I commented on the other [B]F[/B]orex [B]F[/B]orum that it seemed strange how market behavior seemed to have turned on a dime after the 1st of this year.
What I mean is that if scroll back through 2011, 2010, 2009, and 2008 on the daily charts and compare them to what you see since the beginning of this year, you find a stark contrast. Namely, it seems that for the past four years you see that over any given month you had more than a handful of days in which the daily range was greater than 200 pips from the low to high. There a LOT of days in any given month where the range was greater than 180 pips and I’d say that more than 70% of the days had ranges greater than 150 pips.
That all seemed to end suddenly after Christmas and if you don’t count Dec 20th -Jan 1st as being valid simply because of the two holidays, then things seemed to have changed abruptly as of the beginning of this year. What I see is pretty much the exact opposite of what was found over the last 4 years. Namely, you have hardly ANY days where the daily range was greater than 200 pips, very few that were greater than 180 pips and almost all of the days in any given month had a range that was 100 pips or less with many being less than 85.
I really can’t get my mind around what would could have caused such a huge change that had such an obvious start date. (Jan 1st) Sure, we have QE going on, but we had QE in previous years and QE III can’t account for the behavior seen over the majority of this year. We have the problems with Greece and Spain, but Greece was in trouble last year too.
Part of me is wondering if everyone who was participating in the markets over the last 4 years to make it move big on most days just decided to pack it up for the whole year because it’s an “election year” or whatever…but it was an election year in 2008 and the market didn’t demonstrate conditions like we see today.
Anyway…I’m wondering if any of you think that things are going to change significantly after the election.
Also, if any of you watch stocks and other investments, are they demonstrating slow intraday trading like the FX market is? I’ve heard people say that most people taking FX positions large enough to move the market are not doing so as as pure speculation but as a hedge against other trades they’ve put on. This would lead one to believe that if things are slow here because they’re not hedging other positions then the other markets would necessarily be slow as well. Are things slower all around? Is there any market with high intraday volatility right now?