There are nearly 5,000 stocks listed on the NYSE and over 3,000 listed on NASDAQ. That is a lot of stocks! Forex, on the other hand, has a couple dozen currency pairs. Of these, there are four that are heavily traded by the market. This is just one of the many differences between stock and forex.

Forex, unlike the stock market, is a 24 hour market. You can trade currencies in the middle of the night if you are a night owl, you can trade in the evening after you get home from work, or you can place trades during your lunch hour. The trading week begins on Monday morning when the Australia markets open, which is Sunday evening in the United States. The trading week ends when the NYSE rings the closing bell on Friday afternoon.

Most stock brokers require you to purchase stock in whole numbers and have minimum purchase requirements. So if you have only $100, and want to buy a bit of Google, you are out of luck. In forex, you can put as little or as much money into a trade as you want. If you want to make a trade with a dollar, it is possible. Not recommended, mind you, but certainly possible. Stock brokers also charge commission fees. If you want to buy ten shares of EFX, you must have enough to cover the market price of the shares as well as a fee, which varies between $4 and $10 depending on the broker. Alternatively, if you want to buy 100 lots of EUR/USD on forex, you need only enough to cover the trade.

When you trade forex, you can make instant trades based on live, real-time price data. When trading stock, you cannot watch the price on your computer screen, see a price you like, hit a button and execute the trade immediately, getting the price that was on your screen in the moment that you hit the “trade now” button. You can do that with forex, though!

Unlike in equities, there are no restrictions to short-selling in forex. There is also no uptick. In forex, there is no structural bias. Buying and selling are equal. The market moves in the direction that it moves, and you have the same chance of making a profit whether you are buying or selling.

Last year a small company’s stock was successfully manipulated by an Internet blogger. The price dropped more than ten percent, due solely to an article written on a financial blog. This blogger managed to manipulate the price of the stock on a number of occasions. If you had that guy’s number and knew when he was going to post next, you could have made a killing. This is not possible with forex. A news article by a blogger, New York Times, or Bloomberg is not going to affect the price of a currency pair. The market is too big to be influenced by such a thing.

The differences between stocks and forex can be beneficial to you, especially when you are first learning how to trade. Take advantage of these differences to trade forex successfully.