SWOT Analysis - How to Analyze your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats

SWOT Analysis is an effective method of identifying your Strengths and Weaknesses, and to examine the Opportunities and Threats you face. Often carrying out an analysis using the SWOT framework will be enough to reveal changes which can be usefully made.

To carry out a SWOT Analysis write down answers to the following questions:

Strengths:

• What are your advantages?
• What do you do well?

Consider this from your own point of view and from the point of view of the people you deal with. Don't be modest, be realistic. If you are having any difficulty with this, try writing down a list of your characteristics. Some of these will hopefully be strengths!

Weaknesses:

• What could be improved?
• What is done badly?
• What should be avoided?

Again this should be considered from an internal and external basis - do other people perceive weaknesses that you don't see? Do your competitors do any better? It is best to be realistic now, and face any unpleasant truths as soon as possible.

Opportunities:

• Where are the good chances facing you?
• What are the interesting trends?

Useful opportunities can come from such things as:

• Changes in technology and markets on both a broad and narrow scale
• Changes in government policy related to your field
• Changes in social patterns, population profiles, lifestyle changes, etc.
• Local Events

Threats:

• What obstacles do you face?
• What is your competition doing?
• Are the required specifications for your job, products or services changing?
• Is changing technology threatening your position?
• Do you have bad debt or cash-flow problems?

Carrying out this analysis is will often be illuminating - both in terms of pointing out what needs to be done, and in putting problems into perspective.

Improving Noting Skills with the Help of Mind Maps

Appreciation Technique:
Appreciation is a very simple but powerful technique for extracting the maximum amount of information from a simple fact. Starting with a fact, ask the question 'So what?' - i.e. What are the implications of that fact?

Keep on asking that question until all possible inferences have been drawn.

Appreciation is a technique used by military planners, so we will take a military example:

Fact: It rained heavily last night

• So What?
  The ground will be wet
• So What?
  It will turn into mud quickly
• So What?
  If many troops and vehicles pass over the same ground, movement will be progressively slower and more difficult as the ground gets muddier and more difficult.
• So What?
  Where possible stick to metalled roads or expect movement to be slower than normal.

While it would be possible to reach this conclusion without the use of a formal technique, appreciation provides a framework within which inferences can be extracted quickly and effectively.

Reading Technical Information & Documents

Reading Technical Information:
Technical information is typically less friendly than other information. It is often complex and assumes a high level of initial knowledge.

Manuals are often badly written - a manual is often supplied with a product purely because it is expected. In many cases it will have been given to a junior member of staff to prepare, and will not have been properly edited or reviewed.

Before wading into technical documentation, assess who it has been written for. Is it too basic to meet your needs, or is it so advanced that you cannot understand it? In the latter case it may be more cost effective to bring in an expert to do the job.

If referring to specific information, it is most effective to use the table of contents and index to find the appropriate section.

If you are reading large amounts of the material, it may be effective to photocopy the glossary, and keep this beside you. It will probably also be useful to note down the key concepts in your own words, and refer to them when necessary. Usually the most effective way of making notes is to use Mind Maps. As with other sorts of material it may be most effective to skim the material before reading it in depth.

Reading The 'Whole Subject' Documents:
When you are reading a document, such as a company report, which purports to give an overall analysis of a subject, it is easy to accept the writer's structure of thought, and miss the fact that important information has been omitted or that irrelevant detail has been included.

Where you are reviewing this sort of document, an effective technique is to compile your own table of contents headings before you open the document. You can then use this table of contents to read the document in the order that you want.

Using this technique will allow you to spot where important information is missing or has been obscured, and helps you to avoid trivia. If the writer has a better knowledge of the structure of the topic, this helps you to recognise and adjust your initial view of the best structure.

How to Improve your Reading Skills

Tips for Active Reading
This is an important concept: when you are reading it is often useful to highlight, underline and annotate the text as you go on. This emphasises information in your mind, and helps you to review important points after you have finished studying the text.

Active reading helps to keep your mind focused on the material and stops it wandering.

