10 Fun Facts About Foreign Exchange

1. The GBPUSD currency pair is known as cable. This is because – before global satellites and fibre optics – the London and New York stock exchanges were connected using a giant steel cable under the Atlantic.

2. In foreign exchange, a pipette isn’t something you squeeze water through. It’s one tenth of a pip, or the last digit on the euro value 1.17277.

3. Optimistic traders are known as bulls, whereas downbeat ones are called bears. This (supposedly) derives from how each animal attacks, in that a bull strikes upward while a bear swipes downward.

4. More than $3.98 TRILLION are traded on the foreign exchange market each day. That’s about 53 times more than the New York stock exchange, where a measly(!) $74 billion changes hands daily.

5. The US dollar is king currency, featuring in more than 84.9% of foreign exchange trades.

6. If you want to change currencies immediately, you use a spot contract. Spot contracts are called spot contracts because the happen on the spot!

7. Foreign exchange never sleeps. Instead, the market centres on New York, London, Tokyo and Sydney, depending on who’s awake at the time.

8. Back in the mid-1990s, only banks and corporations that had $40-50m+ liquidity could trade on the foreign exchange market. The invention of the internet though means this is no longer the case!

9. Speculators make up almost 90.0% of the trading volume of the market.

10. The profit speculators stand to make depends on the liquidity in the market. Hence, it’s harder to win big during the weekends or big events like the Superbowl, because no one is trading!