what is forex

Forex (Foreign exchange) market is an international money market where free purchase and sale of national currencies are conducted. Forex market as we know it today was formed in the 1970s after the world's leading countries switched from fixed to floating rates.
The Daily average of the Forex market is $ 4 trillion, with constantly increasing volumes of funds for Forex conversion operations .
Forex's main currency is the US dollar (USD).
Market participants:
Central banks
Commercial banks
Investment banks
Brokers and dealers
Pension funds
Insurance companies
Transnational corporations
Private investors
Forex is not a stock exchange market and has no opening and closing times. It works 24 hours a day five days a week making purchase and sale operations possible for banks all over the world at any time of the day or night (some banks work on Saturday and Sunday). As at any stock exchange market, a trade on Forex occurs according to the demand and the proposal of a certain instrument. For example, their are buyers "Euro against the Dollar", and their are sellers. Exchange rates on the Forex market are constantly changing, these changes occur virtually every second, the market is extremely liquid.
Exchange rates are influenced by:
changing interest rates
policy of central banks
economic indicators of countries at the current moment
political events
overall mood of market participants, their expectations
In spite of all these influences, the Forex market is very stable in comparison to stock exchanges and funds markets. It is not liable to devastating disruptions because decrease of the exchange rate of one currency means growth of another.
The main advantage of Forex is its close interplay within the IT sphere. Players from both hemispheres can make deals via the Internet, which makes Forex available to a huge amount of people. Even major banks use e-trade, which occupies the larges share among all variants for conducting trading operations.
These days due to the growing impact of technological development, Forex is rapidly growing on an even greater scale.