FOREX (DEVISEN) NACHRICHTEN

Silver is rallying once again this morning, touching $66 per ounce early in the Asian session. The white metal is not alone. Platinum has pushed aggressively higher over the past four sessions and judging by this morning’s performance, today will likely be the fifth. Platinum is currently challenging $1,900 at the time of writing and if it rises much higher will match prices not seen since 2008. The metal still has a long way to go before notching a new record high, which stands near $2,300 per ounce, but given the surge in silver so far this year, traders will understandably be entertaining such a possibility. Palladium is also looking at its fifth consecutive day in the green, and is now reaching over $1,650 per ounce. Despite a minor loss yesterday, gold still managed to close above $4,300 per ounce, and remains comfortable above that threshold as of this morning, but attentions are focused elsewhere for the time being. Crude oil prices fell to fresh multi-year lows on Tuesday. Futures for the Brent Crude benchmark were briefly pushed below $59 per barrel yesterday, while West Texas Intermediate futures were trading under $55 at one point. Such prices have not been seen since 2021 and reflect a global supply glut that has been building for much of the year. Since April, OPEC+ has continued to ramp up production, rapidly unwinding years of output cuts that had previously buoyed crude oil prices. The simple fact of the matter is that supply is outpacing consumption and this dynamic is unlikely to change in the near future. No one wants to reduce production, because no one wants to cede market share to their competitors. As peace talks between Russia and Ukraine continue to see progress, the probability of Russian oil re-entering the market increases – something that OPEC is painfully aware of. Should the sanctions against Russia be lifted in earnest, the additional player in worldwide oil markets could force prices down even further as different parties attempt to wrestle market share from one another. #Oil #Silver #Platinum

A stock split is exactly what it sounds like. A company splits its stock by increasing the number of outstanding shares, while decreasing the price of each one. A share may be divided into two, three, ten or more, with the cost of acquiring one share adjusting accordingly. The total market capitalisation of the company remains unchanged. Companies tend to perform stock splits when their share prices are high. Nvidia (NVDA) completed a 10-to-1 split in June 2024, at which time the company was trading at $1,200 per share. Following the split, each share was divided into ten shares, each worth $120. Nothing fundamental about the stock changed, merely a change of numbers. Companies can go through multiple rounds of stock splits. In fact, since going public in 1999, Nvidia has completed six separate stock splits, dividing one share at launch into a total of 480 shares today. The chipmaker is by no means an outlier; Home Depot and McDonald’s have undergone 13 and 12 stock splits respectively in their time. Stock splits have been around for a long time. The first examples, according to modern definitions of such, date back to 1916. American Can and American Tobacco both performed a stock split that year, following the same reasoning still used to this day: to make their shares more accessible to the average investor. Over a century later, the trend is still going strong, and by and large follows the same logic. The argument is that acquiring a share is more difficult for an average investor if the price tag is too high. Many stocks had a large barrier to entry because of this, which excluded a number of buyers. Even among those who could afford to buy higher-priced stocks, the perception that the company represents some kind of luxury good can deter some investors. By bringing their price down to more reasonable levels, the shares become more available, thereby expanding the potential pool of buyers. Moreover, a greater number of lower-priced shares results in greater liquidity, which may narrow the bid-ask spread, making life easier for buyers and sellers alike. Things changed considerably in late 2019, when Robinhood introduced fractional trading to its customers, allowing people to buy fractions of a share in a given company. Other competing platforms quickly implemented similar solutions, and over the past five years fractional trading has become widely available. As a result, the process of splitting a stock now makes a lot less sense than it once did. This begs the question of why Nvidia bothered to do one last year. If investors are free to buy only a fraction of a share, what is the point of a stock split? The answer is in fact mostly psychological. On a basic level, if a company is undergoing a stock split, or even thinking about one, it is because their share price has appreciated significantly in recent times, which is an obvious selling point for the stock itself, one that may potentially attract new investors. Such a factor certainly plays a role, but there is also a much deeper element at play: the notion of perceived affordability. As an aside, stock