Join the new world

-== CONTENTS ==-
-Introduction
-Making a profit
-Speculating
-Risks
-Buying Gold
-Tools and tips

-== INTRODUCTION ==-
Welcome to the world of buying and selling currency! The monetary market is the game mechanic that allows you to exchange currencies for different currencies or gold. However, if you do your research, play your cards right and are a little lucky, you can start making a profit this way. This guide will help you do just that.

You can gain access to the Monetary Market through the Market tab on your homepage. From there you can select what kind of currency you want to buy, and what you will be paying for it. It will then show you a list of appropriate offers. If you’d like to post your own offer, click the “Post new offer” button at the top of the screen. Then simple input how much you are selling and the price per 1 currency.

-== MAKING A PROFIT ==-
To help explain how you can make a profit from trading money, let’s look at these hypothetical exchange rates for the Japanese Yen.

1 JPY = 0.034 gold
1 gold = 30.384 JPY

If you look closely at these numbers, you’ll see they don’t exactly match up. You can get slightly more money from buying gold with the yen than you can from selling the amount of gold needed to acquire it. If you sell 5 gold, for example, at 30.3 JPY, you’ll get 151.5 JPY when someone buys your offer. You can then sell that JPY at the current exchange rate of 0.034 gold and make 5.15g. As you can see, you just made a small 0.15g profit just from paying attention to inconsistencies in the exchange rates. That is the simple way money traders make their profits.

-== SPECULATING ==-
Just like in the RL Stock Market, the prices on the Monetary Market go up and down depending on different conditions. If you’d like to make a real profit, you can buy up a certain currency in expectations that it’s price will rise, and then sell it for a maximum price. How do you know which direction a currency is going? The process to find that out is called speculating.

The value of the currency depends on what is happening in the country itself. The more businesses a country has, the more needed that particular currency is. Since each company uses the currency of the country it is in, it is usually safe to assume that larger countries with many regions have stable currencies. The USA and Pakistan are good case examples of this.

-== RISKS ==-

The Monetary Market does not come without risk. Market conditions may decrease profits or even result in a loss. For example, if you put an offer selling gold cheaply but then selling ZAR cheaply too, you can end up selling only gold and having no-one buying your ZAR which means a loss, so be VERY careful, all offers must be thought about thoroughly.

A PTO can also ruin a currency. Aggressive tax rates may effectively shut companies down. New tax rules implemented by the admins have lessened the effect of this, but you should still be weary. Especially in an every changing game like eRepublik. More importantly, look out for countries losing regions. Read the newspapers and forums of countries you have money invested in, and be prepared to sell or buy depending on what happens.

-== BUYING GOLD ==-
If you need some extra gold to use on the monetary market, and you decide on buying gold, keep the following in min😛

(3 gold/Euro) (2.9 gold/Euro) (1.6 gold/Euro) (2.5 gold/Euro) (2.2 gold/Euro) (1.6 gold/Euro)


If you notice, the more gold you buy, the cheaper it is, except for at 40 gold.

-== TOOLS AND TIPS ==-
Tools:
Monetary Market Tool: http://erepublik.ws/currencies

Some useful starting tips:
-Currency exchange is a useful way of making small amounts of gold a day and it doesn't require a lot of time. If you check your offer a couple of times a day, you'll probably do fine.
-Spread your investments, so that a sudden and unforeseeable market crash won't eat your whole fortune.
-Never invest more than you can afford to lose
-Never invest with loaned funds.
-Try to keep a spreadsheet of how much you've sold and at which price. When the markets change, this helps you to avoid losses.

As a final note, thanks goes to Isaac Ether, one of our MoDA interns for putting together the article.

SuperSlax
Director of Education