How About Currency Trading? (Part II)
Posted on August 14, 2009
Filed Under Casino Gambling |
The most active traded crosses focus on the three non USD currencies (EUR, JPY and GBP). These crosses are known as the euro crosses, yen crosses and the sterling crosses. The most actively traded cross currency pairs are: EUR/CHF, EUR/GBP, EUR/JPY, GBP/JPY, AUD/JPY and NZD/JPY. Crosses enable currency traders to directly target trades to specific individual currencies to take advantage of news or events.
For a new traded there are some surprises in currency trading. You may notice that the currencies are combined in a seemingly strange way when you look up at the currency pairs. For example, if euro-yen (EUR/JPY) is a euro-yen cross, why it is not being also referred to as yen-euro (JPY/EUR)? The answer is these conventions have been designed to reflect traditionally strong currencies versus traditionally weak currencies with the strong currency coming first. Those quoting conventions were evolved over the years.
The most basic convention that you need to understand is that the first currency in the currency pair is known as the base currency. For example in EUR/JPY, Euro is the base currency. Suppose you buy or sell a currency pair. It is the base currency that you are buying or selling when you buy or sell a currency pair. The second currency in the pair is known as the counter or secondary currency. In the above currency pair, Japanese Yen (JPY) is the counter or secondary currency. So if you buy 100,000 EUR/USD. You have just bought 100,000 Euros and sold the equivalent amount in dollars.
So currency trading involves simultaneously buying and selling. Going long in currency trading means having bough a currency pair! When you are long, you are looking for the prices to go higher. So you can sell at a higher price that where you bought.
In currency trading, going short means selling a currency pair! In other words, you have sold the currency pair, meaning you have sold the base currency and bought the counter or secondary currency. You go short in anticipation of the price going further down when you anticipate the price of a currency pair going down. This will make you a profit later when you exit your position by going long. Unlike stock trading where you had to observe the up tick rule before you could go short. In currency trading there is no such rule. In currency trading going short is as common as going long.
If you have an open position and you want to close it, its called squaring up. If you are short, you need to buy to square up. If you are long, you need to sell to go flat. Selling high and buying low is the standard currency trading strategy. Having no position in the market is known as being square or flat.
When you open an online currency trading account, you will need to pony up cash as collateral to support the margin requirements established by your broker. A clear understanding of how P&L works is especially critical to online margin trading. Profit and Loss is how traders measure success and failure.
Profit and Loss (P&L) calculations are pretty straight forward. P&L calculations are based on position size and the number of pips you make or lose. Most of the currency pairs are quoted up to four decimal places except those involving JPY. Currency pairs involving JPY on one side are only quoted up to 2 decimal places. A pip is the smallest increment of price fluctuation in currency pairs. Suppose CHF/USD quote is 1.2233. It has gone up by 20 pips if the price moves from 1.2233 to 1.2253. Pip is the increase or decrease in the fourth decimal digit. Pips are also referred to as points. It is an abbreviation of Percentage in Points.
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