Make Money with Forex Trading
Bookstores in Japan are packed solid with stories of high school girls or housewives making millions by trading currencies on their mobile phones. I’ve also got friends or friends who make ridiculous amounts of money by staring at computer screens all day trying to figure out the “forex” or “Fx” market.
To be honest to me it all just looks like gambling and I although I’d like to try it once someday, the idea of short term forex trading doesn’t seem that appealing.
Long term as well then investing in currencies isn’t generally a good thing as in the end they all should balance out, unlike shares or property which should, over the long run, rise in value. Obviously things don’t always work out as they “should”, but you get what I mean.
How I do it
But if you do any type of working online then you’ll automatically be playing forex because you’ll have customers all over the world paying you in different currencies. If you take a medium term view of things and move this money around wisely then you can indeed profit from exchange rate variations.
For example in 2008 the Japanese yen was incredibly low and the British pound was incredibly high. One pound was worth about 240 yen. So for me it was much cheaper to spend as much time as possible in Japan as everything was so cheap. Plus I kept all my savings in yen.
But then when the financial crisis hit the pound plumetted and the yen skyrocketed. So I quickly started moving all my yen savings into British pounds. As far as I was concerned I’d made a nice profit as instead of needing 240 yen to buy each pound I moved the bulk of it at 180 yen to the pound. As it happens the yen went even higher to be around 130, which means if I had waited I could have made even more. But that’s with hindsight, I could have ended up making even less!
Similar things tend to happen every decade or so. So for me exchange rates aren’t something I worry about too much. I do have an exchange rate calculator on my google desktop and when things look good I do transfer some money across, but not on a regular basis. I’ve been doing this for over ten years so that’s the time frame I tend to think in.
But if you like a little risk then have a go at more short term forex trading if you like. A lot of the online brokerages offer free demo accounts so you can try without losing any money. And although it’s not a job where you are actually making anything, for some people it can be an exciting ride!