This is obviously only something to do if you own the document! If you find that active reading helps significantly, then it may be worth photocopying information in more expensive texts. You can then read and mark the photocopies.

Knowing what you want to know:
The most important thing to know is the goal of your study - what do you want to know after reading the text? Once you know this you can examine the text to see whether it is going to move you towards the goal.

An easy way of doing this is to look at the introduction and the chapter headings. The introduction should let you know who the book is targeted at and what it seeks to achieve, while the chapter headings will show an overall view of the structure of the subject.

While you are looking at the text, ask yourself if it is targeted at you, or assumes too much or too little knowledge. Would other material meet your needs more closely?

Knowing how deeply to study the material:
Where you only need the shallowest knowledge of the subject, you can skim the material. Here you read only chapter headings, introductions and summaries.

If you need a moderate level of information on a subject, then you can scan the text. Here you read the chapter introductions and summaries in detail, and may speed-read the contents of the chapters, picking out and understanding key words and concepts. At this level of looking at the document it is worth paying attention to diagrams and graphs.

Only when you need detailed knowledge of a subject is it worth studying the text. Here it is best to skim the material first to get an overview of the subject. Once you have done this you can read it in detail while seeing how the information presented relates to the overall structure of the subject.

How to study different sorts of materialDifferent sorts of text hold information in different places, in different ways, with different depths and breadths of coverage. By understanding the layout of the material you are reading, you can extract all useful information much more efficiently.

Reading Magazines and Newspapers:
These tend to give a very fragmented coverage of a subject, typically concentrating on the most interesting and glamorous parts of a topic while ignoring the less interesting but often essential background. Typically areas of useful information are padded out with large areas of irrelevant data or with advertising.

The most effective way of dealing with magazines is to scan their contents tables or indexes, turning directly to interesting articles. If the articles are useful they can be cut out and filed into a folder specifically covering that sort of information. The magazine can then be binned. In this way you begin to build up sets of related articles which may go some way towards explaining the scope of a subject. Information can be retrieved easily and quickly.

Newspapers tend to be arranged in sections. If you read a paper frequently you can learn which sections have useful information, and which ones can be skipped altogether.

By applying an intelligent way of reading newspapers and magazines you can significantly speed the time it takes to extract the information you need from them.

Article Types, and How to Read them:
Articles within newspapers and magazines tend to be in three main types:

News Articles:here the most important information is presented first, with information being less and less significant as the article progresses. News articles are designed to explain the key points first, and then flesh them out with detail.

Opinion Articles:Opinion articles are designed to advance a viewpoint. Here the most important information is contained in the introduction and the summary, with the middle of the article containing supporting arguments.

Feature Articles:These are written to provide entertainment or background on a subject. Typically the most important information is in the body of the text.

If you know what you want from an article, and recognising its type, you can extract information from it quickly and efficiently.

Art of Reviewing The Learned Information

Reviewing Learned Information:
This article will show you how spending a little time reviewing information after a presentation can help you to vastly improve your recall of that material.

Why Review the Information?
Information learned can be recalled most effectively 10 minutes after that learning has stopped. After this information is lost rapidly, so that after a few months only a tiny percentage can be recalled. By spending a few minutes reviewing material after the learning session, you can quickly refresh your memory, and:

• Significantly reduce the time needed to relearn the knowledge when you need it
• Ensure that you have a reasonable basis of knowledge all the time
• Allow you to improve the quality of future learning, by building on a well-remembered foundation. This allows your mind to make connections and linkages that it would not otherwise make.

The aim of frequently reviewing information is to end up storing it in memory for the long term.

How to review Reviewing information should be relatively easy and need not take long. Reviews are recommended at the following times:

• As soon as possible after learning has stopped. This can take the form of rewriting and tidying up notes
  
• After one day - take a few minutes to jot down everything remembered and compare this with your notes.
  
• After one week - as above. after one month - as above.
  
• After four months - as above.By reviewing frequently, information should be fresh in your mind, should be clearly structured, and easily accessible when you need it.
  

