How to Trade Forex | Forex Trading Examples (2024)

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: spot forex or trading forex via a broker.

SPOT FOREX TRADING

A spot forex position is a way to trade on currency price movements that involves forecasting the direction in which a forex pair’s price is headed. The further it moves in that direction, the greater your profit. The further it moves in the opposite direction, the more you lose. The actual amount that you make or lose is determined by the size of your trade.

All spot forex trades take advantage of leverage. Leverage allows traders to get exposure to large amounts of currency without having to pay the full value of their trade upfront. Instead, you only put down a deposit known as margin.

LEVERAGE EXAMPLE

The amount you gain or lose will still be calculated based on the full size of your position, though. So your profits and losses can be far greater than the amount you put down to open the trade, and your losses can sometimes even exceed your initial deposit.

Find out more about how a spot forex trade works.

FOREX TRADING VIA A BROKER

Forex trading via a broker – or sometimes via a bank – works in a broadly similar way to retail trading. You’re speculating on the price movements of currency pairs without actually taking ownership of the currencies themselves. If you think a currency pair’s price is headed down, you can go short instead of long.