splits can also go the other way, consolidating a large number of shares into fewer, reducing the amount of shares outstanding. Such events are known as reverse stock splits, and typically occur when a company is in trouble. While a regular stock split is good publicity, a reverse stock split is generally a red flag. If a stock continuously underperforms, its share price may fall below the minimum price requirement of the exchange, meaning the stock will get delisted if stays too low for too long. For example, the New York Stock Exchange maintains a strict $1 price threshold, below which the associated company will eventually receive a deficiency notice. One of the most famous examples of a reverse stock split is the shipping company DryShips Inc (DRYS), which completed no fewer than eight such operations between 2016 and 2017. The company performed split after split in an attempt to counter the stock’s shockingly bad performance, desperately trying to remain listed on the stock exchange. The successive consolidations made for a combined reverse stock split of 1-to-11,760,000 shares. At one point, the company was facing ten separate class-action investor lawsuits, with accusations ranging from stock manipulation to violating American securities laws. For reasons that have nothing to do with logic, investors are more comfortable investing in assets when they lie within a specific price range. A high price tag can scare people away because they think that it is a sign that something is overvalued. The assumption is that an asset worth $1,000 must be overvalued compared to one that is only worth $3, and therefore the latter is a better investment. Such an argument is obviously nonsensical because it ignores the market cap of the company. Sticking with chip manufacturers, let us compare Nvidia (NVDA) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). Nvidia has a share price of $177; AMD has a share price of $217. Is AMD “worth” more than Nvidia? Of course not, because Nvidia has over 24 billion shares outstanding, granting the company a market cap of $4 trillion, whereas AMD has just 1.6 billion shares outstanding, granting the company a market cap of $350 billion. Most people in investment circles are obviously aware of how market cap works and why investing in assets based on price alone is silly. But a small part of our brain sees the high price tag and gets skittish. Multiply that niggling feeling by the millions of people who subconsciously experience it, and suddenly there is a very real, tangible effect. The same phenomenon is arguably more pronounced in cryptocurrencies, which, to put it mildly, has its fair share of inexperienced market participants. People flock to “lower priced” coins for no other reason than the price tag, blissfully unaware of the concept of market capitalisation. To each their own. The point is, companies are wise to this effect. Companies will initiate stock splits in order to bring their share price right down to the sweet spot, whether they publicly admit it or not. Many cryptocurrencies are guilty of the same. There are costs associated with performing a stock split, including legal fees and administrative work, so the fact that companies will pursue such ventures, despite the cost of doing so, points to the lucrative nature of these operations. A stock split attracts a lot of attention. A share price going up so much that the company has to undergo a split? What is not to like? The hype surrounding such an event does indeed typically result in a surge of interest, and a rise in price. Such effects are meticulously monitored and studied, with many believing the $30 to $300 range being ideal in terms of optics for potential buyers. $1,000 price tags put people off just as much as sub-$1 prices. Interestingly, the acceptable range appears to vary by region, with different parts of the world preferring different price bands. If investors acted purely on logic, the price of a stock or crypto would not matter at all – market cap would be all that mattered. Unfortunately, we are not as clever as we think. Perception matters more than we would like to admit. With that said, some stocks are completely immune to such notions, such as Berkshire Hathaway, whose class A shares have never undergone a single stock split since their initial listing in 1988. BRK.A hit a share price of over $800,000 earlier in the year. That is not a decimal point. Eight hundred thousand dollars per share. The argument that markets are irrational is one that needs little justification; it is obvious for all to see. Stock markets, and financial markets in general, are a collection of human emotions. As the saying goes: “Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” The quote is attributed to John Maynard Keynes, renowned economist, who despite his expertise, lost significant amounts of money in the 1920s. Keynes would eventually learn his lesson, pivoting his bets towards much longer time frame plays. He would go on to run the endowment for King’s College, Cambridge, consistently beating the market, year after year, for over two decades. Reality usually catches up; it just takes a while.

