Forex – Foreign Exchange Trading and Market

Forex or foreign exchange is the financial trading system that cultivates the international currency market.

Archive for forex trading

Financial Intermediaries

Financial intermediaries, including depository institutions (commercial banks, savings banks, credit unions) and insurers (life, health, property and casualty), can be grouped by the composition of their balance sheets (nature of their assets and liabilities and the asset transformations they undertake) or their ownership structure, the origin of their corporate charters, and/or the identity of their regulators.

Like financial markets, financial intermediaries are highly specialized. Sometimes called the indirect method of finance, intermediaries, like markets, link investors/lenders/savers to borrowers/entrepreneurs/spenders but do so in an ingenious way, by transforming assets.

Financial intermediaries are sometimes categorized according to the type of asset transformations they undertake.

Due to deregulation, though, the lines between different types of depository institutions have blurred in recent years.

Insurance companies are also divided between mutual and joint-stock corporations. They issue contracts or policies that mature or come due should some contingency occur, which is a mechanism for spreading and sharing risks.

The third major type of intermediary is the investment company, a category that includes pension and government retirement funds, which transform corporate bonds and stocks into annuities, and mutual funds and money market mutual funds, which transform diverse portfolios of capital and money market instruments, respectively, into non-negotiable but easily redeemable “shares.”

Wright, Robert E., , and Vincenzo Quadrini. Money and Banking. 2009 . Flat World Knowledge. 27 Jun, 2009. .

Financial Markets – Primary Markets and Secondary Markets

Financial markets come in a variety of flavors to accommodate the wide array of financial instruments or securities that have been found beneficial to both borrowers and lenders over the years.

Primary markets are where newly created (issued) instruments are sold for the first time.

Most securities are negotiable. In other words, they can be sold to other investors at will in what are called secondary markets.

Financial markets can be categorized or grouped by issuance (primary versus secondary markets), type of instrument (stock, bond, derivative), or market organization (exchange or OTC).

Most capital market instruments, including mortgages (loans on real estate collateral), corporate bonds, government bonds, and commercial and consumer loans, have fixed maturities ranging from a year to several hundred years, though most capital market instruments issued today have maturities of thirty years or less.

Financial instruments can be grouped by time to maturity (money versus capital) or type of obligation (stock, bond, derivative).

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Financial System

Financiers are not innately good or evil but rather, like other people, can be either, or can even be both simultaneously.

While some financiers are brilliant, they are not infallible, and fancy math does not reality make.

The financial system is a dense network of interrelated markets and intermediaries that allocates capital and shares risks by linking savers to spenders, investors to entrepreneurs, lenders to borrowers, and the risk-averse to risk-takers.

It also increases gains from trade by providing payment services and facilitating intertemporal trade.

A financial system is necessary because few businesses can rely on internal finance alone.

Specialized financial firms that have achieved minimum efficient scale are better at connecting investors to entrepreneurs than non-financial individuals and companies.

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Financial Terms You Need To Know

Derivatives refer not to calculus (though calculus helps to calculate their value) but to financial instruments for trading risks. Interest is not necessarily interesting. Stocks are not alive nor are they holding places for criminals. Zeroes can be quite valuable. CDs don’t contain music. Yield curves are sometimes straight lines. Principal is a sum of money or an owner, not the administrative head of a high school.

In finance, unlike in retail or publishing, returns are a good thing. Military-style acronyms and jargon also abound: 4X, A/I, Basel II, B.I.G., CAMELS, CRA, DIDMCA, FIRREA, GDP, IMF, LIBOR, m, NASDAQ, NCD, NOW, OTS, r, SOX, TIPS, TRAPS.

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