Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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Currency Crosses Are Trend-y
Since a majority of the forex market will deal with the U.S. dollar, you can imagine that many of the news reports will cause U.S. dollar-based currency pairs to spike. The US has the largest economy in the world, and as a result, speculators react strongly to U.S. news reports, even if it doesn’t cause…
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Why Trade Currency Crosses?
Over 80% of the transactions in the forex market involve the U.S. dollar. This is because the U.S. dollar is the reserve currency in the world. You may be asking yourself, “Why the U.S. dollar and not the sterling, or euro?” Most agricultural and commodities such as oil are priced in U.S. dollars. If a country needs to…
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What is a Currency Cross Pair?
Back in the ancient days, if someone wanted to change currencies, they would first have to convert their currencies into U.S. dollars, and only then could they convert their dollars into the currency they desired. The U.S. dollar was known as a “vehicle currency” since the currency was used as the medium of exchange for…
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Market Expectations of News and Their Impact on Currencies
There’s no one “All in” or “Bet the Farm” formula for success when it comes to predicting how the market will react to data reports or market events or even why it reacts the way it does. You can draw on the fact that there’s usually an initial response, which is usually short-lived, but full of…
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Where to Find Forex News and Market Data
A quick Yahoogleing (that’s Yahoo, Google, plus Bing) search of “forex + news” or “forex + data” returns a measly 30 million results combined. 30 MILLION! That’s right! No wonder you’re here to get some education! There’s just way too much information to try to process and way too many things to confuse any newbie forex trader.…
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Fundamental Factors That Affect Currency Values
There are several fundamental factors that help shape the long-term strength or weakness of the major currencies and will affect you as a forex trader. We’ve included what we think are the most important for your reading pleasure: Economic Growth and Outlook We start easy with the economy and outlook held by consumers, businesses, and…
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Hawkish vs Dovish: Differences Between Monetary Policies
We just learned that currency prices are affected a great deal by changes in a country’s interest rates. We now know that interest rates are ultimately affected by a central bank’s view on the economy and price stability, which influence monetary policy. Central banks operate like most other businesses in that they have a leader, a president,…
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How Monetary Policy Affects the Forex Market
As we mentioned earlier, national governments and their corresponding central banking authorities formulate monetary policy to achieve certain economic mandates or goals. Central banks and monetary policy go hand-in-hand, so you can’t talk about one without talking about the other. While some of these mandates and goals are very similar between the world’s central bank,…
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Why Interest Rates Matter to Forex Traders
Interest rates make the forex world go ’round! In other words, the forex market is ruled by global interest rates. A currency’s interest rate is probably the biggest factor in determining the perceived value of a currency. So knowing how a country’s central bank sets its monetary policy, such as interest rate decisions, is a crucial thing to…
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What is Fundamental Analysis?
Along your travels, you’ve undoubtedly come across Gulliver, Frodo, and the topic of fundamental analysis. Wait a minute… We’ve already given you a teaser about fundamental analysis during Kindergarten! Now let’s get to the nitty-gritty! What is it exactly and will I need to use it? Well, fundamental analysis is the study of fundamentals! That was easy,…
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