S. dollar, EUR for the euro, and JPY for the Japanese yen. Transactions are quoted in pairs such as EUR/USD.﻿﻿

The U.S. dollar is involved in just about every major currency pair because it is the reserve currency of the world.

To understand how forex trading works, consider this example. Let's say the British pound (GBP) is quoted at $1.1510. This means that you could buy 1,000 British pounds for $1,150 U.S. dollars. If the asking price is $1.1511, we can see that the spread is relatively low—it's the difference between the bid ($1.1510) and the ask ($1.1511).

Say you buy 10,000 GBP at $1.1511. If the pound rises to a selling price of $1.1622, you may then sell your position. Your profit equals 10,000 times the difference between the price at which you bought ($1.1511) and the selling price ($1.1662). So your profit would be $151.

How to Become a Forex Currency Trader

There are three ways to trade foreign currency exchange rates:

On an exchange regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission On an exchange regulated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission In the off-market exchange (also known as over-the-counter trades) ﻿ ﻿

Once you know where you'll want to trade, you'll need to open a brokerage account. A few well-known U.S. forex brokers include:

FOREX.com

Thinkorswim by TD Ameritrade

Interactive Brokers

Most large U.S. stockbrokers offer forex trading as well. If you currently have a brokerage account, it's likely you can begin forex trading through your stockbroker. In most cases, you simply need to fill out a short online currency-trading application. If you're opening a new forex account, you'll begin by making a small deposit.

Some brokers, such as FOREX.com, will allow you to open an account with as little as 100 of your base currency, though they may recommend you deposit more in order to have more flexibility and risk management with trades.

Once you've opened your account, you begin trading by selecting the currencies you want to trade. Currencies on the forex always come in pairs. As the value of one of the currency pairs rises, the other falls. Most beginning traders should trade only the most-widely traded currencies, such as the U.S. dollar, the British pound, or the euro because they tend to be the most liquid and have the smallest spreads. The forex spread is the charge that the trading specialist, effectively a middleman, charges both the buyer and seller for managing the trade.﻿﻿

Risks of Forex Currency Trading

As indicated in the example trade described above, currency trades are highly leveraged. This means you can use small amounts of money to buy currencies worth much more than what you're putting in. Beginning currency traders may be attracted to the possibility of making large trades from a relatively small account, but this also means that even a small account can lose a lot of money.

Forex traders can lose more than the value of their initial investment if they are not careful.

Another risk to consider is that the quoting conventions are not uniform. Many are quoted against the U.S. dollar, but there's no regulation or standard for quoting conventions in the forex market. Because of this, you have to know the specific meaning of the quotes for the currency in which you're trading, or you risk losing money unwittingly.

And don't forget about fraud. Whether you're choosing to trade on a regulated exchange or in the off-market exchange, beware of any scheme that says you can get rich quick.﻿﻿

Practice Forex Before You Start

One way to begin forex trading without any real consequences is to open a practice forex trading account. For example, FOREX.com offers a demo account and thinkorswim offers a virtual trading tool. Practice accounts typically open with a large amount of virtual money. This may help you learn how to trade forex without spending real money. If after a few dozen practice trades you see that you're trading profitably, you may try your hand at a real forex trading account.