I'm usually on holiday Dec15 to Jan15 hence why I've been milling around here, I use institutional meaning it won't apply to you but if you can use some of the concepts you will beat your peers, which for you is really what counts. Professional intraday use GBPUSD and for short term trades, EURUSD is slower but probably the optimal pair for most retail, if you want non European you can try AUDUSD or the JPY pairs (USD/EUR/GBP), these are our secondary pairs and you monitor them for a month, you will get an idea how they work. But it begs the question, why Forex, the problem with Forex is due to the leverage up to 500x plus it's for those without capital namely Retail (most of the time at least in the context being discussed here), if you can't trade stocks at up to 5x leverage and make profits you will never make profits in Futures at 50x leverage, and if you don't make profits in Futures you will not make profits in Forex at 500x leverage. Retail use a unique dynamic but don't know it exists, institutions know the dynamic exists but can't use it due to size, what happens when you combine the two via automation and efficiency (not auto trading as the markets are designed to induce algos to fail using context), those two being Stocks with Forex dynamics, you end up generating more profits than you could with Futures or Forex even with their higher leverage. I made more last week on a Tesla (TSLA) trade than I did in Futures or Forex, plus with stocks you have 100s and 1,000s to choose from, they are closed so you get to sleep, and they have the liquidity, the problem will be a stock screener, the one I use kind of costs $1,000s (auto non-curated as the curated one is more along MiFID II lines built in to the terminal) which use algos worth $millions that you could never have access to, but there are plenty available online. Forex is designed to make sure you stay financially compromised, you only need to beat your peers with most having very low expectations, 1-2% per month return on capital, with a failure rate in Stocks at 90% in Forex it is 99.9%, Futures are the best compromise between the two but stay away from Oil unless it's at extreme highs or lows, you will lose your shirt.
In my view due to immense liquidity FX returns are more random than stocks' or equity markets return also there is no access to order flow and other useful data as you trade with a dealer, hence there is just another constraint in terms of information sources which puts you at disadvantage.
You need to use a screener for that, as well as researching historical data to see what is going on in the market. Free screeners all over the place.
Does anybody knows if there are any arbitrage opportunities in FX available? Probably with some specific liquidity providers that offer retail access? Or spreads will prevent arb from making profit?
traders choose their trading currency pair according to their understating, as a scalper i always choose the pair which has most lowest trading spreads.
after having lowest trading spreads there is no way to bring successfully profit by scalping , you need a powerful money management first of all.