Normal or something shady

Hi all, I’m new to trading and I’ve been reading all of the great responses on here. My question is twice in two weeks this has happened to me. I shorted AUD/NZD and had what I thought was a sensible stop loss point. The pair was trading in a range then trended up with a shadow of 20 pips higher and stopped me out and came back down into range. It felt like something shady happened. Is this normal?

I’m looking at various short time-frame charts for this pair but its hard to see anything abnormal.

If you can’t post up a chart, is is possible to state when this happened and quote the significant price levels? (UK time if possible)

Here’s a screenshot.

Here’s the same period off my broker screen. I don’t see anything unusual here. There are always some small variations in candles between various brokers but I see nothing to suggest manipulation here.

20 pips is not a large move and can easily result from just a comment or a statement on Bloomberg, Investing.com, the news, etc, etc.

Is your broker a well-known, large and regulated company or an off-shore? If you are suspicious then you could open a demo account with another broker and watch the candle formations on both while you are in a trade.

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Yes it is called volatility most probably your set too tight stop loss

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Got it. Thanks for the help.

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There was a bullish spike. And IMO, these happen regularly when high volatility is in the market - caused by who knows? Institutional traders who need to exit a bearish position? AUD banks?

You could also see the effect clearly if you watch the 1M chart on the DAX breakout at opening time, at 2pm UK. It’s hectic.

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It is very volatile at the moment. These wicks are common across a lot of pairs. hopefully we get some more stable conditions soon

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It’s Institutions pulling price for liquidity a better price possibly? But not uncommon maybe adjust your SL on this pair

I would add the standard advice - get out of day-trading and just trade off D1 trends. Go as short as H4 if you need to for more precise entries and stop-losses.

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Tommor, two questions. Do you exclusively trade on the daily or higher timeframe and what are the benefits of trading on that time frame? In addition to eliminating noise on the lower time frames

I only make trade decisions on D1 charts. I use D1 and W1 to confirm trends and gauge them against each other.

TA on D1 is much more reliable than from shorter time-frames, so patterns are more reliable (though I probably mean less unreliable) while D1 closes, highs and lows have much more persistent meaning to the market than intra-day levels from random time-frames. I also like to avoid buying and selling live - I set entry orders at TA-based levels and let the market either get through them or fail to get through them, in which case I can adjust them up or down or cancel them, all at no cost.

Thanks for the info