Market and device

What is forex? · India

Forex is the market where currencies are exchanged. This page reads it from a phone, and keeps apart what the market does from what a screen only shows.

Forex — short for «foreign exchange» — is the global market where one currency is swapped for another, euros for US dollars. Rates change constantly, and traders make and lose money on the changes. A phone shows them and can trade them; it neither causes them nor holds them.

Two timetables that never line up

Forex has no single building and no opening bell. It runs 24 hours a day on weekdays: when banks close in one part of the world, others are opening. At the weekend the market rests, though prices can jump between Friday’s close and Monday’s open.

A pocket device has the opposite habit: switched on all day, as available at midnight as at noon. Neither fact says anything about the other.

Trading is offered through the Exness Trade app on a phone, the Exness Terminal in a web browser, and MetaTrader 4 / MetaTrader 5. Three ways in; none of them is the market.

What carries on while the screen is dark

Almost nothing a beginner meets on a phone is kept in the phone. Sorted by where each part sits:

The part	Where it sits	What shutting the app does to it
The rate	In the market, wherever currencies are exchanged	Nothing; it changes, watched or not
The pair, and which way it reads	In how the price is written	Nothing
A trade already opened	With the broker, on the trading server	Nothing; it stays open until closed
The picture of the price	Drawn on the device from the market’s numbers	It stops; the numbers do not
Your attention and your hand	On the device, nowhere else	They stop with it

The last row is the one a device really owns.

A rate belongs to the market, not to the screen showing it

Currencies are priced in pairs, because a currency has a value only against another. EUR/USD is the price of one euro measured in dollars: at 1.1000 a euro costs a dollar and ten cents. Higher, and the euro got more expensive against the dollar; lower, and it got cheaper.

The first currency is the thing priced, the second is what it is priced in, and no screen is consulted about it. Rates move as supply and demand change, and no one predicts those moves reliably.

Four figures a smaller screen leaves alone

Size is where a beginner expects the device to matter, and where it matters least.

Figure	What it is	Set by
1 lot	100,000 units of the first currency	The standard size of this market
0.01 lot	A hundredth of it, and what a beginner trades	The smallest size accepted
One pip	1.1000 becoming 1.1001 — about 10 cents at 0.01 lot	Arithmetic, once the size is known
A Standard Cent account	Balance kept in cents: $10 becomes about 1,000 small units, trades roughly 100 times smaller	The account, never the device

Before any of them is real there is the demo account: virtual money, free, no time limit.

Questions a market raises when the screen is always in reach

Does the market notice that the app was shut?

It does not. Rates are made where currencies are exchanged; shutting the app removes the view, not the market.

Why does the market stop at the weekend when the device never does?

Because the market is banks and businesses, not a program. Their working week ends; the device’s does not.

Why is Monday’s first number sometimes nowhere near Friday’s last one?

Prices can jump across the break: the market stopped, the reasons prices move did not, and nothing on the device went wrong.

Is the rate on a phone the same one seen anywhere else?

A rate is what the market is doing; a screen only passes it on. How much fits at a time belongs to reading a chart.

Is there an opening bell to be on time for?

There is none, and no single building either — on weekdays the activity simply moves round the clock.

Can the moves be worked out by watching them long enough?

Longer watching produces more looking, not more certainty. A pocket market only makes checking again easier — see risk basics.

If no currency ever arrives, what is being traded?

Most everyday traders hold no currency: they trade a CFD through a broker, a contract that follows the price of a pair.

Can this market be followed before any money is involved?

Yes. A demo account runs on virtual money, is free, has no time limit, and keeps the same hours.

Where this goes next

What is a broker?

Who brings this market to a screen, and which part of it is on the device.

See what a broker does

Trading words

Pip, lot, spread, leverage — sorted by where the thing named lives.

Sort the words

Risk basics

What a market in your pocket changes about how often a trade gets touched.

Read the risk rules

Want to watch this market move before a single figure is real?

A demo account runs on virtual money: free, no time limit, mistakes cost nothing. Demo results do not promise the same on a real account.

Open a free demo at Exness