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The spread is the difference between the purchase price and the sale price of a currency pair. For the most popular currency pairs, the spread is often low, sometimes even less than a pip! For pairs that don’t trade as often, the spread tends to be much higher. Before a Forex trade becomes profitable, the value of…

The term CFD stands for “Contract for Difference”. It is a contract used to represent the movement in the prices of financial instruments. In Forex terms, this means that instead of buying and selling large amounts of currency, you can take advantage of price movements without having to own the asset itself. Along with Forex,…

This when traders buy and sell within a day. Day trading is a common trading strategy. However, if someone day trades, they may also make long term investments as well (a long-term portfolio). The following two terms only apply to share trading:

A proportion of the earnings of a company that is paid out to its shareholders, the people who own their stock. These dividends are paid out either quarterly (four times per year) or annually (once per year). Not every company pays its shareholders dividends. For example, companies that offer penny stocks likely don’t pay dividends.

The opposite of a bear market is a bull market. When the stock market is experiencing a period of rising stock prices, we call it a Bear Market. An individual stock, as well as a sector, can also be called bullish or bearish.

The bid is the price traders are willing to pay per share. It is set against the ask price, which is the price sellers are willing to sell their shares for. What do we call the difference between the bid and the ask price? The spread.