So, having looked at all the various marketplaces in which you can trade, you’re interested in the leverage and 24 hr / 5+ day possibilities of the ForEx market. All you need is some decent research so that you can put your trading plan into operation, and you can look forward to trading for a living! But how do you know that you are getting the best ForEx research available, a factor that is crucial for your success?

Well, first you could Google on “ForEx research”, and look at the results.  If you do, you might be disappointed – not with the number of results, but with the quality of the sites that you are directed to.  Probably because of the recent popularity of the ForEx idea, with its promise of highly leveraged profits and trading when you find convenient, you will find that a significant number of the results lead on only to a mixture of paid advertisements for other websites.  I found two sites with any value on the first search page, which also included a site that was four months out of date!  Www.forex.com has been doing a lot of television advertising recently, and it is one of the genuine websites that does not just provide a feed site for RSS articles and pay-per-click advertisements, but provides real content.

You may not know that you can also search easily for news items, which are thus recent and have the date and time displayed, on the major search engines.  While these won’t track the minute by minute movements of the markets, they will give you the latest news which may affect the global economies.  The sites that I use are news.search.yahoo.com and news.google.com, and it is worth adding these to your favorites menu.

How else are you able to get valuable ForEx research online, so that you can trade with confidence?  The best way would be to subscribe to a web service, perhaps but not necessarily associated with your broker.  In this way you would always know that you were getting current information – some of the free feeds are time delayed, which can be detrimental to your trading in a fast moving market.  A subscription to a service such as that at www.netpicks.com will give you real time alerts as well as trading information, and provides a good basis for your trading activity.  There are several blogs available for ForEx, and many are free to register.  You may not know who is doing the blogging, and if you rely on their opinions you can be disappointed with the results, but they will give you another view of the market.

By the way, if you are used to other markets, there are some apparent relationships with ForEx that you should know – for instance, when the price of gold rises, the Australian dollar also goes up.  The Canadian dollar tends to follow the price of oil.  And the EUR/JPY (Euro v. the Japanese Yen) tends to follow the movements of the Dow Index.  These are not hard relationships, but you would be surprised how often the currencies are in step with the indicators given.  This will give you a flying start to your ForEx trading career!