Trading Forex vs Stocks: What's the difference?
Anyone new to trading is likely to wonder, "Which is better: Forex or stocks?". Let's begin answering our question with a little economics 101. We find ourselves today in a low interest rate environment. Central banks around the world are still wrestling with low growth for the most part. Loose monetary policy has been their main answer over the years. So what's the upshot for you?To get more news about forex vs. stock, you can visit wikifx.com official website.
Basically, leaving money in the bank does you little good. In many of the major economies, interest paid on savings is less than the rate of inflation. As a natural result, people are searching for better alternatives to invest their money into, such as the well-established financial markets of Forex and stocks. This article will consider the pros and cons of Forex vs stock trading.
FX vs Stock Trading: Markets
There is no hard or fast answer to the question of which is better, forex vs stock trading. Whether we are talking about for experienced traders or the stock market vs Forex trading for beginners, when comparing, there will be benefits and drawbacks for each market and for each type of trader.
It ultimately comes down to how important those features are to you personally. Let's take a look at an overview of each market first, and then we can move on to drawing some conclusions about Forex vs. stock trading.
What is Forex:
The Forex market is decentralized. It represents a trading network of participants from around the world. The large players in the Forex market include investment banks, central banks, hedge funds, and commercial companies.
What are Stocks:
Stock market trading is the overarching name given to the combined group of buyers and sellers of shares, or or people trading stocks. Shares in a company, as the name suggests, offer a share in the ownership. Usually, though not always, these transactions are conducted on stock exchanges. In order to raise capital, many companies choose to float shares of their stock.
Stock exchanges provide a transparent, regulated, and convenient marketplace for buyers to conduct business with sellers. Trading on these exchanges has historically been conducted by "open outcry," but the trend in recent years has been strongly toward electronic trading.
Stock market trading is immensely popular, but it is exceeded in size by the Forex market, which is the largest financial market in the world. When we weigh up the stock market vs Forex trading in terms of size, Forex takes the round. Why do we care about the size? The greater the size of the Forex market, the greater its liquidity will be.
If you are considering stock market trading to build your portfolio with the best shares for 2021, you need to have access to the best products available. One such product is Invest.MT5. Invest.MT5 enables you to start trading stocks and ETFs across 15 of the world's largest stock exchanges with the MetaTrader 5 trading platform.
Other benefits include free real-time market data, premium market updates, zero account maintenance fee, low transaction commissions, and dividend payouts.
Comparing Liquidity
The next important aspect to consider in the Forex vs stock trading debate is liquidity. The Forex market is extremely liquid. This is a result of the vast number of participants involved in trading at any given time.
If you are trading stocks, you will notice that large, popular stocks can also be very liquid. Vodafone and Microsoft are prime examples. Though once you move away from the blue chips, trading stocks can become significantly less liquid.
Why do we care about liquidity?
Liquidity makes it easier to trade an instrument. Generally speaking, superior liquidity tends to equate to proportionally tighter spreads, and lower transaction costs. Let's consider a trading example, and compare some typical costs. Let's use Microsoft as our liquid share, and EUR/USD as our liquid currency pair.