I’ve got a question for everyone who trades the London session and first half of the New York session:
Do the setups and moves usually come earlier in your trading session (i.e. before New York open), later in the session (after New York open), or some sort of random mix.
I ask because I remember reading that London has the largest FX trading operations in the world, so it seems as though I might be shooting myself in the foot by not getting online before 7:30/8:00 am ET.
On the other hand, I would also think that the combined volume between London AND New York being active at the same time would bring the highest levels of SM activity and therefore, a greater chance of a successful trade setup.
How are broker’s tick volumes calculated? Is it directly from their retail clients or all transactions from their liquidity providers? Because what I’m wondering is what makes us think that the ‘smart money’ would be using retail Forex brokers to conduct their trading as apposed to DMA Prime Brokerages? Currently I’m juggling many different brokers to conduct VSA, however a lot of their volume feeds are different and inconsistent compared to each other, making it hard to draw conclusions. Who would you recommend? How about FXCM seeing as they are one of the largest retail brokers?
Volume simply means “amount” or “number of”. In this case we are measuring the amount of ticks. A tick is simply a price change. Simply put, we are given the amount of times price changed during a candle. The relative increases and decreases are what gives us information, not an exact number of ticks.
How do we know it’s Smart Money? Because the way in which they enter during Accumulation/Distribution causes a high amount of tick activity…lots of price change. They enter in blocks, not all at once, against other traders so they can get in large orders at a good price.
Think of a selloff that would normally have price drop quickly. What if those large sell orders were intentionally being met with buy orders which keep price from falling further? Price will jump around more actively but the progress made down would be limited (the close price and reaction candle).
On the other hand, with low volume tests, SM will pause their activity to “test” the market at a key price area. If others are not very active, we can see a big relative drop in activity on that test (no supply, no demand).
I recommend getting Esignal for the best Volume feed. If you don’t want to pay however, the best I can suggest is to compare a few feeds. The issue I see lately with broker’s volume feed is consistency. I wouldn’t rely on one no matter how great it might look at the moment.
Yep. Esignal is great but I don’t like to do my analysis on their software. It’s slow and clunky.
So, I’m just using whatever looks most similar to them on my MT4 and checking my analysis and entries as I go. I don’t like clicking back and forth but oh well.
The london/us crossover is the busiest time with the most activity, and gbpusd / eurusd have big daily pip trading ranges, so theres loads of opportunities.
Timing varies depending on news events and the time frames you work in. I would avoid trading around news, but any other time should be good for you
i am back again … i hope to catch up very fast … pete pls what broker volume feeds do you recommend now … are you guys still using ibfx or goforex ? answer need pls … thanks
