How does FOREX trading work? trading vs exchanging

External question — Personal Finance Stack Exchange Author: rainhamtown Original post: https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/58761 License: CC BY-SA 3.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ Adaptation: HTML converted to plain text; contact email addresses removed. If I was to trade on the foreign exchange market as an individual investor and I bought 100 USD with my 70 GBP. Have I essentially converted my currency similar to exchanging the currency in a bank ? Could I 'cash out' with dollars. Or is all this just speculation like a commodity futures contract?