If you are stepping into the Forex market, and have charting skills from stocks or commodities, you'll need to bring those tools with you. The foreign exchange market is far too huge to handle by implementing classic fundamental techniques. Think about the difficulty of calculating the value of a company, now try and do that for an entire country. The bottom line is that there are too many variables for the average investor to interpret. You are better off using technical analysis.
Another important point regarding fundamental analysis is that currencies can deviate from their fundamental paths for a significant amount of time. This means that you may well have calculated the true value of a given currency, but you'll lose a lot of money while the rest of the world catches up. Most Forex trades are leveraged, which can mean a bad mistake can leave you broke.Charting skills are more or less universal. The same technique for buying a stock is used for buying currencies. If you are comfortable using technical analysis, then shifting to the Forex market is easy. Before getting too involved, try out some of your stock strategies with play money in the Forex.Because retail investors are more focused on stocks, bonds, and commodities, there are few websites that feature Forex charts. Before purchasing software packages, try the services out beforehand. Make sure that the charts are real time. Acting on delayed quotes can be very expensive.
