Читать книгу Currency Trading For Dummies - Kathleen Brooks - Страница 56

The forex market sits at the crossroads of global trade and international finance and investing. Whether it’s a U.S. conglomerate managing its foreign affiliates’ balance sheets or a German mutual fund launching an international stock fund, they all have to go through the forex market at some point.

Participants in the forex market generally fall into one of two categories: financial transactors and speculators. Financial transactors are active in the forex market as part of their overall business but not necessarily for currency reasons. Speculators are in it purely for the money.

The lion’s share of forex market turnover comes from speculators. Market estimates suggest that upwards of 90 percent of daily FX trading volume is based solely on speculation. We look at the types and roles of speculators later in this chapter, but here we want to introduce the players who are active in the forex markets for nonspeculative reasons.

Financial transactors are important to the forex market for several reasons:

 Their transactions can be extremely sizeable, typically hundreds of million or billions.

 Their deals are frequently one-time events.

 They are generally not price sensitive or profit maximizing.

Add up those reasons and you’re looking at potentially very large, one-off trading flows that are not really concerned with where the current market is trading or which way it’s headed. They enter the market to do their deal and then they’re gone, which can introduce an element of market inefficiency that can allow traders to take advantage of counter-trend movements.