The forex market, also known as the foreign exchange market or FX market, is a global marketplace for buying and selling currencies. It operates 24 hours a day, five days a week, and is the largest financial market in the world by trading volume cross over $5 trillion

When trading in the forex market, you’re essentially buying or selling one country’s currency relative to another. Unlike a foreign exchanger at the airport, there’s no physical exchange of money between parties

In electronic markets, traders take positions in specific currencies, hoping for upward movement and strength in the currency they’re buying (or weakness in the currency they’re selling) to make benefits.

Currencies are always traded in pairs. When you sell one currency, you’re buying another, and when you buy one currency, you’re selling another 

One of the key advantages Forex has over other financial instruments is that relatively small lot sizes can be traded – lot sizes can be as small as 0.01 (one micro lot). Typically, FX markets also involves leverage which in some cases can be as high as 1:500, which is very different to physically exchanging currency at the airport.