There are as many Forex sites on the internet as sand on a beach, however, almost all of them are used as either a marketing tool or simply as an article directory that publish articles with regurgitated information related to Forex. If you are looking for organized information which really teaches you 
systematically how to trade currency, you’ll probably feel frustrated after wasting an afternoon going from site to site that are filled with affiliate links.
Feeling the same way as you are, I decided to write a free online Forex day trading course that really provide good currency trading training. I research the subject personally using resources other than google so that what you find here is not something I just copied from some other sites. We all know that the internet is flooded with rubbish information “written” by internet marketers. I know you hate it, because I use the internet, too.
In this article, I’m going to give you an overview of what we will talk about. What will cover things from basics to advance. No useless talk.
First, we need to know what are currency pairs, what are long and short positions, how to calculate profit and loss and understanding price quotes of currencies.
Currency Pair
What currency trading really fascinates me is that you are actually selling money for money and buying money with money. The whole experience makes you really think about the whole monetary system in the modern society.
What actually is money?
It is simply a vehicle that carries buying power. It can be a piece of paper, stone or metal. In our world, money is quickly becoming purely digital. Money is just a number that exists only in our mind. So when we are trading currency, after all the operations, we need to store our buying power somewhere. And that is usually still one kind of currency. Therefore, we trade currencies by exchange one currency with another. We call this a “Currency Pair”.
Currency pairs are expressed with ISO (International Standardization Organization) codes.
Your first step to becoming a forex trading expert is to familiarize yourself with these common terms and nicknames of the currency pairs.
In this crazily chaotic world, US dollar is still the safest currency, therefore, most of the major currency pairs are U.S. Dollar pairs, i.e. involving US dollar on one side of the deal.
In contrast, currency pairs that do not involve US dollar are called “Cross-currency pairs” or “Crosses”.
Obviously, crosses are used to target specific currencies in case of significant news or events that affect the prices.
Base Currency/Counter Currency
So now you know currency pairs are denoted as GBP/JPY in case of sterling-yen, for example, what are the difference between the currency in the front (GBP) and the one in the back (JPY)?
The one written in the front in called the “base currency” while the one in the back are called the “counter currency” or “secondary currency”.
Traditionally, base currency is the stronger one compared to the counter currency.
The base currency is also the face amount of the trade. Remember, when you buy or sell a currency pair, you are buying one currency and sell another at the same time. So for example, if you buy 10,000 USD/JPY, you bought USD10,000 and sold equivalent amount in JPY. If you sell 10,000 USD/JPY, you sold USD10,000 and bought equivalent amount of JPY.
One last thing but definitely not the least, the PROFIT of a trade is denominated in the counter currency instead of the base currency. Of course, losses are denominated the same way, too.
So this is our first lesson in this forex trading course. See you in the next lesson in which we will be talking about profit and loss of a forex trade.