A new framework for understanding currency movements

By Barbara Rockefeller and Vicki Schmelzer

The foreign exchange market is huge, fascinating and yet widely misunderstood by participants and non-participants alike. This is because its unanswered questions are numerous. For instance, what is the purpose of the $4 trillion per day trading volume? What determines currency trends and who are the players in the FX arena? Does FX drive other financial markets, or is it the passive end-product of all the other markets? FX is without clear supply and demand factors, so how do traders determine sentiment and price direction?

Much is written in an effort to answer these questions, but a lot of it is just noise. In the 12 pieces here, Barbara Rockefeller and Vicki Schmelzer draw on their combined 50 years’ experience in foreign exchange to cut through the clutter and provide an elegant and razor-sharp look at this market. Their analysis is accurate, useful and enlivened by many anecdotes and examples from historic market events. They cover:

– How the matrix concept can help observers understand foreign exchange market action
– What professional FX traders take into consideration before entering into positions
– Whether the FX market can be forecast
– The interplay between foreign exchange and other financial markets
– How technology has levelled the playing field between big and small players, and at what cost
– Whether the prospect of reserve currency diversification away from the dollar is likely
– The toolkit that central banks use to manage national economies and the effect of this on currencies

‘The Foreign Exchange Matrix’ is the go-to book for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the world of foreign exchange.

Barbara Rockefeller is an international economist and forecaster specializing in foreign exchange. She was a pioneer in technical analysis and also in combining technical analysis with fundamental analysis. She publishes two reports daily using both techniques (www.rts-forex.com) for central banks, professional fund managers, corporate hedgers and individual traders. The trading advice newsletter has an average annual hypothetical return over 50% since inception in 1994 and has never posted a losing year. She is the author of three books on trading, including Technical Analysis for Dummies, and contributes a regular column to Currency Trader magazine. Her education includes a BA in economics from Reed College, with a year at the University of Keele in Staffordshire (UK), and MA from Columbia University in international affairs.

Vicki Schmelzer is currently vice president of FINWRIT LLC, a firm specializing in financial journalism and editing. Up until January 2018, she worked for 18 years as a financial journalist for Market News International, writing about currencies and other asset classes. Before becoming a journalist, Ms. Schmelzer worked as a senior currency dealer at major U.S. and international banks including Dresdner Bank, Citibank, Manufacturers-Hanover/Chemical Bank and Westdeutsche Landesbank. She has appeared on ForexTV, FX Street and was in Alain Lasfargues' 2009 documentary The Marvelous History of the Dollar. Her education includes a BA in German (and Mathematics minor) from Clarion State University.