I use Oanda as my broker and use their fxtrade platform. There is an option to change your candle start/end time to either 17:00 New York or 00:00 New York. The 5 hour difference can make a large impact on how candles form and where support and resistance may show. These changes not only affect the daily time frames, but also the 4 hour candles. It seems to me to be important to be looking at the same time frame as most other users.
So is it actually important to be on the best setting or is it okay to trade on either safely? Is it possible to know what is the most widely adopted setting? What is your candle end time if you use daily charts in your trading?
I have a feeling that this is affecting my entries and exits because I am on the wrong setting…
Actually, it’s a 7-hour difference, and it does matter.
This post — 301 Moved Permanently — from October 2011 will give you the rationale for using [B]5pm New York time[/B] as the end of each forex trading day, and the start of the next trading day. (This is one situation in which you [I]don’t [/I]have to take account of daylight saving time. Just use 5pm New York time [I]year-round.)[/I]
The paragraph at the bottom of that post, about Castle Dracula, refers to an inside joke between Dale Paterson and myself. The joke relates to the fact that Romania (GMT+2) is 7 hours ahead of New York (GMT-5), so midnight at Dracula’s Castle in the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania is 5pm in New York.
Many months ago, I did a study of worldwide forex trading volume, hour by hour, throughout a 24-hour trading day. That study showed that, between 5pm and 6pm each trading day, forex trading volume declines to its daily minimum.
If you want to review that study, write back, and I’ll dig it up.
There’s also a third option of setting it to 00:00 in your own local time-zone, which you can specify elsewhere (in other words, by combining the two functions, you can effectively set fxTrade’s “start of day” to [U]any[/U] of the 24 hours of the day).
If it makes u feel any better Pip its been rainy here in sunny FLA all week LOL. Sorry now back to the thread. Oh yeah NY close is what I like to use for whatever thats worth.
And theres a subject for your next video
And I thought I was the only one who cursed the end of week and trading.:46:
Hello… No, it does not help, but I hope you are back to sunny days…
I thought about doing a video on this, but, having read the 2nd Skies Forex article, which I posted here, I think there is nothing more that I could add.
For me, it makes sense to have charts set to.local time, which I have done since I started trading, because I want to organise my chart reference points around my day, without having to recalculate times back to local time… As I do not use day-close or day-open strategies, it is of no consequence to me… Sorry
For me also. My charts are set with the day beginning at 00.00 UK time.
It creates the anomaly that if I look at a daily chart, Sundays, showing therefore just an hour or two of the Asian/New Zealand open, are shown as a tiny bar - and any measurements like a “daily ATR” would of course be completely wrong, but that isn’t actually relevant to me (since I don’t use indicators).
Everything is relative to our trading context… Like trading volume, for example: it only reflects your own broker’s forex retail volume, not a whole-of-market volume (which, unlike for other asset classes, is not available for forex); however, as you are trading with that one broker, that volume information, relative to that broker, is really all you need to know, as it gives you a fairly good idea of how millions of traders are trading with that one broker, and so it is reflective of market sentiment.
Equally, if you are trading around daily candles set to your local time, there will be many more traders investing/speculating with positions based on the same time setting, so you would still be part of a huge market…
