Was sitting at my desk, EUR/USD pair was trading rather quietly at 1.4980, and within a few minutes scalped up to 1.5030. News?
No news, just a TON of stops being triggered. That caused a domino effect jump which is why I shorted at 1.5031 thinking that things would come back down once traders were able to reassess Although I got out for +10 pips and didn't hold
Over 65 pips surge in 5 minutes with no news, but by triggered stops !? A forex newbie is wondering how this big Euro market works, which is supposed to be hard to manipulate.
1.5000 likely had TONS of stops lined up. So when the price made the surge to 1.5000 it began taking out lots of those stops and I am sure, to some degree, triggered buys already set in the market. Also notice that the main move occurred in 1 min Keep in mind that events like this are atypical. Volatility at that time of the day is always nil so the fact that we moved that much helps defend the notion that stops were triggered. And as you can see the price has slowly come back to near the 1.5000 level.
Looks like triggering stops is also a way to manipulate the Euro price on the short-term basis by the big guys. If that's the case, my earlier notion of "Euro market is hard to be manipulated" need to be changed. Did you also see the EURO.USD price spread suddenly widened to about 10 pips around that time yesterday?
I use IB. Their spreads are normally tight. When I saw the 10 pips spread yesterday, I thought something was wrong with IB's quote system. It turned out the big move was coming.