I am in California and watch the last hour of the Japanese market and 9-11amEST. When there are reports being released in Japan (like yesterday) I watch most of the evening. A good forum for forex is at www.global-view.com. Good luck
Not sure if this will help anyone, but here's a one-hour chart using a paintbar study to identify the times in blocks to help visually identify the trendiness of different time frames. Red is from 3:00 to 11:00 pm PST. Black is 11:00 pm to 5:00 am. Blue is 5:00 am to 3:00 pm. Black is (roughly) EU hours, while blue is US hours. The market moves the most during normal US hours, but lately it has been more active in EU hours.
Sorry, the black and blue are hard to differentiate because of the crappy picture quality I had to use to make it fit.
Hi Mike, I don't scalp but I can offer my point of view on currency trading. Currencies are not the same as equities, indices, etc. in a fundamental way. A stock price represents the price of a single underlying entity (an index, the average value of a group of entities). But a currency rate represents the value of one currency in relation to another. I know I'm not telling you anything you don't know here, but my point is that when a currency cross rate moves, it can do so for a variety of reasons. For example, one rate might be falling while the other is rising, both may be rising but one is rising faster than the other, and so on. This being the case, what I do in my trading is I try to determine the strength/weakness of each national currency rate by monitoring its movements against the other main rates. I follow a basket that includes all the majors. This analysis give me a read on the relative strength/weakness of each individual currency compared to the others in the basket on an ongoing basis. Next I look to take trades only on the strongest currency paired with the weakest currency. Myself, I focus on end of day data because I work full time and don't have a lot of time for trading. However, there's no reason one couldn't use intraday data and integrate this method into a scalping strategy. What promoted me to write this was a comment by a previous poster about not paying attention to support and resistance. I feel that S/R levels probably do not have as much merit in currency trading as they do in stocks because there is twice the chance that a change in the perceived value of the underlying will cause price to ignore them. That said, I don't have experience attempting to rely heavily on S/R in both equities an currencies to be able to make a comparison. By the way, I do follow S/R, but I don't use it as a primarily tool. I look forward to your comments. Regards, chaos
ES, have passed on the message to your wife. Chaos, im experience both support resistance and fibs do work in currencies but the major difference is that trends are much more persistent than in indexes and bonds. So a currency might pause at 78% or a double top but after pausing it keeps right on going whereas an index would be more likely to reverse or retrace substantially. Guess a way to give back all your profits in currencies. :eek: Kiwi
did you see that EUR/USD move? 170 point spike down in 5 seconds! good thing I was short - hehe. all positions closed / 192 points clean profit this trading session / all wins no losses - flat for the weekend. later girls/guys. Sam
jrs3, How's your execution speed with CMS Forex? Another ex-CMS user on another thread wrote that he had very slow execution times, sometimes minutes during high volume periods. Have you ever used Oanda? If so, how do they compare? I'm currently not a currency trader (QQQ), so I have to ask the question: No commission No software fees High leverage No Uptick restrictions on shorts Tight Spreads Most say instant (or close to it) execution What's the catch? Why aren't more traders involved in currencies?
Gulp. That's why. Today is a good day to look at the charts and realize that STOP LOSSES ARE YOUR FRIEND. Oh. My. God.