Art of Developing Effective Communication Skills

Know How to develop Effective communication skills:
Effective communication skills are something no one can do without, on the job or in your personal life.

There’s no enterprise in human affairs, from top-level negotiations to everyday personal interactions, that can go smoothly in the absence of great communication.

And learning how to communicate clearly is an ongoing learning process, which continues over the course of one’s entire life.

Not all of us are born orators or brilliant writers; but, at the same time, communication isn’t the domain of a lucky few. It’s a skill that can be learned, practiced, and improved. And believe it or not, it’s a skill you already have, and practice with greater skill and subtlety than you may imagine. You have a lot to work with as you embark on improving your basic communication skills.

Good communication skills involve speaking and listening; communication isn’t a one-way street. It involves being speaker and audience simultaneously. It involves appreciating the dynamism of human encounters, according to which things are always in motion, always changing.

Listening closely to your interlocutor’s words allows you to constantly adjust your own approach, to better convince the other person. Most often, effective communication isn’t about formulating your thoughts and foisting them on another person; rather, it’s about putting yourself in the listener’s shoes, imagining what he wants to hear, seeing the situation from his perspective, and adapting your words based on his reactions.

Keep in mind as well that not all communication is verbal. How you present yourself, your facial expressions, and your gestures speak volumes as well. Non verbal communication skills are key.
Below are just a few pointers regarding the importance of good communication skills.

1. Every individual has his own unique language: Generally speaking, there are as many languages as there are individuals; because every person uses his or her own unique combination of spoken languages, non verbal communication skills, and styles of argumentation to express thoughts.Language is about a lot more than German, Spanish, or Chinese. It includes the entire thought process, and the entire range of communicative methods, from body language to the emotions expressed by the eyes or mouth.

2. Know who you’re speaking to: Empathizing with people from different backgrounds, and seeing the world through their eyes, can allow you to communicate with anyone, anywhere in the world.

For an effective communicator, the audience is first and foremost; one cannot formulate one’s argument until one properly understands where the listeners are coming from. Don’t coerce—persuade.Guide your audience to reach the proper conclusions themselves; if they draw those conclusions independently, they’ll be more likely to recognize them as their own, instead of as something foreign, foisted upon them by a condescending speaker.

No one wants a hostile audience. Win them over by understanding their expectations, and tailoring your words for their unique ears.

3. An embarrassment of riches: Everyone realizes that people communicate by speaking. But it’s amazing to consider how much of our feelings and even thoughts we convey by non verbal communication.

Our gestures and facial expressions can tell the listener (or rather, watcher! ) a lot about us. Often, the impression we give by our body language and movements can color the message we are trying to express with our spoken words. If you seem nervous or fidgety, the listener will be put on edge, and may even wonder if you yourself are convinced of the truth of what you are saying.

4. Be aware: Be aware of every factor in the communication process—your own strengths and weakness, the expectations of your listener, the logic of your arguments, and, most importantly, the goal you have in mind for the interaction.

If the conversation strays, guide it gently back to the central issue at hand, and pursue your aims with good communication.

Communicating with others is part of being a human being—we are, after all, social animals. Begin to improve your communication skills today. Make the gift of speech (and non-speech) a formidable weapon in your communication arsenal.

Art of Designing your Presentation for Maximum Learning

Following guidelines on the way in which information is assimilated allow us to derive a number of principles by which presentations, lessons and training courses can be delivered to have the maximum impact:

1) Use breaks effectively - by breaking frequently, you take advantage of the way in which the mind recalls information most effectively at the beginning and ends of a presentation. You can take advantage of this several times within a session, before and after each break. As a guide: presentations of less than 20 minutes in length can be ineffective as it can be difficult for the audience to grasp at the shape and rhythm of the material. Presentations of more than 50 minutes in length are usually boring and ineffective.

2) Take advantage of the high initial level of assimilation and of the heightened understanding of the final facts to present some of the most importance information during these periods.

3) Relate facts that should be remembered to other facts, and fit them into a framework that shows their relevance. If necessary, repeat important information.

