Kept and unexplained

What is forex? — Ethiopia

Forex is the market where currencies are exchanged. It stores every price it printed, and none of the reasons behind them.

Forex — short for «foreign exchange» — is the global market where one currency is swapped for another, like euros for US dollars. Rates move all the time; money is made from those moves and lost in them the same way.

What a price carries, and what it never does

Prices come in pairs, because a currency has value only against another. EUR/USD is the price of one euro in US dollars: at 1.1000, one euro costs 1 dollar and 10 cents. Up means the euro got more expensive against the dollar; down, cheaper.

A size travels with the figure. The standard trade size — 1 lot — is 100,000 units of the first currency, 100,000 euros on EUR/USD; 0.01 lot, one hundredth of that, can be traded instead, and at that size a pip — the step from 1.1000 to 1.1001 — is worth about 10 cents. On a Standard Cent account the balance is kept in cents: $10 becomes about 1,000 small units, trades are roughly 100 times smaller, and mistakes cost cents.

So a bare figure in an old note is unreadable: «down 40» means nothing until it says forty what, at what size, on which pair.

The one line about this market that needs no date

Forex has no opening bell and no single building. It runs 24 hours a day on weekdays — when banks close in one part of the world, they are opening in another — and at weekends it rests. That timetable reads the same next year as today.

A line in an old note	Stays readable	Without a date it loses
«24 hours on weekdays»	Indefinitely	nothing
«EUR/USD is at 1.1000»	A minute	the moment it belonged to
«Expected a fall after the report»	As long as it is kept	which report, which fall

What has to sit beside a figure for it to survive

The pair, before anything else

Without it a price could have come from anywhere, and a month later nothing says where.
The clock it was read by

Yours or the one on the screen: two clocks put the same figure in two different hours.
The sentence nothing else keeps

What you expected, in your own words. A screenshot without it is one more picture of a number.

Three explanations the record does not hold

Prices move when supply and demand change, and the everyday reasons are easy to name: news — elections, conflicts, big announcements; the economy — reports on jobs, prices in shops, interest rates; and the exchanging itself, done daily by banks, companies and travellers.

None of it arrives attached to the figure; these are labels put on a finished move. No one can predict these moves reliably — not banks, not experts on TV, not beginners. A reason written beforehand is not a forecast waiting to be marked correct: it is the only version of your thinking that survives.

A trade adds figures, not reasons

An account is opened with a broker — a company that connects a trader to market prices — and trading happens from an app or a website, MetaTrader or the Exness Terminal. Most everyday traders never own the currencies: they trade a CFD, a contract that follows the price of a pair. It can go your way or against you, and both happen to everyone.

All that adds is a second column of numbers — figures again, never sentences. Before any of it there is the demo account: virtual money, free, no time limit.

Questions about a market that explains nothing

The price moved and nothing says why. Is something broken?

It does not work otherwise: the record holds the figure and the moment, never the reason.

Two currencies are named in every price. Which one is being priced?

The first; the second is what it is priced in. Keep that order and the line still reads later.

Why does a line written last month read like it is about nothing?

Usually it carried only a number: a price line survives with the pair and the day beside it.

Monday’s chart does not continue Friday’s note. Why?

The market rests at weekends, and prices can jump between Friday’s close and Monday’s open.

Which sentences about this market are still true a year from now?

The timetable, the way a pair is written, and the sizes: a lot is 100,000 units.

Is there any point in writing before an account exists?

More point then than later: a demo account is virtual money, free, with no time limit. See risk basics.

Where the other records are kept

The chart is a record too

A record of the past, not a map of the future.

Read a chart as a record

Whose record holds what

The company between a trader and the prices, and what it writes down.

See what a broker holds

Words a note has to carry

Pip, lot, spread — sorted by what can hold each word.

Sort out the words

Want somewhere to test a written expectation for nothing?

A demo account runs on virtual money: free, no time limit, a wrong note costing nothing. Demo results don’t promise the same on a real account.

Open a free demo at Exness