CME/Globex futures contracts. Short = short EUR / long USD. The M6E contract (micro-EUR/USD). The 6E contract is the full-size. Contract size for the M6E is 1/10th the size of the 6E. The 6E is 125K euros, so the M6E is 12.5K euros. So my position size right now is $75K euros. If I was trading the 6E, the margin required and paper gain would both be 10x higher.
Oh I see, you are trading currencies on the Futures market, not the Forex cash market, via the micro-contracts. It does not matter really, as long as you are on the right side of the market. Ok, the New Zealand dollar is resuming its uptrend now, time to load the boat and make a killing!
Looks like on the daily chart it should be able to get to .8425-.8450 without much trouble. It's going to hit serious resistance above that. Probably will take some time (days/weeks/months) to clear it, if at all. In the last 25 years (based on the Barchart.com chart), it's only cleared .8500 a handful of times. Odds are it drops to .6500 before it hits .9000...
All the majors seemed to have spiked in the last 2 hours against the dollar. BOJ or some other central bank sell dollars or something?
Thanks everyone for a good discussion.... I have been trading equities and futures and just starting to watch Forex. The question I have is "how much more profitable is it to watch 8 currency pairs instead of just EURUSD?" It appears to me that most of the movement in forex is represented in EURUSD so I am not missing very much by just trading that pair. Clearly posters on this thread are watching many pairs at the same time. What have you found to be the benefits of many pairs vs a single major pair such as EURUSD? Thank you, ramora
Hi Ramora, I used to watch only the EUR/USD at the beginning of my Forex trading "career", because I always thought that since the currency pairs are all highly correlated anyway, why bother watching them all? And because the EUR/USD has the smallest spread too, I will make more money trading that currency pair only, right? Big mistake! The problem with this "logic" is that it could take days or even weeks for the winning trading setup you are looking for (assuming you have one of course) to appear on your EUR/USD chart. So now I look for my winning price action pattern in 28 currency pairs simultaneously (trust me it is not that difficult to do) and I can spot my trading setup almost daily, instead of waiting weeks! In other words, why limit yourself to one currency pair like the EUR/USD, and ignore the 27 other pairs? I will elaborate later on, got to go now, something is brewing on the GBP/USD...
So you are watching 28 all the time or you flip through screens during the day looking for trade setups? Do you pick a subset to follow during the day? Do you trade pairs with wide spread, many of that 28 must have very wide spreads, correct? If you don't mind, what time zones are you trading, and chart bar size, 5 min, 15 min, hour? Thanks xelite777
Mostly confirmation - ensuring a move isn't isolated to one pair. All the pairs are correlated to varying degrees. Watching multiple pairs might motivate you to do some research in the following areas: determining which pairs are highly correlated in the time-frame you're interested in, and seeing if there are any leader/lagger relationships so you can pounce all over the lagger once the leader starts moving... Not likely, since there are much smarter people playing this game, but it doesn't hurt to look. trading spreads - long one pair, short another pair, and playing the convergence/divergence. That'll eliminate some of the risk of a directional play. Not all, since a central bank intervention or policy announcement/action will make a lot of markets go haywire simultaneously...