You're going to have liquidity issues with the smaller currencies. It's the same issue with the cross currencies. Yeah, you can trade the GBP/JPY with a 13 pt spread; it's possible, but is it profitable? This makes them high risk, and ... and, probability of success goes way down. That's why they're not offered everywhere. A "trader" knows better. Trying to "speculate" in them, or trade them, slippage will eat you alive. You can get in (and speculate) on just about anything, but with low liquidity, getting out is the problem. Sometimes there are no buyers.

How does that fit into your trade plan? Don't have a plan? That's the number one reason newbies fail. Odds are you and 85% of all newbies this year will fail. Not good odds. Learn investing first, trade stocks, develop a time frame, discover your risk level, learn good money management techniques and risk management. Since you will be wrong about 50% of the time, these are what will make you money and save you money. But test your plan on a simulator first in both up and down markets before risking a dime.

The killer of newbies in forex is the leverage. Yeah, exactly the draw to forex, like a lamb to slaughter. You don't even have time to learn anything before being wiped out by the leverage; just stupid. Leverage when everything lines up, not just at random every time.

Until you become consistent, don't use leverage. There is no point in leveraging inexperience and ignorance. Trade the currency ETF's without leverage. Learn good trading strategy, then find the right market that fits that strategy and tests well. If it's simple enough, you can program it to trade automatically.l

Currency ETF List

http://etf.stock-encyclopedia.com/catego...

? FXA - Australian dollar

? FXB - British pound

? FXC - Canadian dollar

? FXE - euro

? FXY - Japanese yen

TRAITS OF SUCCESSFUL TRADERS: a four part guide

http://www.fxcm.com/docs_pdfs/fxcm-trait...

My advice on trading forex:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;...

Answered a similar question here:

https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index...

Professional traders trade these all the time with non-deliverable forwards and similar derivatives. I've not traded either of those currencies but in general I disagree with David on this. You can trade exotic currencies at a reasonable spread around interest rate parity as long as you are doing enough size. All that happens is that your prime broker does the trade for you by crossing a couple of bonds (which of course says that the bond market in the target country has to work and I bet that liquidity in Ukrainian bonds is poor now).

And if the country collapses, you can hedge by using the money as fancy wallpaper.

Forex brokers offering easy trading of the 'majors' are everywhere.

does anyone know what the channel might be for someone looking to speculate in say ukrainian hryvnia or Nigerian naira?

thanks in advance.