4) If the presentation is part of a series, then a brief period of time can be spent before the presentation starts reviewing the overall structure of previous presentations. This helps to refresh the audience's minds with the information on which you want to build, allowing connections to be made automatically which would otherwise be lost.

5) Where possible members of the audience should be encouraged to review information in their own time. See the article on Using Reviews to Learn Effectively for further information.

6) Try to engage the whole mind of your audience and as many of their senses as practicable with a variety of aids. This will keep all of their minds focussed on the learning experience rather than having unused parts of the mind 'wandering off' and generating distractions.

7) Perhaps try to fit the key information to be recalled into a mnemonic structure. This will require that your audience understands and is comfortable with the use of memory techniques - otherwise your presentations may seem a little strange!

Summary:
It is important to design the structure of a presentation to fit in with the way in which your audience recalls and assimilates information.

This involves reviewing information already known, keeping presentations relatively short while still maintaining the feeling of structure to a subject, linking information in with a structure, and presenting or representing key information at the beginning and end of a session.

How to Improve Written Communication Skills Quickly and Effectively

Targeting your writing:
It is essential to have a clear idea of who your reader is. You should know why he or she is going to be reading your piece, where and when they will be reading it, and what they will want to get out of it.

Knowing this, and knowing what information you want to convey allows you to decide an aim for the article. You should focus all decisions on content, structure, style and presentation on meeting this aim.

Preparing an outline:Once you have decided the aim of the article, you are ready to prepare an outline. This allows you to start to organize the information in an article into a coherent structure. If you start writing without an outline you are in danger of producing a disorganized, chaotic mess that confuses your reader and fails to make the desired connections in his or her mind.

If you have researched the article by using a Mind Cap or by noting conventionally, an effective way of producing an outline is to open up a Word Processor document and to type in the facts that you have decided to include. You can then cut and paste these notes into related groups, and order these groups in a way that supports your argument.

Once you have selected information and organized a structure, prepare an outline of the introduction and summary. The shape of these should be obvious from the structure you have given your information. The introduction should help the reader to prepare an overall structure into which the information in the article can be fitted. The summary should organize the facts in the middle of the article into a coherent whole.

Writing your piece: When you have prepared your outline, it is time to start writing!

The easiest way of doing this is just to let the words and ideas flow. Move quickly through the piece without editing or reviewing it. This will help to keep your creativity flowing without it being crippled by self-criticism.

Only when you have finished a section should you review it. At this stage you may decide to reorganise it, edit it, change it around, and add or delete information. As you review it you should check that what you have written meets the aim you set and gives the reader the information they want.

Style:The style of the article should be completely focused on the reader's needs. Language used should be pitched at the appropriate level for the reader.

People generally prefer information presented in short sentences with little or no jargon. You may be tempted to write in a way that you think will impress your readers, using long words and complex sentences. All this shows is that you are not able to communicate ideas clearly and simply. It is likely that material written like this will not be read at all.

If you need to use technical language that may not be understood, include a glossary.
Remember that you have responsibility for the clarity, effectiveness and focus of your communication. Beyond this, style will emerge on its own without you needing to worry about it.

Summary

• It is essential to know who you are writing for, and what they will want from your writing. Once you know this you should know precisely the level you are writing at and what information to include.
  
• Preparation of an outline helps you to give structure to your piece. An effective way of doing this is to transfer notes into a WP document, and then cut and paste words and sections into a coherent form.
  
• Including an introduction and summary helps readers to structure information in their minds.
  
• When you write, try to let words and ideas flow. Only edit and review a section once you have completed its first draft. As you review it, ensure that the material meets the aim you set for the piece.
  
• The style of the piece should be focused on the readers needs. Avoid trying to impress people with your knowledge.
  
• Remember that the responsibility for effective communication lies with you!

Speculation about Forex Markets

Controversy about currency speculators and their effect on currency devaluations and national economies recurs regularly. Nevertheless, economists including Milton Friedman have argued that speculators ultimately are a stabilizing influence on the market and perform the important function of providing a market for hedgers and transferring risk from those people who don't wish to bear it, to those who do. Other economists such as Joseph Stiglitz consider this argument to be based more on politics and a free market philosophy than on economics.

