Hi everybody, I am very new here so i presume I am aloud to ask some stupid questions. Could somebody explain for me step by step how to go short. Let’s say I have US dollars on my account and EUR/GBP just looks great to be shorted. What should I do and how can I get my profits from this trade?Thank’s in advance.
Place a sell order on the pair. Don’t forget your stop losses 
That means I have pounds on my hands, wait until dollar drops let’s say 30pips and than buy them.Is that correct? if it is what should I do next?
Your making this much to hard.
All you have to do is short the pair or sell it. You would select the pair you want to short on your trading platform and place an order. At that point you would have some options like buy or sell, what kind of order pending or market, where or if you want stops or take profit. Once you have the ticket set up the way you want you submit it.Your broker handles all the conversions that have to do with your accounts base currency. Now this is just a general description of placing an order. Every broker and trading platform are a little different. Start a few demo accounts and see how it works.
There is a tab at the top of the page called “School” and it would be really useful in answering all your questions.
Thanks lads, I do the school and find it ok just few things did not click at first and at second:). As Mr Shr1k mentioned I am very good at making some things more complicated than they really are, but now i think i got an idea. Now the best thing to do will be open a demo acc and see how does it work I presume. Thanks to all once again.
Get 2 more pints and revisit this question in the morning !!
This is something I’ve not been able to get my head around also - I ‘[I]think’[/I] I understand it - after some very educated help from folks here - I still can’t pretend to know how it works, I only know that if I think a trade is heading downhill I click on ‘sell’ then when I think it’s going to do a turnaround I click ‘buy’ and hey presto - some pips/profit for me! :DDon’t question it - just go for it !
Hi Catwoman ,I have read about your struggle with short selling and here you are, you advising me how to do it :). That means it will clik latter or sooner to me too :), and thanks for advise about revisiting question after few pints, sounds good.
oh dear - I hope you don’t think I’m getting above myself advising anyone at this time 
I really don’t know enough - just saying how it is for me.
More pints ?? whatever are you suggesting ? I’ll have you know I’m a respectable lady from UK 
Good luck to you and all of us here anyway
bah, im gonna throw in another two cents that will probably get me beat up by the big boys.
Say the EurUsd is sitting at say 1.3250.
And I believe it will go to say 1.3100 - hoping for 150 price move based on whatever I think… doesn’t matter.
If I set my position as SELL as illustrated earlier then my broker will typically take the opposite side of my position. Basically hedge my position and take the spread as profit.
It does not matter which way you are going… as said before, we are trading nothing physical.
Short = the chart going down
Long = the chart going up
Short = sell
Long = buy
I know it is very ambiguous as when trading stocks. You buy one in hopes that it will go up.
You actually can short or sell stocks as well.
Only in stocks you are not comparing two different things.
I’m still a noob, but ive been through the babypips school.
Do every bit of it and keep reading. I’ve only lost 230 bucks so far. I kind of expect to lose a little more because… enough said.
You must have missed my post in your other thread.
It’s easy to understand.
Your trades are based on a pair of currencies.
Let’s use the EUR/USD, but the principal is the same for all pairs.
If you go long, you bought the euro against the dollar.
If you go short, you bought the dollar against the euro.
You call long or short, based on the direction you anticipate the FIRST currency named in the pair will take.
Hi,
I don’t know if this is going to complicate matters further or make the concept of short selling easier to understand. What I DO know is that I’ve been trying to explain this to my father for the past five or six years and he still doesn’t ‘get it’ and I know the reason (well at least in his case anyway): it’s a very difficult concept to grasp at first because theoretically you’re ‘selling’ something that you never ‘bought’ or ‘ownded’ in the first place unlike ‘the old days’ where people would buy stocks, wait for them to go up in price, and then sell them at a profit obviously (well that was the idea anyway). The point is it’s a mindset thing really but nothing complicated though.
Anyway: I don’t know if that helps.
Regards,
Dale.
Thanks lads that really helps, the main thing probably was; how you can you sell something that you are not actually owning, and changes between the currencies. Like I said if you have USD and shorting EUR/GBP there must be some cost involved in converting USD when you are executing “sell” order.
Especially thanks to “fihunts”, you get it somehow very clear hope you won’t loose more money, I am trying to convince myself that to loose about 500 is ok, but it is hard :))),very hard.
I like to think of shorting pairs as if I’m shorting stocks.
If you have any experience in trading stocks, it may help.
But this is how I see things: (Probably not accurate at all, but it seems to make sense in my head).
Say you are looking to short a stock at $10.00 for 100 shares, hoping it’d fall to the $9.00 level. You would essentially borrow 100 shares from your broker and sell for a total of $1000.00 promising to pay them back at a later date. When the stock reaches $9.00 you decide to close the trade and pay them back, by buying back 100 shares for only $900.00. You’ve just made $100.00 profit.
But that’s how I see things anyways. Hope that helps.
Clark.
Guys every buy or sell we execute is a trade forget about what currency your account is funded in for now.
This is how it goes. You give your broker a chunk of change, they say with this money you have in your account you can trade x amount of GBP, USD, JPY etc…
the amount is determined by the leverage your broker allows.
Now you want to sell EUR/USD that means you think the EUR will be worth fewer USD in the future.(the price on the chart will move down) So you say to someone I will trade you my EUR for your USD. Sometimes the the person you making the trade with is your broker sometimes your broker finds someone for you to trade with.
If you want to buy GBP/USD you are saying I will trade my USD for your GBP you are thinking the GBP will be worth more USD in the future. (the price on the chart will move up)
When you close the trade the deal is reversed.
Think of the words buy and sell as directions that the chart will move. Buy is up Sell is down. Dont think you are buying [B]or[/B] selling something. In every trade long or short you buy [B]and[/B] sell by the time you close the trade.
I have not got experience trading stocks but i’ve read exactly same explanation in other book about going short with the stocks as you submited and that sounds clear and nice in my head, so thanks to Mr Clark FX. But really nice axplanation came from Mr Shr1k and I think I got it completelly now, so thanks to all responded, your help is really appreciated.Regards.
Good morning,
‘ClarkFX’ is 100% correct about shorting stocks. If I’m not mistaken though this ‘rule’ of having to ‘borrow’ the stock before being able to short them was put in place to stop ‘naked short selling’ (exactly what I was alluding to above i.e. selling a stock, or ‘something’, that you didn’t own in the first place) during this last bout of Wall Street ‘shenanigans’ (sub-prime and the credit-crunch) in an effort to try to curb to volatility and stop the prices of stocks being (dare I say ‘artificially’) driven down for no good reason. I think the rule existed previously, then was lifted, and was then put back into place at or around this time (for a limited time) (the same as the ‘up tick rule’ which also seems to ‘come and go’).
Come to think of it though: ‘Shr1k’ for the purposes of this discussion is ‘spot on’ i.e. we (I) have gotten ‘overcomplicated’ (‘overthinking’) here!!! If you ‘think’ (well: if your SYSTEM tells you) that the price of a pair is going to go down you ‘short’ or ‘sell’ the pair and visa versa if you ‘think’ the price of a pair is going to go up. There’s nothing more to it than that.
(The above being said though: you never know when seemingly useless or irrelevant information as that posted above will come in handy and a bit of additional information and knowledge never hurt anyone)!!! LOL!!!
Regards,
Dale.