Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Forecast Forex Rates Guide

By Edy Sihombing

It's not easy to forecast the forex markets, but it's what thousands of forex traders and brokers do every day, with varying degrees of success. Like forecasting the weather, predicting the forex market is sometimes a crapshoot, sometimes a guessing game, and always an adventure.

There are two basic philosophies on how to forecast the forex markets. One is technical analysis; the other is fundamental analysis. We'll look at them both.

The technical approach examines past market action and uses that data to predict the future. Previous trends in most areas of life are almost always good indicators of the future; forex is no different. People have not changed much in the decades since the forex market was created. People still buy and sell and react to stimuli in much the same way as they did 50 years ago.

Since forex rates change constantly throughout the day, every day, looking at all the years of past data can be daunting. Smart analysts learned to look at the big picture, to skip the minor details and examine trends over a longer period of time.

Using fundamental approach to predict forex markets is a bit more detail, but it can also be highly accurate. Basically, fundamental method means forecasting the market based on external factors -- political moves, government involvement, social movements, even the weather. Someone good at fundamental analysis might forecast foreign exchanges drop-offs because he knows a country's government is unstable at the moment, or increases because the country has just elected a highly-acceptable new leader. Anything that can influence a country's economy can affect the exchange rates, and that's what a fundamental analyst uses to guess at the foreign exchanges market's future

Naturally, this means having to know a particular region in-depth, which is hard to do for more than a few nations at a time. (It becomes even more complicated when trying to forecast the euro, since several different countries use that currency.) But having that kind of intricate expertise makes it much, much easier to predict foreign exchanges future.

Most good traders use a combination of both principles, technical and fundamental. For example, a broker might see that a nation is currently facing a particularly strong hurricane season (fundamental) and know that in the past, strong hurricane seasons have meant a weaker economy for that region (technical). Thus, he can forecast down-turns for that nation with some degree of accuracy.

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