Everything you need to know about EFX trading
The foreign exchange market, often shortened to Forex or FX, is a global decentralized market for traders looking to exchange currencies. This market, in fact, traces back to ancient times, as money-changers exchanged people’s currencies and made profits by taking commissions. Nowadays, we’ve evolved far past that – with EFX trading becoming the largest trading phenomenon worldwide.
What is EFX trading?
EFX trading, or Electronic Forex Trading, takes the foreign exchange market to an entirely new level. Using an online trading platform, traders can effortlessly open and close positions at will, no matter where in the world they currently are. EFX offers lower trading costs and streamlines the entire process, increasing people’s access to the Forex market and making trading easy and accessible.
A short history of electronic trading platforms
Before electronic trading became a thing, person-to-person trades were performed on physical exchanges around the world. Hand signals and speech were used to place trades – which could often be misinterpreted, causing a wrong trade to be placed.
In 1971, the first electronic trading platform was created – the Nasdaq Stock Market. The system quickly rose to popularity, with other platforms popping up all over the world, like Globex or E*Trade. Nowadays, no trade happens without technology being involved in one way or another, drastically increasing accessibility to traders located far from popular physical exchanges.
The benefits of EFX trading
There are many benefits to EFX trading, apart from just streamlining the process and increasing accessibility around the world. Thanks to being fully-electronic, Forex markets can be accessed 24/7, 5 days a week. EFX also made Forex trading much more efficient, as the costs for traders are much lower. Most of the world’s currencies are available for electronic trading, and all you need is a platform and an account to start.
When trading EFX, traders operate on currency pairs, buying one currency while at the same time selling another. The most popular currency pairs currently are EUR/USD, USD/JPY, GBP/USD, AUD/USD, USD/CAD, and USD/CNY.