Stock V/S Foreign Currencies trading and Managed Funds

For over a century now, Stocks have been heavily traded and known to the average USA investor and non-investor alike. In essence, when you buy a stock you are purchasing a stake of ownership in the company. When buying a stock, you are doing so with the belief the value of that company's stock will go up. There is a lot of information available to the public about company's who's stocks are available for purchase, so significant research can be done to determine the merits of these company's stocks.

Since the currency market became available to the public in the late 90's, several advantages to trading currencies over stocks have been observed.

The first and most important advantage is the liquidity. Currently, approximately $3.2trillion flows through the currency market everyday. If you were to take the entire global stock market, along with all the commodities, derivatives, bond markets, etc. and put all the other global markets into one pool, it would still be smaller than the Forex market. Liquidity gives you several advantages when it comes to trading. One: you will likely get faster execution as there will be more of a market available at most prices quoted. Two: it is virtually impossible to corner or seriously manipulate the FX market or any particular currency you are trading. Three: when you are trading stocks, anyone who wants to buy a stock wants it to go up in value, whereas in FX, people may purchase a currency with no intention of profit. Some examples are multi-national corporations who have to exchange funds for business purposes, or central banks working to stabilize their economy. The bottom line is when it comes to participants, in the stock market, there has to be one winner and one loser, whereas this is not always the case in currencies.

The second critical advantage to trading currencies over stocks is that you can trade FX 24 hours a day 6 days a week from Sunday 5pm EST to Friday 4pm EST. This provides significantly more trading opportunities and also reduces the chance of overnight gaps which happen often while trading stocks due to information coming out which can affect that particular stock when you cannot trade it.

A third advantage is the leverage; prime stock accounts get maybe 2:1 leverage, with currencies you can get up to 400:1 which gives you more purchasing power.

A fourth advantage; with stocks your accounts can and often do go below their original value with you actually owing money to your broker. In contrast most FX trading companies have automatic algorithms built into their platforms to close out all positions if the equity value hits a zero balance, yielding more equity protection.

A fifth advantage; back to liquidity, which tends to make market prices smoother since there is more money to make the market, giving technical analysis much more potency.

A sixth advantage; it is much easier to manipulate a stock price since all orders flow through one central exchange whereby the 'specialists' have many advantages that are unavailable to the average investor. Another challenge is that companies can easily manipulate their accounting or perform illegal activities which can falsely effect their perceived value. In contrast there are too many protocols in the FX market to do this.

A seventh advantage; companies can receive bad press and even fail and stock prices can drop extremely fast, much faster from a percentage perspective in comparison to currencies. If the company fails, your stock is worthless while with currencies, the chance of a G-8 country's dollar or base currency becoming worthless is extremely unlikely. As we have seen in the recent market volatility and global credit crisis, companies that appeared to be stable (Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Wachovia, etc.) have all failed. Countries within the G-8 are much more stable unions than individual companies.

While most of the money trading stocks is made by buying the stocks, currencies are traded both up and down and there is never an entire bear or bull market. This is because as one currency goes up, another must go down but they cannot all do this together.

This informational comparison should give the potential investor a clearer picture about the unique differences between the stock market and the currency market and the clear advantages the currency market holds.