Don’t surprise when the next time you login to your AdSense account, a new window will be displayed containing verbose page of text. AdSense is asking publishers to accept their new terms and conditions. You don’t have to read all through the page though to get what has been modified in the past AdSense Terms of Conditions. Inside AdSense blog highlights the Terms and Conditions changes in two categories as follows;

These modifications relates to development in Google’s policy and network of contents. Regarding new features and products, Google AdSense is just anticipating other possible formats in the Google network that may be later on utilized for advertising programs.

A good example of this is the recently announced AdSense for Video link units. So the new AdSense terms and conditions reworded some parts to reflect that online advertising under the AdSense program may be available in other media and formats. The other highlights of the new AdSense terms and conditions adhere to Google’s privacy policy.

This is reflected in the new AdSense terms and conditions. The policy reiterates the need for publishers to notify their users of cookies and/or web beacons to collect data in the ad serving process. This policy would be applicable to advertisers’ use of products and features. Just accept the new terms and conditions as not doing so might block you from accessing your AdSense account later on.

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The currency market is designed to facilitate the trade of money between two parties interested in actually delivering the currency being traded. The contracts traded on the spot market are designed to settle within two business days. Since most currency trades are speculative and traders do not want an armored car full of money to show up at their house, currency dealers automatically expire open positions and roll their settlement date forward two more business days. This process, known as the rollover, takes place at the end of each trading day, around 5:00 P.M. Eastern Time. Avoiding settlement is just one benefit; the rollover process also settles interest payments to your account, depending on your open positions. Earning interest for simply holding a position open is a benefit of trading money. Each currency pair has an associated cost-of-carry premium, which is either positive to your account or negative, depending on whether you are long or short. The premium is determined roughly from the central bank rates in the currency’s home country. For example, if you are long AUD/USD while the central bank rate in Australia is 3.5 percent and the central bank rate in the United States is 0.25 percent, you should expect to be paid some of the difference between these two interest rates as calculated on the total size of your open trade. If you were short AUD/USD in this example, you should expect the difference to be debited to your account. There are some variables that affect the actual interest payment paid or charged to your account.

The actual interest rate used to calculate carry premiums is the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR). This short-term interest rate is a benchmark rate maintained on 10 currencies by the British Bankers Association (BBA). The rates are determined through a survey process conducted by the BBA of 8 to 16 contributing banks per currency. The survey determines the lowest average rate at which banks are willing to borrow funds overnight and performs a calculation on that data to determine the LIBOR. The difference in LIBOR rates between two currencies determines the base cost of carry for your open position in the forex market. If you are interested in the specific details of how LIBOR is calculated, I recommend you visit the LIBOR web site at www.bbalibor.com.

Let’s look at an example to understand how the carry premium is calculated using the LIBOR during the nightly rollover.

Assume that you have bought 100,000 units of GBP/USD. In this trade you are buying the British pound and selling the U.S. dollar. If the LIBOR for GBP is 2.4775 percent and the LIBOR for USD is 2.07 percent, the difference between the two currencies is 0.4075 percent. The difference is multiplied by your total position size, in this case, 100,000 × 0.004075, which equals 407.5 units of currency. LIBOR rates are annual yields; therefore, 407.5 represents the annual yield. Divide 407.5 by 360 days to determine the nightly interest premium, which is 1.13 units of currency. If the base currency in your trade is different than the currency your account is funded in, you must also multiply the interest payment by the currency exchange rate to convert the interest payment to your account’s currency. The current GBP/USD exchange rate is $1.5928. The final calculation to convert 1.13 to dollars is 1.13 × 1.5928, which equals a final nightly premium of 1.79 units of currency.

The amount actually charged or credited to your position may vary by broker because many brokers derive income from the overnight swap payments before passing those rates on to you. Brokers routinely publish their swap rates for each currency and typically post them on their web sites. Traders should be aware of these rates and understand that holding a position against the carry could cause them to pay significant interest if they plan to hold the position open for a long period of time. Finally, traders should be aware that on Wednesdays the interest premium is triple the normal amount. This accounts for positions that are set to be settled on Saturdays or Sundays, when the market is essentially closed, by setting their valuation date to Mondays.

In the forex market, all price quotes are represented by two prices, known as the bid price and the ask price. Both the bid price and ask price represent the exchange rate of the base currency pair against the quoted pair, except they serve two different functions. The bid price indicates the price at which your currency dealer is willing to buy the base currency from you in exchange for the quoted currency. 

