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[Marbo]

Hi to all traders,

I want to know where you come from (better: WHEN you trade) and which pair you mostly trade. That has the following reason:

I am trading the European session (1h AM - 12h AM ET) and the best pairs to trade regarding to chart patterns, volatility etc. are EUR/USD and GBP/USD.
But today I saw that also the EUR/JPY is nice to trade. The USD/JPY is in my opinion pretty hard to trade in the European session.

I am sure that you all noticed that some pairs are "faster" than others. In times where the correlation between EUR/USD and GBP/USD is strong, the EUR/USD moves down and the GBP/USD moves much more and faster in the same direction. So you can say that the GBP/USD is doing what the EUR/USD does.

What I wanted to tell you is that I want to avoid concentrating on trading the wrong pairs. I think a trader from India is not trading the EUR/GBP because the "big players" in Europe are still sleeping and the vola will be pretty low...

Therefore it would be interesting for all to know what pairs traders from Australia, Japan, India, Russia, Germany, Spain, USA etc. are trading at their trading hours. Please be so kind and write down your trading session in Eastern Time.

Thank you!

Marcus

[united46]

Marcus

Have a look at this, page 18. You might find this data more useful as it shows fx turnover for each country.

http://www.bis.org/publ/rpfx05t.pdf

To that end, it doesn't really matter what pairs Aussie traders trade during Asian hours, the volume of trade is so small it has no material effect. That's not meant as a sleight, it's purely a fact.

Kind Regards

United

[Ray G]

I trade where the London and New York times overlap; about 1am to 7:30am Pacific time zone here in the States.

DailyFx has a monthly paper they put out calculating the various correlations between the majors. That brings up two things. 1) Why trade correlated pairs? Especially since the EU/US is usually the narrowest spread i.e. the cheapest to trade. So if two pairs move in close correlation, (negative or positive) just buy another lot on the cheaper pair.

2) And we shouldn't assume that typically correlated pairs are always moving in the same step. I brought this up in another thread somewhere; the correlation between the EUR and the GBP versus USD are pretty high but last month that correlation was only .22. That's pretty low.

The only time I trade anything besides the EU/US is when there is particular news affecting another pair and I want to get in on some of it. Otherwise, what's the point? If most people trade the Euro/US, then that's where the volatility is and thus the most trading opportunities exist.

A good time to scalp is between 9pm and 12am Pacific time. It's not as reliably active but enough so to keep an eye on.

On edit: My eastern times are thus; my typical trading time is 4am - 10:30am New York. The second time I mentioned is 12am - 3am.

[proedge_joe]

8:00-12:00 EST time

[Marbo]

I noticed that there is only one thing a forex trader has in mind: Is the US Dollar rising or falling? If I am sure that the USD will rise than it is always the question which pair to trade. Today I first made some losses in USD/CHF and then the same pair brought many pips back to my account. The AUD/USD was also a nice pair to trade today.
So I think it is not always the best way to trade the cheapest pair. It is more important for me to have good support and resists I can rely on. The EUR/USD often shows no set-up but others pairs do. Therefore I tend to trade pairs offering a better set-up.
What do you think? If you are sure about a rising USD you can not only go short in the EUR/USD but go long in USD/CHF or USD/JPY or go short in AUD/USD etc.
But what do you prefer? Are you only trading the cheapest pair? Would you never trade the AUD/USD if you are sure about a rising USD?

I ask all that because I have always traded the EUR/USD and GBP/USD. But yesterday I recognized much better possibilities in the other pairs...

Therefore I am interested what all the other traders do. If you look for set-ups in the different pairs or if you just think about what the USD is doing and trading a xxx/USD pair.