Compare Forex to Traditional Stock Exchange

Although the Foreign exchange market, or Forex, is the youngest market in the world, it is the largest in terms of daily volume traded, as well as the fastest growing market in the world. There are some important differences between the traditional stock market, and for the purposes of this article we will be talking about the New York Stock Exchange, or NYSE.

Hours of trading of the NYSE are quite limited. The NYSE opens up at 9:30am New York time on Mondays through Fridays, and closes at 4:00pm on the same days. That comes out to 32.5 weekly hours of trading. In contrast the Forex market is open 24 hours a day, 5 days per week. That comes to 120 total trading hours, a very large difference.

The NYSE is quite complicated due to the large number of companies listed there, whose daily behavior is almost impossible to predict. The Forex however only trades currencies, and it is possible to follow only certain currencies in comparison to major currencies such as dollars or pounds. The fluctuations in the prices of these currencies are much more subject to economic news or other current events, making predictions about the direction a currency might go more reliable.