US stocks took a turn for the worse last Friday, as an increasing number of investors shied away from big tech companies. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite index shed 1.7%, while the S&P 500 lost 1.1% and the Dow Jones closed 0.5% in the red – the further removed from tech stocks, the lesser the damage. Many companies associated with the artificial intelligence space suffered on Friday, including Oracle (ORCL), which fell another 4.5% after incurring a double-digit loss the day prior. Fellow chipmakers Nvidia (NVDA) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) lost 3.3% and 4.8% respectively, while Broadcom (AVGO) plummeted over 11% following its latest earnings report, which failed to meet investors’ sky-high expectations regarding the company’s sales outlook. Despite the heavy selloff, the poor performance in technology stocks appears somewhat contained, with broader markets remaining relatively unaffected. There is a growing sentiment that AI valuations are overblown, and this has manifested in a pivot towards other sectors, as evidenced by the fact that the Dow gained over 1% last week, while the S&P 500 and Nasdaq both closed in the red. Gold continued to push higher last Friday, reaching highs over $4,350 before settling a hair’s breadth below $4,300. The precious metal started the week strongly this morning, rising back towards $4,340 in the early Asian session. Silver traders finally took some profit last week, lowering the white metal to a $61.91 weekly close, but the bid has once again returned as of this morning. The spotlight may turn elsewhere this week, this time to platinum, which is currently challenging $1,800 – a price not seen since 2011. Traders have a lot to keep an eye on this week. Tomorrow, the Bureau of Labor Statistics will publish a special NFP report, which will include nonfarm payroll figures for both October and November, granting the publication additional weight. However, the report will only feature unemployment stats for November, because the household survey data was not collected in October due to the government shutdown. Tuesday and Wednesday will then provide back-to-back retail sales for October and November, while Thursday will see the publication of the latest CPI figures. The backlog is rapidly being cleared. Moving away from the United States, this week will also see three major central bank decisions. On Thursday, the Bank of England is expected to enact a rate cut of its own, lowering the interest rate on the Pound to 3.75% from 4% currently. Later in the day, the European Central Bank will in all likelihood hold rates on the Euro steady at 2.15%. Finally, the most anticipated decision of the week lies with the Bank of Japan, which, in the early hours of Friday morning, will probably increase rates on the Yen to 0.75% from 0.5% at present. The shift to higher rates could be acutely far-reaching because low borrowing costs on the Japanese Yen have long been a source of cheap credit to markets around the world. The unwinding of such could have a detrimental impact on a number of markets, particularly those susceptible to low liquidity conditions, such as cryptocurrencies. To put the adjustment in context, rates on the Yen have not been as high as 0.75% since 1995. Despite the looming threat, the Yen does not appear to be making any strong moves, while Japanese bond yields have increased steadily for many months already, suggesting the rebalancing is somewhat priced in. Time will tell. #Gold #Silver #AVGO #NFP

SHARE Every forex quote shows you two prices. One to buy, one to sell, and a small gap between them. That gap is charged on every single trade you take, before the market has moved a millimetre, and most traders have never actually worked out what it costs them in a month. I traded for the better part of a year before I did that maths on my own account. The number annoyed me enough that I have paid attention to spreads ever since. By the end of this article you will know what the spread is, how the formula works, and how to run the calculation yourself with real numbers. You will also know what counts as a good spread, how the cost stacks up over a month of trading, and whether a spread-only account or a commission account suits the way you trade. We finish with the habits worth keeping and the traps worth avoiding. The spread in forex is the difference between the bid and the ask price, measured in pips, and it is the main cost of entering a trade. Major pairs such as EUR/USD carry the tightest spreads, so they are also the cheapest pairs to trade. Want to see live spreads for yourself? The spread in forex is the difference between the price at which your broker will buy a currency pair from you and the price at which it will sell it to you. That one sentence is the whole concept. Everything else in this article is arithmetic and consequences. The two prices have names. The bid is what you receive when you sell. The ask is what you pay