Large hedge funds and other well capitalized "position traders" are the main professional speculators.

Currency speculation is considered a highly suspect activity in many countries. While investment in traditional financial instruments like bonds or stocks often is considered to contribute positively to economic growth by providing capital, currency speculation does not; according to this view, it is simply gambling that often interferes with economic policy. For example, in 1992, currency speculation forced the Central Bank of Sweden to raise interest rates for a few days to 500% per annum, and later to devalue the krona. Former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad is one well known proponent of this view. He blamed the devaluation of the Malaysian ringgit in 1997 on George Soros and other speculators.

In this view, countries may develop unsustainable financial bubbles or otherwise mishandle their national economies, and forex speculators allegedly made the inevitable collapse happen sooner. A relatively quick collapse might even be preferable to continued economic mishandling.

Financial instruments of Forex

Spot :
A spot transaction is a two-day delivery transaction (except in the case of the Canadian dollar, which settles the next day), as opposed to the futures contracts, which are usually three months. This trade represents a "direct exchange" between two currencies, has the shortest time frame, involves cash rather than a contract; and interest is not included in the agreed-upon transaction. The data for this study come from the spot market. Spot has the largest share by volume in FX transactions among all instruments.

Forward :
One way to deal with the Forex risk is to engage in a forward transaction. In this transaction, money does not actually change hands until some agreed upon future date. A buyer and seller agree on an exchange rate for any date in the future, and the transaction occurs on that date, regardless of what the market rates are then. The duration of the trade can be a few days, months or years.

Future:
Foreign currency futures are forward transactions with standard contract sizes and maturity dates — for example, 500,000 British pounds for next November at an agreed rate. Futures are standardized and are usually traded on an exchange created for this purpose. The average contract length is roughly 3 months. Futures contracts are usually inclusive of any interest amounts.

Swap:
The most common type of forward transaction is the currency swap. In a swap, two parties exchange currencies for a certain length of time and agree to reverse the transaction at a later date. These are not standardized contracts and are not traded through an exchange.

Option:
A foreign exchange option (commonly shortened to just FX option) is a derivative where the owner has the right but not the obligation to exchange money denominated in one currency into another currency at a pre-agreed exchange rate on a specified date. The FX options market is the deepest, largest and most liquid market for options of any kind in the world.

Exchange Traded Fund:
Exchange-traded funds (or ETFs) are Open Ended investment companies that can be traded at any time throughout the course of the day. Typically, ETFs try to replicate a stock market index such as the S&P 500 (e.g. SPY), but recently they are now replicating investments in the currency markets with the ETF increasing in value when the US Dollar weakness versus a specific currency, such as the Euro. Certain of these funds track the price movements of world currencies versus the US Dollar, and increase in value directly counter to the US Dollar, allowing for speculation in the US Dollar for US and US Dollar denominated investors and speculators.

Factors Affecting Currency Trading

Although exchange rates are affected by many factors, in the end, currency prices are a result of supply and demand forces. The world's currency markets can be viewed as a huge melting pot: in a large and ever-changing mix of current events, supply and demand factors are constantly shifting, and the price of one currency in relation to another shifts accordingly. No other market encompasses (and distills) as much of what is going on in the world at any given time as foreign exchange.

Supply and demand for any given currency, and thus its value, are not influenced by any single element, but rather by several. These elements generally fall into three categories: economic factors, political conditions and market psychology.

Economic Factors:
These include economic policy, disseminated by government agencies and central banks, economic conditions, generally revealed through economic reports, and other economic indicators.

Economic policy comprises government fiscal policy (budget/spending practices) and monetary policy (the means by which a government's central bank influences the supply and "cost" of money, which is reflected by the level of interest rates).

Economic conditions include:
Government budget deficits or surpluses: The market usually reacts negatively to widening government budget deficits, and positively to narrowing budget deficits. The impact is reflected in the value of a country's currency.

