WHAS11 coverage

(WHAS11) - Multi-national corporations, Hedge funds and large financial institutions buy and sell trillions of dollars in currency everyday.

While a student at Sacred Heart High School, Annie Cassaro decided to get a piece of that pie.

Like most teenagers, Annie Cassaro loves the internet. But her favorite website isn't facebook or MySpace, its online currency trading. 

She discovered the Forex website after her father suggested she look into trading stocks online.

"I am less interested in what individual companies are doing, but countries, that's more interesting," Cassaro says.

After she mastered a demo account, Annie's dad gave her $2,000 in seed money and she's been making real money ever since.

"I basically understood that I had to buy low and sell high. I go that from when it opened, and the rest I kind of figured out," she says.

Cassaro showed whas11's Joe Arnold how she does it, in just minutes executing a transaction.

"I'm going to buy the Canadian dollar," Cassaro explained, "because it's about to go up.  It's below all of its simple moving averages, and it's below it's lowest 'Bollinger band,' and it's about to go up so I’m going to buy it."

Cassaro's tutor through all of this? Not her father or an economics professor, but Google and Wikipedia.

By surfing the Internet, the University of Hawaii student learned how to ride the waves of the international currency exchange.  And while the volatility of the world economy is nerve-wracking for most investors, it's what Cassaro is banking on.

"That’s kind of what I depend on because I’m not keeping positions open for a month. I'm keeping them open for an hour,"  Cassaro says.

Cassaro hasn't kept an exact count of her profits so far, but her father gets a 10% cut.

"My dad would like to use it to pay for my tuition. Which I guess is fair,"  she acknowledges.

And so far? 

"Clothes, shoes, purses, movies," Cassaro says laughing.

Cassaro made $20 off that exchange of Canadian currency which is not bad for two minutes at the computer.

She studies ethno-botany at the University of Hawaii -- which studies the connection between plants and people.

Cassaro says the field isn't all that lucrative but she has this fallback plan.