Many people would like to take a vacation overseas. Yes it is true that you will be able to meet a lot of new friends when you are traveling abroad. It is a kind of experience that you can never get from the books. It is a very good way for you to learn other cultures.

One thing you may not know is that it can be very dangerous when you are traveling abroad. Here the notion of danger does not necessarily mean things such as car accidents. It is dangerous because you are in a place that you do not really know very well.

If it can be arranged, you are not suggested to arrive a place late at night you have never visited before unless it is all well arranged by travel agents. If for some reason you have to arrive your destination late at night, you may wait until next morning before you leave the airport.

Besides, it can be very dangerous when you are taking a taxi. As a result, you should make sure that the taxi is an official one. You should never take a vehicle which only looks like a taxi without any official identification of the driver.

As discussed, it can be very dangerous if you are traveling on your own. In fact, if it is possible, you should not travel alone. However, there are a lot of people who actually enjoy traveling alone. If you are one of those people, make sure you will pay extra attention to the safety issue.

In the study of forex movements over time you often see a high correlation between currency movements and interest rate differentials.

As an example, if British Pounds are paying 6% on deposits and US dollars are paying 5%, with all other things being equal, investment funds would flow into the currency paying higher interest rates and that currency would strengthen relative to the other currency.

In the example given above we would therefore expect that the British Pound Sterling would gain in value against the US Dollar.

Of course, this is a rather simplistic view as for one thing the “other things” are never equal. At times it is even difficult to know exactly what the “other things” may be.

There are times when markets seem to ignore fundamentials completely and trade in a highly technical manner.

However, in making a judgement about the possibility of a market maintaining a long term trend one can not ignore interest rate differentials . A review of forex price movement charts will often show that a currency paying a relative high rate of interest will in fact trend higher against currencies paying lower interest rates.  

That is one important reason why forex traders pay so much attention when central bankers of a major currency nation have their interest rate policy meetings. Occasionally the central bankers will surprise the forex market with an unexpected change in the level of interest rates and spark a fast change of price levels.

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Forbes magazine has been around for a long time. It was one of my must read magazines way back when in my college days.

Well, after all I was a finance and real estate major. And I did read, or at least look at, a few other famous non financial publications of the day.)

Today forget about the print media. Forbes and other print media publications that have withstood the test of time have finally figured out that they had better have a sharp web operation to operate and stay afloat in the 21st century.

The Forbes web operation covers a good number of markets including currencies and commodities. As you would expect from Forbes there is extensive stock market coverage.

Take a look. The Forbes folks seem to have worked hard at putting together a creditable online operation.

See what you think.

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Here’s to successful blogging by sharing.

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The forex trading business has changed tremendously since I made my first forex trade way back in the 1980’s. In those days the costs of data feeds and market news feeds were so expensive that except for big players trading from home or from a small business was prohibitive.

The cost of Reuters, Telerate, and other services could easily be several thousand dollars a month. There was also the problem of finding legitimate banks or counter parties for your trades that would accept smaller accounts. And by smaller I mean anything less then seven figures.

Even then many banks would accept a forex trading account only on an accommodation basis. Which meant that you had to have a sizable amount of other business and deposits at the bank in order to be accepted for forex trading.

There were forex dealers, mostly out of Asia, who catered to the smaller client but most of these were bucket shop operations and best to be avoided.

As you can tell the good old days were not so good for smaller forex traders. How things have changed in the past 25 years.

Now you can run a search online for “forex trading” or “forex trading system” or just “forex” and find a large number of firms eager to accept your account and forex trading business, even if it is small potatoes.

Your choice of a good forex broker or dealer is important to you. Take your time to research each firm of interest. The following are a few things to consider: