Trading currency in the Forex market centers around the basic concepts of buying and selling.
Let's take the idea of buying first. What if you
bought something (it could literally be almost anything...a house, a
piece of jewelry or a stock) and it went up in value. If you sold it at
that point, you would have made a profit...the difference between what
you paid originally and the greater value that the item is worth now.
Currency trading is the same way...
Let's say you want to buy the AUDUSD currency pair.
If the AUD goes up in value relative to the USD and then you sell it,
you will have made a profit. A trader in this example would be buying
the AUD and selling the USD at the same time.
For example if the AUDUSD pair was bought at 1.0615
and the pair moved up to 1.0700 at the time that the trade was
closed/exited, the profit on the trade would have been 85 pips. (See the
chart below…)
Had the pair moved down to 1.0600 before the trade was closed, the loss on the trade would have been 40 pips.
Also, it makes no difference which currency pair you
are trading. If the price of the currency you are buying goes up from
the time you bought it, you will have made a profit.
Here is another example using the AUD. In this case
we still want to buy the AUD but let’s do this with the EURAUD currency
pair. In this instance we would sell
the pair. We would be selling the EUR and buying the AUD
simultaneously. Should the AUD go up relative to the EUR we would profit
as we bought the AUD.
In this example if we sold the EURAUD pair at 1.2320
and the price moved down to 1.2250 when we closed the position, we
would have made a profit of 70 pips. Had the pair moved up instead and
we closed out the position at 1.2360 we would have had a loss of 40 pips
on the trade.
Remember, we are always buying or selling the
currency on the left side of the pair. If we buy the currency on the
left side, which is called the base currency, we are selling the one on
the right side which is called the cross or counter currency. The
opposite would be true if we were selling the currency on the left side.
Now let's take a look at how a trader can make a
profit by selling a currency pair. This concept is a little trickier to
understand than buying. It is based on the idea of selling something
that you borrowed as opposed to selling something that you own.
In the case of currency trading, when taking a sell position you would borrow
the currency in the pair that you were selling from your broker (this
all takes place seamlessly within the trading station when the trade is
executed) and if the price went down, you would then sell it back to the
broker at the lower price. The difference between the price at which
you borrowed it (the higher price) and the price at which you sold it
back to them (the lower price) would be your profit.
For example, let’s say a trader believes that the
USD will go down relative to the JPY. In this case the trader would want
to sell the USDJPY pair. They would be selling the USD and buying the
JPY at the same time. The trader would be borrowing the USD from their
broker when they execute the trade. If the trade moved in their favor
the JPY would increase in value and the USD would decrease. At the point
where they closed out the trade, their profits from the JPY increasing
in value would be used to pay back the broker for the borrowed USD at
the now lower price. After paying back the broker, the remainder would
be their profit on the trade.
For example, let’s say the trader shorted the USDJPY
pair at 76.28. If the pair did in fact move down and the trader
closed/exited the position at 75.81, the profit on the trade would be 47
pips.
On the other hand, if the pair was shorted at 76.28
and the pair did not move down but rather it moved up to 76.50 when the
position was closed, there would be a loss on the trade of 22 pips.
In a nutshell, this how you can make a profit from selling something that you do not own.
In wrapping up, if you buy a currency pair and it
moves up, that trade would show a profit. If you sell a currency pair
and it moves down, that trade would show a profit.