when you buy. Take a EUR/USD quote of 1.08500 / 1.08512, with the numbers here illustrative: the bid is 1.08500, the ask is 1.08512, and the distance between them is 0.00012, or 1.2 pips. You cannot trade at the price in the middle. You always buy at the higher number and sell at the lower one. That gap is how a broker earns on your trade without sending you an invoice. It is a real cost, but it never appears as a line item the way a commission does. It is simply built into the price you are filled at. Costs that never send an invoice are the easiest ones to forget. One boundary worth keeping clean: the spread is measured in pips, while the money value of each pip depends on the pair and your lot size. How much a pip is worth is its own topic, covered in our pip guide. Read more: What are pips in forex and how to calculate their value Brokers package the spread in three ways: fixed, variable and raw. Same cost, three different shapes, and each shape suits a different kind of trader. A fixed spread stays the same regardless of what the market is doing, because the broker sets it and holds it there. The appeal is predictability. You know your entry cost before London opens and before the data lands. The catch is that this certainty is priced in: fixed spreads usually run wider than variable ones in calm conditions, and when the market turns violent the broker may protect itself with requotes or slippage instead of a wider spread. A variable spread breathes with the market. When liquidity is deep, it compresses, and on EUR/USD during the London–New York overlap it can sit well under a pip. When liquidity drains away, it stretches. The same pair that cost you 0.8 pips at lunchtime can cost several times that in the minutes around a rate decision, and there is no way to know the exact figure until you click. The widest I have personally watched it go was on GBP/USD in the seconds after a UK inflation print: the spread stretched from under a pip to around seven, then settled back within the minute. Anyone who entered on a market order inside that window paid seven times the usual toll for exactly the same trade. A raw spread account compresses the spread close to the interbank minimum, sometimes near zero, and charges a fixed commission per lot instead. For scalpers and other high-frequency traders the total often works out cheaper. For someone placing three trades a month, the commission maths rarely justifies the switch. The full comparison gets its own section further down, because the marketing around raw accounts deserves a careful look. The formula is short: Spread = Ask price − Bid price The result is read in pips. For most pairs a pip sits at the fourth decimal place; for JPY pairs it sits at the second. So a difference of 0.00012 on EUR/USD is 1.2 pips, and a difference of 0.016 on USD/JPY is 1.6 pips. Turning pips into money takes one more step: Spread cost = Spread (pips) × value per pip × lot size The value per pip changes with the pair and the lot size, which is why the same 1.2-pip spread costs a scalper on standard lots a hundred times what it costs a beginner on micro lots. The pip guide covers those values in detail. That is the entire toolkit. The next section runs it with real numbers. All figures in both examples are illustrative. EUR/USD. The quote reads 1.08500 / 1.08512. Open that position and it starts $12 underwater. Not because the market moved. Because you entered. USD/JPY. The quote reads 155.302 / 155.318. The pip is at the second decimal here. Your platform already shows the spread somewhere on the ticket, so nobody calculates this live before every trade. The point of doing it once by hand is different: you can now check whether the number the platform shows you is normal, and you know precisely what you hand over each time you press buy. Tighter is better, since the spread is pure cost. But there is no single number that separates good from bad, because normal differs by pair, by broker and by hour of the day. What I can give you is the range that active-session trading usually lives in. Figures are approximate, as of July 2026, and drift with the broker and the session. Treat them as a sanity check, not a promise. The useful yardstick: find the normal active-session spread for the pair you actually trade, then hold your broker's quote against it. If your broker's EUR/USD runs at 2 pips while the market norm sits under 1.2, you are paying two-thirds more for the same trade, every trade. One warning about the word "lowest". A raw account advertising 0.0-pip spreads has not abolished the cost; it has moved the cost into a commission. Good spread means good total cost, and that comparison has its own section below. The spread is paid at the door. The moment your order fills, the position shows a small loss equal to the spread, and price has to travel that distance in your favour before you reach break-even. On a quiet pair with a tight spread, that toll is small. It is never zero. Frequency is what