The ask price indicates the price at which your currency dealer is willing to sell you the base pair in exchange for the quoted currency. There is always a difference between the bid price and the ask price; this difference is known as the spread. The spread is usually less than five pips on major currency pairs. Cross-currency pairs such as GBP/JPY may have much higher spreads. The spread is the way a currency dealer earns money for executing a trade. Figure 1.2 shows the difference between the bid and ask prices offered in the forex market. The difference between the two prices is known as the spread.

Using the prices quoted in Figure 1.2, if a trader wanted to buy EUR/USD, his currency dealer would sell it to him using the ask price of $1.4002. To sell the position at least at breakeven, the trader needs the bid price to move up two pips, to $1.4002. Alternatively, if a trader wanted to sell the EUR/USD, the currency dealer would sell it to him at the bid price of $1.4000 and the trader would need the market to fall by two pips before he could sell it at the ask price for a breakeven trade. The two-pip spread in this EUR/USD example is the cost of doing business with this currency dealer.

The terms long and short simply refer to the position a trader has taken with a trade the trader has either bought or sold it.

The term long simply means that you have bought the currency; the term short means you have sold it. For example, if a trader decides to buy GBP/USD, it means she has gone long British pounds and short U.S. dollars because she has bought the GBP and sold the USD.

The term pip is an acronym for percentage in points and is used to measure the change in exchange rates on the forex market. 

A single pip represents the smallest possible decimal change a currency quote may move, and it is the standard on which profit and loss are calculated. Currencies are quoted in decimal format to 1/1,000th of a percent unless the currency pair contains the Japanese yen. Currencies quoted against the Japanese yen are in decimal format to 1/100th of a percent. Using a quote for GBP/USD as an example, a change in price from $1.5600 to $1.5650 represents a change of 50 pips.

Currency Lots

Currencies are traded in standard lot sizes to facilitate efficient trading on the forex market. The standard retail lot is 100,000 units of the base currency. Most currency dealers offer 10,000-unit mini lots and 1,000-unit micro lots. Some currency dealers offer a 100-unit nano lot. Positions can be sized larger by purchasing multiple lots. Fortunately, you don’t actually need $100,000 in your trading account to buy a single standard currency lot. Currency dealers offer various levels of leverage, allowing you to control full-sized lots with significantly less capital in your account. We discuss margin and leverage later in this title.

How a Currency Trade Works

The way a currency is simultaneously bought and sold during a trade is confusing for many new traders, so an example will help clarify what happens under the hood of a currency trade. 

Assume for a minute that you are interested in buying the British pound against the U.S. dollar, which is listed as GBP/USD in your trading software. The base pair is the British pound; the quoted pair is the U.S. dollar. If the quoted exchange rate is $1.59 and you are trading one standard lot of currency, it will require 159,000 dollars to buy one British pound, or it will require selling 100,000 pounds to buy 159,000 dollars. 

Since we are interested in buying the pound, we want the exchange rate to increase, allowing us to sell our pounds at a higher rate for more dollars than we sold to buy the original 100,000 pounds. As an

example, Table 1.5 illustrates how a currency trader realizes a profit or a loss using a single standard lot GBP/USD currency trade. 

Trading currency is a process of exchanging one currency for another, so each currency trade is actually two transactions happening at the same time. One currency is bought while the other is sold. The forex market quotes prices as currency pairs to facilitate the ease of trading one currency for another. The quote of a currency pair represents the number of units of one currency that are required to buy or sell the equivalent amount of the other, based on the given exchange rate. 

For example, if the exchange rate between the U.S. dollar and the Canadian dollar is $1.12, a trader may purchase 1.12 Canadian dollars for every one U.S. dollar, or she can buy one dollar for every 1.12 Canadian dollars. Your goal as a currency trader is to hold the currency you believe will gain value against the other currency quoted in the pair. It really is as simple as that.

Currency Pairs

Each currency pair is made up of two parts: the base currency and the quote currency. For example, the U.S. dollar/Canadian dollar example we just discussed is paired as USD/CAD. The base currency is always to the left of the slash (/) mark; the quoted currency is always to the right of 

the slash. It is the direction of the base currency you consider when deciding whether to buy a currency pair or sell it. If you believe the base currency will appreciate against the quoted currency, you will buy the currency pair. If you believe the base currency will depreciate against the quoted currency, you will sell the currency pair. This is an important distinction for new traders to remember because it is easy to buy by accident when you meant to sell. Currency pairs offered on the forex market are constructed using currency from both developed and emerging markets.

Table 1.4 lists the most common currencies, their countries, and their International Standards Organization (ISO) codes used in the forex market to construct currency pairs. 

