When you see advertisements and sales pitches for the Forex Markets they often simply prey on your desire for fast and easy money. While it is possible to make money pretty quickly trading Forex, it isn’t as easy as they’d like you to believe. However, there are some distinct advantages to trading Forex over the stock market.
The first reason that’s applicable to anyone with a day job is the fact that Forex is a 24 hour market. A trader can trade any time they can set aside some free time between Sunday and Friday evening. This allows you to have the security of a day job backing you up, and releases some of the stress of urgency created by the need to generate an income.
Secondly, forex day trading isn’t subject to the Pattern Day Trader (PDT) rules imposed by the SEC on stock traders. If you don’t know what PDT rules are, the most difficult part for people to overcome is the requirement of having $25,000 in your trading account if you make more than 3 day trades in a week. The forex market has no such rules, and brokers allow you to open accounts for as little as $500, and will afford you leverages up to 1:100. This allows you to purchase enough of a currency pair to make a decent, albeit small, profit, and to make as many trades as necessary.
Finally, liquidity is never a problem with Forex. The forex is the largest market in the world, and is limited to a relatively small amount of currency pairs. While you could possibly get stuck in a position on the stock market, this is impossible with forex. There will always be someone there to take the opposite side of your trade.
If you’ve considered the option of day trading for a living, you might want to look at forex. It allows you a lot of flexibility as far as trading hours go, it has a relatively low barrier of entry with the ability to start an account with such a small amount of capital, and you never have to worry about the fear of getting bullied into a losing position by market players who are bigger and faster than you.