You no doubt know someone who is making a full-time living from currency trading. When these traders talk about what they do, they often make it sound terribly complicated. What follows is a brief currency trading tutorial to make you familiar with the basics.

What does forex trading involve? A currency trader, similar to a trader in any other market, buys products and hopes to sell them at a profit in future. In his case the product is a foreign currency and not gold or cattle, for example.

Why would someone choose forex trading as a career? The answer is not hard: if you know what you are doing, you can make excellent money from currency trading. Traders very often double their money in a matter of a few hours. Of course they often lose a lot of money in a small time as well.

What do you have to do to become a currency trader? It’s quite simple. There are a large number of websites on the Internet where you can get a free demo currency trading account. You can start simulated trading immediately without having to invest anything right now.

Does a demo account simulate a real account in every aspect? Normally the answer to this is yes. The only difference will be that you aren’t trading with actual money, so you can’t lose anything.

When should you buy a currency and when should you sell? If you had the answer to this, you would be making millions on the currency markets every day. The rule is simple: buy when prices are at their lowest and sell when they are at their highest. There are many free software packages on the web which will help you make a choice in this regard. They use technical indicators to trigger buy and sell signals.

What is meant by a technical indicator? These are a set of statistical formulas developed to analyse price movements of a trading instrument to try and predict when the next upswing or down swing is going to start. A well loved example is the moving average, which is used by many traders to determine when they should buy a currency.

How much knowledge of statistics do you need to analyse these technical indicators? You don’t need a lot of statistical knowledge. The majority of the available software packages will show movements in the various technical indicators in the form of charts, so you can visually see where the market is going.

Is it possible to get free live price quotes? There are a number of currency trading sites which give their customers access to live currency prices. Some of them charge for this privilege and only give delayed prices at no charge. Delayed prices are not updated in real time, but every few minutes, hours or even days.

We have tried to cover the basics in this small currency trading tutorial. There’s a large number of websites on the Internet where you can get more tutorials. You should make sure that you are familiar with the basic principles of trading before you start trading with real money.