Forex Cash Market

The Forex Cash Market is a non-regulated and distributed market maintained by different brokers, which allow clients to buy or sell either random amounts or predefined 'Lots' of a given currency pair.

A forex Lot is a fixed amount of currency to buy or sell. A Standard Lot represents 100,000 of any currency, whereas a Mini Lot represents 10,000 and a Micro Lot represents 1,000. So essentially:

100 Micro Lots = 10 Mini Lots = 1 Standard Lot

Most forex brokers allow you to trade combinations of these. For example, and order to buy 6.52 Lots logically buys 6 Standard Lots, 5 Mini Lots and 2 Micro lots.

Some interesting links:

• Wikipedia.org contains a lot of background information and statistics can be found.
• InformedTrades.com hosts an excellent introduction to Forex Trading.