Thanks for the kind words.
Then, fasten your seat-belt. That thread is well on its way to 1,000 pages, 10,000 replies, and 1,000,000 views. Attempting to dig into it can be a daunting proposition.
My advice: concentrate on page 1 of that thread, where the videos are arranged sequentially; they will lead you from market basics to sophisticated trading.
And keep an eye on the last 5 or 10 posts in the thread, just to keep up with the current conversation, and to be alerted to live webinars, which happen on short notice, on an irregular schedule. Most (but not all) of the webinars are recorded, either by Michael or by other members, but they don’t all get posted on page 1 of the thread.
Michael Huddleston is the premiere trader on this Forum, hands down, no debate. And he is the best and most active teacher on this Forum. Regardless of your present trading knowledge and skill, you can gain the equivalent of a college education in forex trading from Michael. Believe me, he’s that good.
I agree. That’s why I like to divide worldwide forex trading into seven “sessions”, rather than four. The seven, in geographical order, are: Wellington (New Zealand), Sydney, Tokyo, Singapore, Zurich, London and New York. (Here’s more info). But, even this is deceptive. It implies some sort of equivalence among these “important” trading centers.
A quick look at volume figures confirms that it’s crazy to consider Wellington and London as equals in terms of size: New Zealand accounts for 9 billion USD per day in forex volume, while the U.K. accounts for 1,854 billion USD per day. In other words, Wellington’s trading volume amounts to less than ½ of 1% of London’s trading volume.
So, why even include Wellington? Only one reason: the NZD is among the 10 most heavily-traded currencies in the world. Altogether, those seven “sessions” represent the “home markets” of all 10 of those currencies.
A case can be made for dividing the world into [B]three[/B] major, regional forex markets: Tokyo (if we understand that to mean all of Asia plus Australia and New Zealand), London (if we understand that to include all of central Europe plus Ireland and South Africa), and New York (if we understand that to mean all of North America).
Looked at this way, the “Tokyo market” is a 1,099 billion USD per day market; the “London market” is a 2,756 billion USD per day market; and the “New York market” is a 983 billion USD per day market.
Are you shocked that New York comes in last? How can that be, given the fact that the highest trading volume of the day typically occurs in the first 3 hours of the New York session?
The answer lies in overlap. The first 3 hours of the New York session overlap the last 3 hours of the Zurich session and the 6th, 7th and 8th hours of the London session. There is no other time of day when 19 countries, accounting for 75% of total world forex volume, are all “open” at the same time. “Open”, in this context, means that they are in the midst of their 8am-5pm normal business days.
There’s one other factor that argues for dividing the globe into three regional forex markets. The big banks which are the heavy-hitters in the worldwide interbank network typically maintain “trading desks” in at least three major financial centers around the globe. In almost every case, those three centers are London, New York and Tokyo. As the normal business day winds down in one location, each bank’s position and order book is passed from one office to the next. This happens seamlessly, and we never see it or feel it. Kathy Lien has written an article in Investopedia which details some of this — The Foreign Exchange Interbank Market
Trading activity attracts trading activity, and the clustering of powerful banks in specific locations tends to make those locations grow in importance. How else would you explain the fact that London is so important financially, given the fact that the U.K. is not the most powerful economy in the world? It has to do with 400 years of powerful banks wanting to be “right next door” to other powerful banks, in that one-square-mile area of London known as “The City of London”, or simply as “The Square Mile”.
Well, I’ve just about beaten this horse to death. So, it’s time to move on.
Take care.