Picture yourself at an airport before a trip to Tokyo. You hand over dollars and the clerk gives you Japanese yen. That exchange feels simple. But what if your company needs to pay a European supplier three months from now, and you want to lock in the cost today? The foreign exchange market—the world’s largest financial market, with trillions of dollars traded daily—does far more than that airport kiosk. It runs on a network of banks, electronic platforms, and trading rules that can seem confusing. In this chapter, we’ll make those rules clear. You’ll learn what really happens when you see a two‑sided price for a currency, how to read quotes like a trader, and how to fix a future exchange rate long before the money moves.