turns a toll into a bill. Take a trader on 0.1 lots making 40 round trips a week on EUR/USD at an average spread of 1.2 pips, all figures illustrative. Each entry costs 1.2 × $1 = $1.20, so the week costs about $48 and a month runs near $200 — paid before a single trade has won or lost anything. Scale the same habit to full lots and the month costs roughly $2,000. The market never took that money. The door fee did. So sensitivity to the spread comes down to how often you walk through the door. A scalper crossing it thirty times a day lives or dies by fractions of a pip. A position trader crossing it twice a month can nearly ignore it. Nearly — it remains part of the bill, alongside slippage and swap, and the slippage article covers its own share of that bill. Read more: What is slippage and how to avoid it in trading Two account models, one cost, collected differently. A standard account folds everything into a wider spread and charges nothing else. A raw or ECN account compresses the spread towards interbank levels and charges a fixed commission per lot on top. The comparison that matters is total cost: Total cost = spread cost + round-trip commission Run one trade through both models, figures illustrative. One standard lot of EUR/USD. On the standard account the spread is 1.4 pips and that is the whole story: 1.4 × $10 = $14. On the raw account the spread is 0.1 pips with a $7 round-trip commission: (0.1 × $10) + $7 = $8. The raw account wins by $6 on this trade — and the more trades you take, the more those $6 add up. Shrink the size to 0.1 lots and the gap nearly closes: $1.40 against $0.80. At three trades a month, the difference buys a coffee. The honest yardstick is that raw plus commission usually rewards high-frequency, larger-volume trading, while a standard account stays simpler and perfectly adequate for low-frequency trading. Neither model is cheaper for everyone, whatever the account page says. I switched to a raw account during a month when I was trading every London session, and my monthly cost line dropped by roughly a third. A friend who places three trades a month copied the move and saved almost nothing. Same accounts, different doors. For me the spread earned a permanent place in the trade plan the day I added up a month of scalping costs and found that 163 entries at an average of 1.3 pips had taken more than my worst losing trade that month, one small slice at a time. The figures were mine, but the lesson is portable. The spread is one of the few variables you can see, price and manage before you enter — manage it, and part of your cost is locked down before the chart gets a vote. The spread is the most transparent of your controllable costs. Watch it, price it into every plan, and it stops being a leak and starts being a known quantity. The tighter the better, and major pairs in active sessions set the benchmark. EUR/USD typically runs between 0.6 and 1.2 pips in liquid hours; if your broker consistently quotes wider than that, you are paying above the market rate. Subtract the bid price from the ask price and read the result in pips. To turn it into money, multiply the pips by the value per pip and your lot size. The spread is the difference between the bid and the ask price, measured in pips. It is the main cost of entering any forex trade. Mainly liquidity and volatility, shaped further by the pair, the broker and the session. The deeper the liquidity, the tighter the spread — majors in the London–New York overlap are the cheapest trades of the day. Lower is better, because the spread is a cost. The one caveat is raw accounts, where a very low spread comes with a separate commission — compare the total cost, not the spread alone. The spread is paid on entry, so price must move one full spread in your favour before the trade earns anything. The more often you trade and the larger your size, the more of your profit the accumulated cost claims. Variable spreads are usually cheaper while liquidity is deep, and fixed spreads are predictable but tend to run wider in normal conditions. Which suits you depends on when you trade and how much certainty you want. An account that compresses the spread close to interbank levels and charges a fixed commission per lot instead. It suits high-frequency, active traders — provided the commission is counted into the total cost. The spread is the gap between bid and ask, and it is the one cost attached to every trade you will ever take. The formula fits on one line, the benchmarks fit in one table, and the compounding is just multiplication — none of it is hard, it only asks to be checked. What changed my own trading was smaller than a broker switch: I started treating the spread as a number I check before entering, the same way I check my stop — because it is the only cost in this business I can see in full, in advance, every single time. Read this alongside the guides on pip value and slippage, and your picture of what a trade actually costs is complete. The RADEX MARKETS editorial team consists of seasoned financial professionals and market observers. Dedicated to delivering objective market summaries, macroeconomic insights, and educational content, the team strives to keep traders well-informed in a fast-paced financial environment. Reviewed by RADEX MARKETS Risk Warning: Trading derivatives and leveraged products carries a high level of risk, including the risk of losing substantially more than your initial investment. Related concepts:

