How to Short Forex?

In the forex market, each currency quote is provided as a ‘two-sided transaction.’When you short sell a currency pair, you are effectively selling the base currency and buying the quote currency in expectation that the value of the of the currency pair will fall.

Take EUR/USD for example. If you are selling the EUR/USD currency pair, you are not only selling Euros; but you are buying dollars. Because of this, no ‘borrowing,’ needs to take place to enable the short sale. As a matter of fact, quotes are provided in a very easy-to-read format that makes short-selling more simplistic.

let‘s assume we initiated a short position for $100 000 and sold EUR/USD when price was at 1.29. If the price has moved lower, the trader could realize a profit on the trade (excluding commissions and fees). But let’s assume for a moment that our trader expected further declines and did not want to close the entire position. Rather, they wanted to close half of the position to cover the initial cost, while still retaining the ability to stay in the trade.

The trader that is short $100 000 EUR/USD can then manually enter in 0.5, then click on the ‘Close’ button to begin the trade closing process of 50k - offsetting half of the 100k short position that was previously held -see image below.

Our trader, at that point, would have realized the price difference on half of the trade (50k) from their 1.29 entry price to the lower price they were able to close on. The remainder of the trade would continue in the market until the trader decided to buy another 50k in EUR/USD to ‘offset,’ the rest of the position.