This article is based on Grace Cheng works, the foundator and the editor of the GraceCheng.com site totally devoted to the european currency market forex trading market happenings and news. She is as well the author of the “7 winning strategies for forex trading” book (2007) and is the creator of the PowerFXCourse – world currency market online training course.

Real time currency market trading is based on selling one currency and parallel purchasing another currency. It’s the larges global financial market. It’s even larger than the fund market. Daily turnover of the currency forex market trading is exceeding 3 trillions USD. It’s a global network of currency buyers and sellers, an off-stock market, where the transactions are operated by brokers. World currency market schedule is 25/5 and it’s a one more market peculiarity as other markets have some specific time of opening and closing the market.

Forex brokers may trade practically any currency. Currencies as a rule are denoted by three letters, where the first and the second denote a country and the third is the name of the currency. The most popular with the traders are the US dollar (USD), Euro (EUR), Japanese Yen (JPY), British pound (GBP), Swiss frank (CHF), Canadian dollar (CAD), Australian dollar (AUD). The currency rates rises and falls respectively another currency. For example, if you say that USD is going down, it’s not understandable what is going on as it may mean that the USD is falling respectively Australian dollar, and rising respectively Euro. Therefore the currencies are always traded in pairs. The pairs are denoted as EUR/USD. The first is given in the primary and the second – on a diverse quot. The major trading currencies are four and they are called “majors”:
EUR/USD USD/CHF GBP/USD USD/JPY

As you see, Euro, Swiss frank, English pound and Japanese Yen are traded via American dollar. Every pair has own peculiarities that are influencing their movements.