How to trade Forex

When you learn how to trade FX, it’s not hard to see why it is such a popular market among traders. You’ll discover there’s a huge number of different currency pairs to trade – from majors to emerging currencies to exotics – 24 hours a day. Learn how to trade forex using CFDs or a forex broker, how the forex market works and see an example of a forex trade.

Forex trading steps

Learning how to trade any market can seem daunting, so we’ve broken forex trading down into some simple steps to help you get started:

Decide how you’d like to trade forex

Learn how the forex market works

Open an account

Build a trading plan

Choose your forex trading platform

Open monitor and close your first position

Decide how you’d like to trade forex

A lot of forex trading takes place between major banks and financial institutions, which buy and sell massive amounts of currency every single day. For individual traders who don’t have the means to make billion-dollar forex trades, though, there are two main ways to get involved: forex CFDs or trading forex via a broker.

What is a forex CFD?

A forex CFD is a contract in which you agree to exchange the difference in price of a currency pair from when you open your position to when you close it. Open a long position, and if the forex position increases in price you’ll make a profit. If it drops in price, you’ll make a loss. Open a short position, and the opposite is true.

Forex trading examples

Trading a GBP/EUR CFD

GBP/EUR is trading at 1.1284, with a buy price of 1.1285 and a sell price of 1.1283, giving it a spread of 2 points. You think that the pound is set to gain value against the euro, so you decide to buy the market at 1.1285.

The size of a CFD position is measured in contracts, with each contract equal to a single lot of the base currency in the pair. In this case, buying a single GBP/EUR CFD is the equivalent of trading £100,000 for €112,850. You decide to buy three CFDs, giving you a total position size of €338,550 (£300,000). This means you’ll earn €30 for every point of movement.

CFDs are a leveraged product, so you don’t have pay the full value of your position upfront. GBP/EUR has a margin factor of 3.33%, so you’ll need to commit €11,273.71 as margin.