As a DoorInvestor, my primary investment vehicle is real estate, specifically multifamily. That is always my plan. But in my (and your) journey of investing, real estate does not have to be the only vehicle, because there are many choices out there. I would like to dedicate this blog post to talk about another adventure experience – Forex.

Forex, or foreign exchange, is about trading currency. There are several reasons why investors or traders like forex:

Liquidity

If you stick with the major pairs, like EUR/USD, GBP/USD, USD/JPY, and USD/AUD, these currencies get traded very frequently and you will not need to worry about your orders not getting filled. In fact, in most cases, whatever price you are quoted with, you can expect to fill them instantly.

Leverage

Forex is one of the investment vehicles that allow trading with relatively higher leverage. To put it in comparison, stock trading usually allows 2:1 leverage with margin, but forex can give you 50:1 (I have seen 200:1 years ago). This means you only need a small amount of initial fund to secure a large position.

Availability

Forex market is one of those that “follows the sun” which means there is always some markets opened and available to trade currency. There are “peak hours” that you can expect higher volume (and volatility) , like when the New York market is opened, when the London market is opened, or when the Tokyo market is opened. But generally, you can trade forex 24 hours a day, 5 days a week (in US time zone, opens Sunday evening, and closes Friday afternoon).

Lack of Manipulation

Think of stocks in which its price can be manipulated so easily, by the institutional investors, by the market sentiment, by rumors, by the major shareholders. But in forex, the currency is tied to the country so it is not easily manipulable by individual players. Yes, there are times that the country will come in to manipulate the currency (I have seen the Yen being manipulated before), but typically those are the extreme rare cases and you rely on all of these well-established countries to know what they are doing if a manipulation is needed.

Getting Started

There are several ways to get started but the path of least resistance is to subscribe to a forex trading signal service. Of course, we all need to do our own due diligence, you certainly need to try out all of the signal services with a demo account (play money) before you commit your own real money. It won’t hurt to subscribe each service for a few months to see its performance for yourself.

A signal service can substantially reduce your learning curve by providing you their trading recommendations. You can then focus on analyzing the trade and simply decide to follow or not. That can save you tremendous amount of time, as opposed to watching the charts / news all day trying to spot a trade signal.

Check out 1000PIPBuilder.com and their reputable forex trade signal service.