Bids, offers and spreads

When you are in front of a real time feed of markets quotes you will see two prices for currency pair. There are two prices you see on your trading screen. Bid price is the price at which you can sell your currency pair. If the currency pair is liquid it means you can sell your currency pair without impacting the price. Otherwise big traders or trading algorithms can  move prices.

Offer price is the price at which you can buy currency pair. Spread is the difference between the bid price and offer price. If gap is bigger it  means that when you will want to sell or cover short position you profit will be lower for that gap, or your loss will be even bigger because of that gap. So be carefull which currencies you trade, that there is enough liqudity and small gaps.

Currency pairs

To simplify matters, forex markets means that currencies are

being traded in pairs. Symbol are combined of two currencies that are

traded against each other. Major currency pairs include most important

world currencies. Major currencies pairs are: EUR/USD, USD/JPY, GBP/USD,

USD/CHF, AUD/USD...

Majority of trading goes to american dollar pairs, although other currencies pairs

are also traded. Forex markets consist of a lot of different currency pairs,so news and

other factors affect every currency pair different. You can exploit some major news,

like FED meetings, economy news for each currency pair indepent of each other.