true. but still banks are the only ones that can move the market as much as it does. its only them moving it.
Who the hell gave you that idea? You can move FX markets around easily. Maybe you need to step back a little bit and re-evaluate things and maybe pick up a few books and do a little more reading and a little less trading. Just a suggestion.
Why do you think bank is the only one? There are many many big and small domestic and internationally players. They can easily cause spike in price. To name a few: Wealthy investors, insurance companies, mutual fund companies, governments, hedge funds, pharmaceutical companies, sovereign funds, tech giants, etc... Bank probably is the least one to influence the market because of the regulation. Citibank has already closed down their hundred years old fx trading department a year or two ago. Bill Gates or Warren Buffet can cause a big spike in Israelis shekel if they pour couple billion dollars to some bank in Israel to buy some Israelis medical companies. If Global Sony want to repatriate some of their profit in billions of USD back to Japan or Samsung to S. Korea, certainly it will cause some spike in their respective currencies. The same if Europe Google wants to send some of their profit back to USA or some sovereign funds in Middle East want to buy some hotel chain in Europe albeit in a negative way. Certainly they are not going to tell traders when they are going to do it. Certainly they don't really care about upset traders price levels. They do as what they see fit business-wise.
look no further than eurusd today to open euro session... you're telling me that random and sudden sharp selloff and retreat back wasnt done on purpose?
People sometimes have theories like that for years and years and years. They become extremely attached to them, seek only validations rather than refutations of them, and if the facts don't fit the theory, will sometimes try to change the facts rather than the theory. Unfortunately, that sometimes prevents them from re-reading (and thinking objectively and dispassionately about) Maverick's few posts, above, which are the ones in this thread that could actually help them.
Even if your theory were true one should take into account that different banks have different interests, so it comes down to bulls and bears again.
The top 10 banks control 80% of the forex market, however to think they directly stop run is naive. The institutions have resources and processes that very few have access to, it means they can analyse data and trends en masse. The markets are based on human psychology, so most of the time there will not be stop runs, it will be that crowd mentality comes in to play and people will place trades and stops in similar places. Ever watched bears feeding during salmon season, it's easy pickings, that's 99% of traders being taken out. Some salmon get through by luck or by sheer volume, remember one picture of a bear virtually passed out from gouging on too much, there you have the institutions. It's about being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but due to psychology it concentrates in small channels where the pickings are the richest, the institutions have sheer size and can more or less do what they want, Forex is for all intents unregulated. All very simple, so you have two options, work out what the institutions do and follow them, or go down the volume/luck route. Some do succeed, mostly temporarily, as they use a subset of an institutional approach without knowing it and think they found the magic formula believing that putting in 80 and getting out 20 is some sort of utopia. The institutions can put in 20 and get out 80 day in day out, everyone else will not have the resources nor stamina. Can you succeed at forex, yes, can most do it, no!
Forex is decentralized, there's no one exchange that may run your stops. If you want to be suspicious, you should be suspicious of: Private for-profit banks. They have a proven criminal track record of "greed is good" mentality and incompetence regarding ie. derivatives and hedging instruments. When banks fuck up, they tend to socialize their destruction, or fund new and ever more destructive wars and environmental collapse. The larger examples of the latter, the larger bonuses for their vill^H^H^H^HCEOs. Brokers. They can and often do take the other side of your trades, can manipulate spreads and reported figures (very short-term). For large exchanges (ie. US stock market), there are indeed issues of stops being run over, but more for unintentional and destructive decentralized behaviour rather than the occational price machinations. This is why modern centralized exchanges implement more and more automatic circuit breakers, as to prevent incentives to financially exploit near-collapse of financial institutes. IOW, the myth of "free market" perfections, doesn't work short term (days, weeks even months), but are powerful and efficient enough to destroy all complex living beings on the planet (through funding warfare), or enough financial instability as to destroy trust and institutions. The end-game for Capitalism is socialism or anihilation, as bets gets ever larger and power become more centralized into fascist organizations. Doesn't have to be this way if we evolve further.
I am myself into forex, and I am seriously wondering: does this thread belong to psychology ? Sure those into forex, might be interested in this subject; but I am pretty sure that when some people concentrate on psychology section, it is because their focus is psychology.