How does currency trading work?

luckat

How does trading in currencies work?

For instance, the grouping-together of the traders who took advantage of a run on the baht a few years back?

Any good stories of funny or clever deals?

Capt'n Midnight

No.

Its just when speculators have enough money relative to government reserve funds they can affect the market price by selling low or whatever and then clean up by calling in contracts or whatever.

I'd consider it to be a form of fraud/insider trading

luckat

Yes indeedy. I suppose I'm looking for people who know this inside out, and also for entertaining scam stories about money moving in giant waves around the world - hot money rather than pinginni fuara...

fintan

buy a book on the topic?

for example ugly americans, the sink, george soros casino moscow, mr china, infectious greed, fiasco, fooled by randomness, bombardiers, liars poker

not all of those are forex related but there any amount of books out there full of interesting trading stories

luckat

Excellent list, thanks very much! I'll read them all.

blocparty

fintan wrote:

buy a book on the topic?

for example ugly americans, the sink, george soros casino moscow, mr china, infectious greed, fiasco, fooled by randomness, bombardiers, liars poker

not all of those are forex related but there any amount of books out there full of interesting trading stories

ive read ugly americans and it is excellent. im a studnent so i cant afford them all so if you could please recommend one or two of the ones you mentioned. i love reading books about trading and am currently studying to be one

fintan

i don't think i could recommend any of them above others, they are all interesting in different ways.

But if I was to suggest the first book to buy it would be "Fooled by Randomness" by Nassam Nicholas Taleb

x.x.x

tell you what what instead of getting involved with options, go to vegas, drink as much as you can with as many pretty girls as you can then play some roulette, your chances of making some money are about the same ( exceptions aside )

dunkamania

x.x.x wrote:

tell you what what instead of getting involved with options,

Who mentioned options?

x.x.x

...currency options

dunkamania

Now I understand,

The issue with options as I see it is most amateur traders dont fully understand

A. how price is affected by volatility

B. how price is affected by time value decay

There are more straight forward ways to trade currencies,

forwards,futures or forex come to mind

TabulaRasa22

Anyone have any opinions on how China loosening up its currency restrictions might affect global currency markets? Like the euro strengthening perhaps (good news for those of us with foreign investments)?

ctrl-alt-delete

blocparty wrote:

i love reading books about trading and am currently studying to be one

Im sorry but i just had to laugh at that

phantom_lord

fintan wrote:

liars poker

I read that, I thought it was an excellent book. It had only been taken out of the library once in the last ten years....

Henry McConville

fintan wrote: »

buy a book on the topic?

for example ugly americans, the sink, george soros casino moscow, mr china, infectious greed, fiasco, fooled by randomness, bombardiers, liars poker

not all of those are forex related but there any amount of books out there full of interesting trading stories

Ugly Americans, what a book!