Oanda

Let's face it, money is as imaginary as time. The only difference between the cash in your pocket and the Monopoly bills buried in a cardboard box at the family lake house is this: your government mandates that the cash is accepted for all debts, public and private. In other words, it has value because they say so.

What's also interesting about money is that there is more of it being created everyday. By that logic, you might as well be getting a bit of it.

Central banks all over the world are pumping cash in the global economy. "Inflation" could be more accurately termed "dillution", since it's fundamentally the phenomena of there being more and more money used to purchase the same amount of goods and services. It's a great big pyramid scheme, with banks making money every single second using algorithms and arbitrage. The foreign exchange markets, or the FOREX, is where the world order gushes its blood and parasitizes it at the same time. Oanda is a great trading platform for potentilaly parasitizing off this ever growing supply, or for getting parasitized yourself. Since all currencies are degrading, but not at the same rate, there's always a bull market somewhere, even if it has the attention span of a $5000 hooker on a week-long coke binge.

You may have noticed that since money is just play money, all markets and socities are games. It's true. For example, securities markets are basically MMOs, the content sifted through the crowdsourcing of logistical decisions. The volume and pattern of people's buying and selling determines the patterns in price, it's user-created content. This is true of all markets, but the most fluid and exiting market in the world is the FOREX. You can watch a stock and see a price change every few minutes, maybe every twenty seconds - that's fairly liquid stock. Exchange rates are changing by hundredths of a penny every few seconds. You can jump in and ride short down a quick slope, profiting off of someone else's selling. You can make 1% in a minute. Just to put that in perspective, 1% a month is considered good performance on a stock portfolio, and is practically unheard of in the bond markets.

Now, just because you can make off like a bandit using guerilla trading strategies doesn't mean you will. The thing is, currencies are moving at such slight intervals that you have to be leveraged to really make a difference. Leverage means you're borrowing from the broker in order to place your bets. So when you're leveraged 20:1, when the chart moves a pip, every dollar you've put down moves up by one fifth of a penny. It sounds boring, but with the game account you can pretend you're a rich guy with 100 grand sitting in a FOREX account, and you can see hundreds of dollars of difference pile up in seconds. It's a blast. Just remember, there's a spread on the price you can buy and the price you can sell, known as the ask and bid prices. Graphically, it's represented as the width of the bar. Any move you make has to clear the spread before you're really profiting or losing.

Now, we can analyze the values of WoW or A Tale In The Desert or the apparent lack of values in Second Life (only apparent, SL's got values just as strong as WoW, but less overt). Why not analyze the MMOs that are our global financial markets? Success in commodities is zero-sum, success in stocks is positive sum provided you're living before Peak Oil and industrial expansion is still happening. What's interesting about the FOREX is that it's actually fixed negative-sum, all currencies are losing value all the time, but success feels positive-sum because you're making money a lot faster than it's inflating. The values of this game are then being able to more potently strategize about the shapre of you life and the world around you, and fuck everyone else.