How you all well,
As the new decade comes I have being looking through my charts etc and wondered is it better to concentrate on a single market or multi markets. As a day trader mainly I only really look at around 3 markets but had a chat with someone who watches 20 pairs , indices , gold and I thought my head would explode if checking that lot daily
I will glance at multi ,market end of day for long term
Good to not over-focus. I’m always banging on about this, sorry. But its good discipline to open a longer time-frame chart than whatever is your default for your preferred market and ask yourself why you’re thinking of going contrary to the long-term action. Likewise, if you’re looking to go short on AUD/USD, have a look at the other AUD and USD charts and do likewise. Just as a sense-check if you like…
Hi, if you trade manually, three charts are enough, for automatic trade, even 30 will be not a problem. Regards Greg
By a day trader I assume you mean short term/scalper type of strategies.
From my experience very similar yearly returns can be achieved trading higher time frames as scalping if you trade multiple markets. (I am saying yearly return as it can take the full year for it to play out.)
As far as forex is concerned I look at all the major pairs and their crosses and even glance at USDMXN, some SGD pairs and had two profitable trades this year with USDSEK and USDNOK. I even trade shares from time to time if I see an opportunity I like. I write this to show the variety of things one can trade and to present something a mentor told me that I wish he had told me earlier.
“In trading, loyalty is not a virtue. That is loyalty to a position, a company, or a currency.”
Also
“Professionals don’t care what they trade. They just trade when their edge presents itself.”
The more that we realize instruments don’t really have their own “personality” , other than maybe their average true range (especially true for currency pairs and indices. Shares are a little different.) And that the information displayed on the price chart are human generated events that show us the thoughts and psychology of the market participants as a whole, the better. The higher time frames make the reading of the general sentiment of an instrument much clearer as it filters out a lot of the noise that can simply be banks balancing their “books” and/or filling client orders.
If you are determined to short term trade such as scalp, which let me say, I am not against. I actually will scalp if my schedule permits and there is a really good looking opportunity about one or two days a week, then looking at so many charts would be overwhelming. If you are only looking at 27 or so daily charts where the only thing that really matters is the daily 5pm close it is not very much to flip through those charts and see if you have a signal, you have days and potentially weeks to watch a trade set up.
For scalping though there are only a handful of pairs I watch. I will drill down to the 30 and even 15 minute chart and see if there is a clear market structure to trade from. Many times there is no market structure that satisfies my trading rules and I don’t end up scalping even though I had the time for it.
Great advice here. Recently I have found myself taking on too much, leading to sloppy analysis because I’m trying to get through too many charts in a short period due to time restrictions and a full time job. I have realized that this is just not sustainable and have scaled back.
Currently, I have 3 pages of charts I look at in order of importance to me, the first one and my top priority being the 7 major pairs. Once those have been properly analyzed then I can move onto my 2nd page which consists of a few selected commodities from the COT report. I will look for setups in favour of the direction specified by the non commercial, large speculators. This is a new strategy that I am still working on.
Finally the 3rd page consists of 21 of the other main currency crosses.
Only do what you feel comfortable doing, but don’t think you have to limit yourself. There’s so much opportunity out there if you have the time and patience.
If you can describe the strategy you can write EA and save a lot of time. Regards Greg
I’m a hands-on kind of guy. Call me old school but I like to learn what I’m doing rather than have someone or something, like in this case, do it for me. Such as running a business, I would not start one then hire someone else to run it, I need to have control of every aspect, every detail. Learn it inside and out.
That’s just me though, I’m sure these programs can work when done right, but I have no interest in them.
This is your decision about what kind of trading you choose, results are the most important.
I believe that is something we can all agree on. Results are what is important.
Its ultimately all about being profitable regardless of win rate percentage, draw down, time frame, price action, indicators, automated or manual!
Do what works for you!
Hi langers,
I personally believe you should trade a few but analyse and watch all incase you can add another pair to your trading list. I really only want to trade markets that are moving. I want to get in and out within the day. When I first started out I analysed all pairs at the end of the day or weekend and whittled them down to the ones that were consistently winning. I still analyse all the pairs on the weekend to see if the volatility has increased and there are quick moves I could get in to. It could be the case that next year something else is more volatile giving me an opportunity to get in and out. I would then start trading it eg ethereum 2 years ago around this time was making fast moves through the day so I started trading it. By feb it had slowed down and harder to trade so stopped.