FOREX Description

FOREX (Foreign Exchange Market) is a global currency market based on the exchange of one country's currency for another at a rate agreed on on a certain date.

FOREX has no physical location. It is an enormous network of currency dealers who are interconnected by means of telecommunication services, concentrated in all major world financial centers and working 24 hours a day as a single apparatus. The main participants in the currency market are commercial banks, currency exchanges, central banks, export trading companies, investment funds, broker companies and individuals

At the present moment, the main currencies that comprise the bulk of all FOREX transactions are the US dollar (USD), the euro (EUR), the Japanese yen (JPY), the Swiss frank (CHF) and the British pound sterling (GBP). The world daily conversion transactions volume is about US$2,000,000,000,000. The London market has about 30% of the turnover, US markets have 60%, German ones have 10% of it. The US dollar is used in 70% of transactions. Electronic brokers' share is now 85% of the FOREX market volume.

The daily transactions volume of major international banks (Deutsche Bank, Barclays Bank, Union Bank of Switzerland, CityBank, Chase Manhattan Bank, Standard Chartered Bank) reaches billions of dollars. Currency purchase and sale operations that are actually carried out on the second working day after the deal was made are called spot operations or current conversion operations.

Typical interbank trade transactions volume averages out at $10,000,000, but thanks to the margin trading system the market is also accessible to entities with limited funds. Brokers who render margin trading services require a security deposit and let the client carry out purchase and sale operations totaling 100 to 200 times as much as the paid-in deposit sum. The risk of loss is borne by the client and the deposit is a security for the broker.