Balance of trade levels and trends: The trade flow between countries illustrates the demand for goods and services, which in turn indicates demand for a country's currency to conduct trade. Surpluses and deficits in trade of goods and services reflect the competitiveness of a nation's economy. For example, trade deficits may have a negative impact on a nation's currency.

Inflation levels and trends: Typically, a currency will lose value if there is a high level of inflation in the country or if inflation levels are perceived to be rising. This is because inflation erodes purchasing power, thus demand, for that particular currency. However, a currency may sometimes strengthen when inflation rises because of expectations that the central bank will raise short-term interest rates to combat rising inflation.

Economic growth and health: Reports such as gross domestic product (GDP), employment levels, retail sales, capacity utilization and others, detail the levels of a country's economic growth and health. Generally, the more healthy and robust a country's economy, the better its currency will perform, and the more demand for it there will be.

Political Conditions:
Internal, regional, and international political conditions and events can have a profound effect on currency markets.

For instance, political upheaval and instability can have a negative impact on a nation's economy. The rise of a political faction that is perceived to be fiscally responsible can have the opposite effect. Also, events in one country in a region may spur positive or negative interest in a neighboring country and, in the process, affect its currency.

Market Psychology:
Market psychology and trader perceptions influence the foreign exchange market in a variety of ways:

Flights to quality: Unsettling international events can lead to a "flight to quality," with investors seeking a "safe haven". There will be a greater demand, thus a higher price, for currencies perceived as stronger over their relatively weaker counterparts. The Swiss franc has been a traditional safe haven during times of political or economic uncertainty.

Long-term trends: Currency markets often move in visible long-term trends. Although currencies do not have an annual growing season like physical commodities, business cycles do make themselves felt. Cycle analysis looks at longer-term price trends that may rise from economic or political trends.

"Buy the rumor, sell the fact:" This market truism can apply to many currency situations. It is the tendency for the price of a currency to reflect the impact of a particular action before it occurs and, when the anticipated event comes to pass, react in exactly the opposite direction. This may also be referred to as a market being "oversold" or "overbought". To buy the rumor or sell the fact can also be an example of the cognitive bias known as anchoring, when investors focus too much on the relevance of outside events to currency prices.

Economic numbers: While economic numbers can certainly reflect economic policy, some reports and numbers take on a talisman-like effect: the number itself becomes important to market psychology and may have an immediate impact on short-term market moves. "What to watch" can change over time. In recent years, for example, money supply, employment, trade balance figures and inflation numbers have all taken turns in the spotlight.

Technical trading considerations: As in other markets, the accumulated price movements in a currency pair such as EUR/USD can form apparent patterns that traders may attempt to use. Many traders study price charts in order to identify such patterns.

Participants for FOREX Market

Unlike a stock market, where all participants have access to the same prices, the forex market is divided into levels of access. At the top is the inter-bank market, which is made up of the largest investment banking firms. Within the inter-bank market, spreads, which are the difference between the bid and ask prices, are razor sharp and usually unavailable, and not known to players outside the inner circle. As you descend the levels of access, the difference between the bid and ask prices widens (from 0-1 pip to 1-2 pips for some currencies such as the EUR). This is due to volume. If a trader can guarantee large numbers of transactions for large amounts, they can demand a smaller difference between the bid and ask price, which is referred to as a better spread. The levels of access that make up the forex market are determined by the size of the "line" (the amount of money with which they are trading). The top-tier inter-bank market accounts for 53% of all transactions. After that there are usually smaller investment banks, followed by large multi-national corporations (which need to hedge risk and pay employees in different countries), large hedge funds, and even some of the retail forex market makers. According to Galati and Melvin, "Pension funds, insurance companies, mutual funds, and other institutional investors have played an increasingly important role in financial markets in general, and in FX markets in particular, since the early 2000s." (2004) In addition, he notes, "Hedge funds have grown markedly over the 2001–2004 period in terms of both number and overall size" Central banks also participate in the forex market to align currencies to their economic needs.

