The Basics of Reading a Forex Quote
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Newcomers are baffled by the foreign exchange market and a source of confusion is the price of foreign exchange. This small piece of information contained in the budget of foreign exchange is full of numbers that may not make sense for the unknown eyes to see this information. Here is a basic explanation of how it works.
Currency trading involves selling one currency and buying another. It also contains a bid price and ask price. A phrase might look like this, USD / JPY 118.71/75
What exactly is this number USD/JPY118.71 is actually an abbreviation of two numbers to U.S. $ 118.75 The first base currency value of the base is always 1 in this case, $ 1 U.S. dollar, the training sets the number of trading of the currency, the Japanese yen JPY, you can buy with $ U.S. $ 1.
The 118.71 is the price of the offer or sale price is 118.75 and the purchase price. Therefore, according to this example, you can sell $ 1 to $ 118.71 Japanese yen, or you can buy $ 1 U.S. $ 118.75 Japanese yen.
The spread is the difference between the bid price and ask price, and each unit is called a pip. In our example the spread of USD / JPY is 4 points. In most of the currencies traded spread is by usually small. Some may even be stretching as small as 1 pip due to competition in the trading market.
Less currency markets have a greater spread, but even the smallest stretches to ride when it comes to hundreds of thousands of units.
Source: EzineArticles

March 7th, 2009 at 5:09 am
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