Buying and Selling Foreign Exchange

What exactly do you buy or sell when you make a foreign currency transaction?

In reality, you are doing both actions - buying and selling. A transaction of Buying the EUR/USD at 1.2000 is actually buying the Euro and selling the Dollars at 1.2000 cents. If the Euro increases in value in relation to the dollar, the price would increase and the investor will make money.

If for whatever reason, a trader could not execute an order using FXDD, a verbal order to a broker could be the following:

"I buy 100,000 Euros and sell the dollar at the Market"

or

"I buy 500,000 EUR/USD on a 1.2100 stop"

or

"I buy 100,000 Euros vs. the Dollar at the market"

What is required on all verbal orders is the amount, the Currency Pair, the rate and/or the type of order. Simply saying "I buy the Dollar at the Market" is not good enough as it does not say what currency the trader wants to sell.