Poker Players and the Foreign Exchange Market

Highly successful live and online poker players often have trouble finding the proper destination for all the money they generate at the green felt. It is often said that in order to be successful, a poker player needs to develop a very peculiar vision in regards to the nature of money: he or she has to be able not to view it as currency but rather as a sort of fuel, the sole destination of which is to help him or her reach a goal, and that goal is to win hands and to amass even more chips. While this sort of mentality may be a requirement at the green felt, that doesn't mean that it is particularly helpful in real life. In fact, it may explain why so many poker players get infatuated with gambling, and despite knowing that the odds are stacked sky-high against them, they take their hard-earned dollars to the casino tables and they often burn through them like they are nothing but dry foliage. Phil Ivey, one of the most successful poker players, is an avid gambler, as is Mike Matusow and several others, some of whom are textbook examples in how successful people can end up destroying their own lives and burying themselves in debt (Brad Booth).

Such players use the skills acquired at the poker tables in the worst possible manner. There are others however who are savvy enough to take the best of their poker skills and put to them to good use elsewhere. For someone who knows how a poker player's mind operates and what he needs to achieve in order to attain a higher level of poker thought, it doesn't come as a surprise that many successful poker players are also successful Forex traders.

Nowadays, the Internet has pretty much been filled up with Forex trading ads, and thus the whole concept has been degraded into shrug-off worthy background noise. While a complete layman, without any sort of understanding of statistics, probabilities, odds and various handicapping techniques, will indeed find it quite impossible to turn a profit trading currencies, someone familiar with all the above said issues can and will indeed make things work.

The foreign exchange market is an excellent playground filled with countless opportunities for those of the right mindset. There is indeed no other market out there that even comes close to the Forex in any way. When most people think of trading, they think of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), however the Forex far exceeds the NYSE in every respect. Unbound by physical limitations, the actual size of the foreign exchange market is only limited by the number of traders looking to buy currency which they can later sell for more, thus turning a profit. While the exact size of the foreign exchange market is quite impossible to pinpoint, it is estimated that it is about 54 times bigger than the NYSE. What this means for poker players turned traders is that there is a great deal of liquidity in the Forex. Liquidity is indeed one of the main advantages offered by the foreign exchange market. Around 80% of the Forex trading volume is made up of trades which involve the US dollar one way or another.

The explanation behind this fact is simple: not only is the US economy the world’s biggest, backed by a massive population/stable government/cutting-edge military, the US dollar is also used as the state reserve currency by every country.

Currencies are always traded in pairs, for example EUR/USD, or GBP/USD.

How does one make money through forex trading?

The object of currency trading is quite obvious. The trader purchases one type of currency with the expectation that the value of the said currency will rise and he’ll be able to sell at one point, generating a profit. Through repeated successful trades, a steady stream of profits can indeed be generated without any kind of additional effort. Trading Forex binary options is even simpler: one simply wagers on whether the index of a given currency pair will rise or fall. While currency rates usually don’t move as much as commodities in response to certain local or global events and in consequence, they can a bit more difficult to figure out, it generally pays to trade Forex binaries because the market offers a series of rather significant advantages.

Advantages of Forex Trading

Leverage is the key word when it comes to Forex advantages as pointed out at www.intellitraders.com. Most binary options beginners come into the game on meager bankrolls. While it generally takes money to make money, in the case of Forex, this is not always true. Most Forex brokers offer some pretty breath-taking leverage. Traders on a $10k bankroll can trade $5 million worth with a 500:1 leverage, which means their profits can soar (but then again, so can their losses).

Besides high liquidity, high leverage and the 24h trading system (the Forex never sleeps), Forex also offers limited liability, automatic rollover and two-way profits.

Forex doesn’t feature any commissions either. Unlike most other services of its ilk, Forex trading doesn’t cut into trader profits through exchange, data, clearing or brokerage fees. The only fee the trader pays is an under 1% bid/ask spread.

Many Forex brokers will toss demo accounts into the mix, which offer traders the chance to gain access to real time data charts, and pretty much everything that real money traders have at their disposal, which means they can actually give it a realistic go before they risk any money on trading.

These are obviously only the very basics of Forex trading. Those truly interested in putting their poker related skills to use in the foreign exchange market will find sites out there like www.etorocopytrader.com, which feature virtual trading academies where all the required skills can be acquired and all aspects of the activity can be mastered.