Banks:
The interbank market caters for both the majority of commercial turnover and large amounts of speculative trading every day. A large bank may trade billions of dollars daily. Some of this trading is undertaken on behalf of customers, but much is conducted by proprietary desks, trading for the bank's own account.

Until recently, foreign exchange brokers did large amounts of business, facilitating interbank trading and matching anonymous counterparts for small fees. Today, however, much of this business has moved on to more efficient electronic systems. The broker squawk box lets traders listen in on ongoing interbank trading and is heard in most trading rooms, but turnover is noticeably smaller than just a few years ago.

Commercial Companies:
An important part of this market comes from the financial activities of companies seeking foreign exchange to pay for goods or services. Commercial companies often trade fairly small amounts compared to those of banks or speculators, and their trades often have little short term impact on market rates. Nevertheless, trade flows are an important factor in the long-term direction of a currency's exchange rate. Some multinational companies can have an unpredictable impact when very large positions are covered due to exposures that are not widely known by other market participants.

Central Banks:
National central banks play an important role in the foreign exchange markets. They try to control the money supply, inflation, and/or interest rates and often have official or unofficial target rates for their currencies. They can use their often substantial foreign exchange reserves to stabilize the market. Milton Friedman argued that the best stabilization strategy would be for central banks to buy when the exchange rate is too low, and to sell when the rate is too high — that is, to trade for a profit based on their more precise information. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of central bank "stabilizing speculation" is doubtful because central banks do not go bankrupt if they make large losses, like other traders would, and there is no convincing evidence that they do make a profit trading.

The mere expectation or rumor of central bank intervention might be enough to stabilize a currency, but aggressive intervention might be used several times each year in countries with a dirty float currency regime. Central banks do not always achieve their objectives. The combined resources of the market can easily overwhelm any central bank.[4] Several scenarios of this nature were seen in the 1992–93 ERM collapse, and in more recent times in Southeast Asia.

Hedge Funds:
Hedge funds have gained a reputation for aggressive currency speculation since 1996. They control billions of dollars of equity and may borrow billions more, and thus may overwhelm intervention by central banks to support almost any currency, if the economic fundamentals are in the hedge funds' favor.

Investment Management Firms:
Investment management firms (who typically manage large accounts on behalf of customers such as pension funds and endowments) use the foreign exchange market to facilitate transactions in foreign securities. For example, an investment manager bearing an international equity portfolio needs to purchase and sell several pairs of foreign currencies to pay for foreign securities purchases.

Some investment management firms also have more speculative specialist currency overlay operations, which manage clients' currency exposures with the aim of generating profits as well as limiting risk. Whilst the number of this type of specialist firms is quite small, many have a large value of assets under management (AUM), and hence can generate large trades.

Retail forex brokers:
There are two types of retail brokers offering the opportunity for speculative trading. Retail forex brokers or Market makers.Retail traders (individuals) are a small fraction of this market and may only participate indirectly through brokers or banks. Retail forex brokers, while largely controlled and regulated by the CFTC and NFA might be subject to forex scams[5] [6]. At present, the NFA and CFTC are imposing stricter requirements, particularly in relation to the amount of Net Capitalization required of its members. As a result many of the smaller, and perhaps questionable brokers are now gone. It is not widely understood that retail brokers and market makers typically trade against their clients and frequently take the other side of their trades. This can often create a potential conflict of interest and give rise to some of the unpleasant experiences some traders have had. A move toward NDD(No Dealing Desk), And STP(Straight Through Processing) has helped to resolve some of these concerns and restore trader confidence, but caution is still advised in ensuring that all is as it is presented.

Others:
Non-bank foreign exchange companies offer currency exchange and international payments to private individuals and companies. These are also known as Foreign Exchange Brokers but are distinct from Forex Brokers as they do not offer speculative trading but currency exchange with payments. i.e. there is usually a physical delivery of currency to a bank account.

It is estimated that in the UK, 14% of currency transfers/payments are made via Foreign Exchange Companies[7]. These companies' selling point is usually that they will offer better exchange rates or cheaper payments than the customer's bank. These companies differ from Money Transfer/Remittance Companies in that they generally offer higher-value services.

