The foreign exchange market differs from stock markets or futures markets in that there is no physical location or central exchange where trading takes place. Instead, the market consists of a network of large banks and dealers, with much of the trading handled over the phone. In recent years, private traders have been able to gain access to this "over-the-counter" market through retail-level currency brokers and online trading platforms.

Daily turnover in the forex market is enormous - in excess of a trillion US dollars.

85% of all transactions involve a group of currencies known as the "majors." These currencies include the US Dollar, Japanese Yen, Euro, British Pound, Swiss Franc, Canadian Dollar and Australian Dollar. About 60% of trading is concentrated in the 3 leading pairs - USD/EUR (30%), USD/JPY (20%) and GBP/USD (10%).

The interbank forex market trades seamlessly around the clock, following the sun across the globe for five days each week. Trading begins early on Monday morning in Sydney and finishes in New York on Friday afternoon, with activity usually peaking during the morning hours in London.

Quoting Conventions

In every currency transaction, a trader simultaneously buys one currency and sells another. The first currency in the pair is referred to as the base currency, and the second currency is the counter or quote currency. The U.S Dollar, as the world's dominant currency, is usually considered the base currency for quotes - e.g USD/JPY, USD/CHF, and USD/CAD. This means that quotes are expressed as a unit of $1 USD per the other currency quoted in the pair.

A quote of USD/JPY 120.05 means that 1 unit of the base currency (one US dollar) is equal to 120.05 Japanese Yen

Exceptions to this rule include the Euro, British Pound and Australian dollar. These currencies are typically quoted as US dollars per foreign currency.

dataHQ is a software package that updates end of day prices from stock exchanges around the world. Currently we have data available for the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX), Singapore Stock Exchange (SGX) and a US data service that includes AMEX, NASDAQ, NYSE and OTC exchanges, plus the major US indices.

All the exchange data subscriptions supply end of day data, except for ASX where hourly snapshots are also available.

The dataHQ Data database for all exchanges is held in Y2K compliant MetaStock^tm/Computrac compatible format. Nearly all well-known charting and analysis software packages will read this format including:

• MetaStock^tm (ver. 6.52 and above).
• TradeStation
• Advanced GET (MSFL option)
• Omnitrader (ver. 4 and above)
• SuperCharts
• AmiBroker
• Market Analyst
• Free Charts

Data Maintenance

The following actions are performed as part of regular data maintenance program:

• Prices are adjusted for changes to a company's capital base (such as stock splits, bonus issues, consolidations and rights issues).
• De-listed securities are moved from the main database into a "De-listed Securities" folder.
• Securities that have undergone a name or code change are refreshed to reflect the new name or code.
• New securities that have been added to the database are assigned their full names.

The maintenance and data updates are also applied to any custom data folders you have set up within each database.

MetaStock^tm is a registered trademark of Equis International, Inc

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