Considering that today isn’t a day of a high market volatility and big opportunities in Forex, I’ve decided to post something interesting but a little detached from the actual trading. I’m always interested in how the popularity of the Forex trading grows among the common people. Fortunately enough, Google is such a nice company that it allows us to easily access the data that represents the popularity of almost everything.
The chart below shows how the popularity of the keyword “forex” grew among all the search terms entered by Google users since the beginning of 2004. In less than 7 years, the popularity of Forex went up more than twice. The growth was steady until a peak in late September 2008, which was caused by the global credit crisis that increased the people’s awareness of the financial markets. After the said peak, the popularity declined somewhat and then remained almost the same through the rest of 2009 and 2010. Meanwhile, the news references for Forex didn’t demonstrate any significant growth until early 2008. After that, the news mentions of Forex started to grow more rapidly than the search reference:


On the contrary, the stock market becomes the less popular financial term for search — the keyword “stocks” shows a steady decline since 2004 until now. The chart below shows that quite clearly. It repeats the same peak as the keyword “forex” does in late September 2008, which was also caused by the financial crisis. Strangely, the news reference count continues to grow since 2004 for the term “stocks”:


It looks like before early 2008 traders didn’t search for ”forex scam” a lot. According to the chart below, there wasn’t a significant level of searches for the term until 2008. The searchers’ awareness for the Forex scams peaked in early 2010 and then proceeded to decline (was there a decline in the amount of actual Forex scams? I doubt that). The news reference graph is almost flat except for the peak in early 2010 (I wonder what caused it):


MetaTrader is currently the most popular Forex trading platform in the on-line retail market but that was not always true. The chart from Google Trends doesn’t show any significant activity for the term “metatrader” until early 2005. The popularity of MetaTrader among the Google visitors continued to grow until the middle of 2009 and then declined slightly until a sharp jump in the fourth quarter of 2010, which was probably caused by the ATC 2010 tournament and the launch of the real accounts with MetaTrader 5 by some brokers. Since mid 2008 “metatrader” becomes a popular keyword in the news and the popularity shows a rapid growth in 2009 and early 2010:


Thanks for reading and happy Turkey Day to all traders from the United States and Canada!