Major Pairs Major currency pairs are created by pairing currencies from countries with highly developed economies and financial systems. Major currency pairs are the most liquid and heavily traded currency pairs on the forex market. Currencies among the majors include the euro, U.S. dollar, British pound, Swiss franc, Japanese yen, Australian dollar, and Canadian dollar.

Cross-Pairs Some currencies are not directly quoted against each other; rather, they are synthetically traded by combining two different pairs. These pairs, known as cross-pairs, include currency pairs such as GBP/JPY, EUR/JPY, EUR/CHF, and GBP/CHF. When a trader executes a trade to buy GBP/JPY, the trade is really constructed by buying GBP/USD and selling USD/JPY. The dollar component of this trade is equaled out and the trader ends up long GBP and short JPY. Because these pairs are constructed with two different currency pairs, the spread or cost to trade a cross-pair is significantly more than a typical major currency pair, such as EUR/USD.

Trade Mechanics of Forex 02

I do believe it is important to have some knowledge of the market’s history, so this section covers the key points. If you have never studied global monetary systems, consider this section an abridged history of the forex market. The modern forex market’s roots began with over-the-counter currency trading desks established by banks throughout the 1970s and 1980s, following the collapse of a postwar-era monetary system known as the Bretton Woods system. Bretton Woods was established in June 1944, as World War II came to a close. The Allied nations sought to establish a new monetary system to promote global investment and capitalism and to eliminate the challenges of a gold standard system. 

Under the Bretton Woods monetary system, member nations agreed to value their currency at parity to gold ±1 percent and then set their exchange rate against the U.S. dollar. In exchange, the United States agreed to peg the dollar against a gold standard of $35 per ounce and guarantee its exchange for gold. This promise by the U.S. government effectively made the dollar a global payment standard instead of using a gold standard. The phrase “good as gold” was frequently used to describe the U.S. dollar under the Bretton Woods monetary system. Although the system worked to foster investment and capitalism, it also encouraged a tremendous outflow of dollars into overseas currency reserves. 

The world needed dollars to support a global payment system based on the dollar, and the United States was content printing more money. The United States assumed it could balance the deficit with trade. Unfortunately, the outflow of capital finally caught up to the Unites States in 1950 and the country began posting a negative balance of payments, despite the government’s best efforts to increase trade.

As inflationary concerns loomed on the horizon, the United States found itself in a difficult position. Failing to supply the global demand for dollars would bring the monetary system to its knees, whereas continuing to print money would eventually threaten to devalue the dollar. Confidence in the U.S. government’s ability to maintain a gold match standard for the dollar began to wane, and speculation grew that a serious devaluation in the world’s primary reserve currency was inevitable. 

In August 1971, President Richard Nixon finally intervened by suspending the peg dollar had against gold. The Bretton Woods era of a fixed exchange rate system was over. Policy steps were taken to implement a floating exchange rate system, which is the cornerstone of today’s modern forex market. In the 1970s trading desks were established among major banking institutions to facilitate currency transactions for major clients. This private trading arrangement was known as the interbank, a term still used today to describe the electronic trading arrangements among major banks, institutions, and currency dealers. Today prices are determined by the forces of supply and demand within the forex market, allowing traders to capitalize on small swings between the exchange rates of two currencies.

The currency market, or more specifically the forex (Introduction to forex) market, derives its name from the generic term foreign exchange market. The forex market is a decentralized global network of trading partners, including banks, public and private institutions, retail dealers, speculators, and central banks involved in the business of buying and selling money. The forex market is a spot market, which means that it trades at the current market price as determined by supply and demand within the marketplace. 

This differs from currency futures traded on the commodity exchange in the United States, which trades a contract price for delivery in the future. In the spot market you are trading cash for cash at the current market price.

The forex market is the largest, fastest-growing financial marketplace in the world. Every trading day the forex market handles a transaction volume of nearly $3.2 trillion, according to a survey done by the Triennial Central Bank in 2007. 

To put that figure in perspective, the average daily volume on the forex market is nearly 20 times larger than on the New York Stock Exchange. The need for foreign exchange is driven by travelers, multinational corporations, and governments. Tourists from the United States need euros for their European vacations; corporations such as Microsoft exchange profits made overseas into U.S. dollars. Governments hold reserve currencies and manipulate the money supply while they implement their monetary policies.

The forex market was created to facilitate the sale of currency to customers who intend to take delivery of the currency; however, the vast majority of trading is done by speculators seeking nothing more than profit.