Markets received an early Christmas present on Wednesday after the Fed delivered a highly-anticipated rate cut on the dollar. While expected, the decision nevertheless prompted a sigh of relief throughout financial circles, which swiftly turned into a flurry of buying activity. US stocks reacted positively, with the Dow Jones and S&P 500 climbing to record highs yesterday, but for once, the technology sector missed out on the euphoria. Oracle (ORCL) published a worrying quarterly earnings report late on Wednesday, which led to an 11% loss on the stock the following day. The company fell short of revenue estimates projected by analysts, but the bigger problem in the eyes of many is the fact that Oracle reported capital expenditures of $12 billion in Q2. The figure is much higher than expected and has reawakened concerns regarding an over-inflated AI sector. The fall in Oracle also dragged down other AI-focused stocks, including Nvidia (NVDA), which lost 1.6% yesterday. Far from causing widespread fear across the stock market, the shift away from tech has resulted in a rotation towards other sectors, hence the outperformance of the Dow Jones and Russell 2000 indices over the past two days. The Fed’s decision was also well received in precious metals, pushing gold to $4,279 per ounce on Thursday, while silver briefly reached above $64 during yesterday’s session. For those keeping track, silver is now up a staggering 120% since the start of the year, dwarfing decades of prior price action. In stark contrast, there has been absolutely zero reaction in cryptocurrencies thus far. Alongside the interest rate adjustment, the Fed also committed to regular purchases of short-term treasury bills, to the sum of $40 billion per month, set to begin today. According to Jerome Powell, the buying is “solely for the purpose of maintaining an ample supply of reserves over time, thus supporting effective control of our policy rate”, meaning the move is mostly technical in nature, ensuring the Fed has enough on its balance sheet to properly control market liquidity. Although the planned purchases are not officially part of the Fed’s monetary policy, for many people, they will be perceived as such. With quantitative tightening officially over, market participants have been on the lookout for signs of asset buying; it looks like they got their wish. #Silver #Tbill #Stock

Traders attempting to call the top in silver keep being proven wrong. For the first time in history, spot silver breached $60 per ounce after surging 4.3% during yesterday’s session. The white metal pushed even higher this morning as Asian markets opened for the day, climbing up to $61.50 without being challenged. The latest move translates to a 110% gain so far this year, making gold’s 60% rise seem almost tame in comparison. While the most recent push in silver was unmatched by other metals, precious or otherwise, platinum and palladium also put in respectable performances yesterday, rising 2.8% and 2.2% respectively. Supply and demand dynamics are still largely responsible for the rise in prices, although expectations for a rate cut on the dollar are also playing their part. The agonising wait draws to an end. In a few hours, the Federal Reserve will deliver its verdict and the fate of the dollar will be sealed – until January anyway. CME’s FedWatch has been stable over the past few days, predicting a 25-bps cut with an 85 to 90% probability. Should the prediction hold, the target interest rate will be brought down to 3.50-3.75% and will mark the third cut of the year. Beyond the decision itself, markets should be curious as to just how united the committee members are with regard to today’s decision. While the Fed may indeed deliver a rate cut, it may do so only begrudgingly, leaving little hope for further rate cuts in the near future. The inbound rate decision looms over financial markets in general, but perhaps none more so than cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin showed some unexpected signs of life yesterday, pushing towards $95,000 before settling back down to around $92,500 at the time of writing. The move coincided with the debut of crypto treasury firm Twenty One Capital (XXI) on the NYSE on Tuesday. The firm is majority-owned by Tether and Bitfinex and currently owns over 43 thousand Bitcoin. In a statement earlier in the month, the firm said that it “intends to become a leading vehicle for capital-efficient bitcoin accumulation”. #Silver #Bitcoin #Federal