Money Transfer/Remittance Companies perform high-volume low-value transfers generally by economic migrants back to their home country. In 2007, the Aite Group estimated that there were $369 billion of remittances (an increase of 8% on the previous year). The four largest markets (India, China, Mexico and the Philippines) receive $95 billion. The largest and best known provider is Western Union with 345,000 agents globally.

Introduction to Foreign Exchange Market

FOREX Markets
The foreign exchange (currency or forex or FX) market exists wherever one currency is traded for another. It is the largest and most liquid financial market in the world, and includes trading between large banks, central banks, currency speculators, multinational corporations, governments, and other financial markets and institutions. The average daily trade in the global forex and related markets currently is almost US$ 4 trillion.

The foreign exchange market is unique because of the following
( # ) Its trading volumes,
( # ) The extreme liquidity of the market,
( # ) The large number of, and variety of, traders in the market,
( # ) Its geographical dispersion,
( # ) Its long trading hours: 24 hours a day except on weekends (from 5pm EST on Sunday until 4pm EST Friday),
( # ) The variety of factors that affect exchange rates.
( # ) The low margins of profit compared with other markets of fixed income (but profits can be high due to very large trading volumes)
( # ) The use of leverage.

As such, it has been referred to as the market closest to the ideal perfect competition, notwithstanding market manipulation by central banks. According to the BIS, average daily turnover in global foreign exchange markets is estimated at $3.98 trillion. Trading in the world's main financial markets accounted for $3.21 trillion of this.

This $3.21 trillion in main foreign exchange market turnover was broken down as follows:

$1,005 billion in spot transactions
$362 billion in outright forwards
$1,714 billion in forex swaps
$129 billion estimated gaps in reporting

Of the $3.98 trillion daily global turnover, trading in London accounted for around $1.36 trillion, or 34.1% of the total, making London by far the global center for foreign exchange. In second and third places respectively, trading in New York accounted for 16.6%, and Tokyo accounted for 6.0%.

In addition to "traditional" turnover, $2.1 trillion was traded in derivatives.

Exchange-traded forex futures contracts were introduced in 1972 at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and are actively traded relative to most other futures contracts. Forex futures volume has grown rapidly in recent years, and accounts for about 7% of the total foreign exchange market volume, according to The Wall Street Journal Europe (5/5/06, p. 20).

Foreign exchange trading increased by 38% between April 2005 and April 2006 and has more than doubled since 2001. This is largely due to the growing importance of foreign exchange as an asset class and an increase in fund management assets, particularly of hedge funds and pension funds. The diverse selection of execution venues such as internet trading platforms offered by companies such as First Prudential Markets and Saxo Bank have made it easier for retail traders to trade in the foreign exchange market.

Because foreign exchange is an OTC market where brokers/dealers negotiate directly with one another, there is no central exchange or clearing house. The biggest geographic trading centre is the UK, primarily London, which according to IFSL estimates has increased its share of global turnover in traditional transactions from 31.3% in April 2004 to 34.1% in April 2007. RPP
The ten most active traders account for almost 73% of trading volume, according to The Wall Street Journal Europe, (2/9/06 p. 20). These large international banks continually provide the market with both bid (buy) and ask (sell) prices. The bid/ask spread is the difference between the price at which a bank or market maker will sell ("ask", or "offer") and the price at which a market-maker will buy ("bid") from a wholesale customer. This spread is minimal for actively traded pairs of currencies, usually 0–3 pips. For example, the bid/ask quote of EUR/USD might be 1.2200/1.2203 on a retail broker. Minimum trading size for most deals is usually 100,000 units of currency, which is a standard "lot".

These spreads might not apply to retail customers at banks, which will routinely mark up the difference to say 1.2100 / 1.2300 for transfers, or say 1.2000 / 1.2400 for banknotes or travelers' checks. Spot prices at market makers vary, but on EUR/USD are usually no more than 3 pips wide (i.e. 0.0003). Competition is greatly increased with larger transactions, and pip spreads shrink on the major pairs to as little as 1 to 2 pips.