Yes, agreed - it’s all strategy dependent - if you’re using a market-making strategy then typically volatile periods might be the very [I]worst [/I]times to trade!
Once I’ve been through all the major pairs I’ll try and put together a post looking at how these volatility patterns affect the results of a couple of example strategies in different styles.
I’ve come unstuck many times as a trader by relying on “common sense”. I’ve also been surprised over and over by the degree to which patterns in price data perturb expectations. Over time I’ve learned that the most fool-proof (and even “common-sense”) approach is to take nothing for granted and interrogate the data.
One main reason that algorithmic trading has come to dominate the market (not only in the high frequency sector) is because it doesn’t bring the biases and make the often incorrect “common-sense” assumptions that human traders do.
A final point - I wouldn’t say there’s anything “complicated” or overly sophisticated about the analysis I’m posting - we’re not trying to unpick deviation in theta decay of an in-the-money option call hedged with a dynamically allocated basket of triple-leveraged ETFs . . . or anything silly like that - it’s just a bar chart with a very basic volatility measure.
There is. It’s called finance . . . On every exchange, lurking behind every dealing desk and gaming every ECN are vampires. They want your blood and your money and, to misquote Gary Oldman, they’ll cross oceans of time-zones to find you!
above i was talking bout common sense in human behaviour more then of common sense in markets, i know markets dont act upon common sense very often and your right about what you wrote, we only talked about 2 different things
With oil proving to be one of the principal drivers for markets so far this year, it seemed like a good time to tackle the major commodity currencies, starting with the Australian Dollar.
The AUD/USD pair appears to be notable for lower deviations in its volatility throughout the trading day. Although it is possible to identify the three characteristic peaks in volatility accompanied by higher volumes, these are both far less pronounced when compared to the troughs, and far less different from one another. The Australian Dollar perhaps has less of a ‘home’, and is consistently actively traded around the globe.
While volume is notably higher around the start of the US trading day, it should be borne in mind that some of this is due to the natural influx of liquidity at the start of the regular futures trading session.
Although the Australian Dollar trades with the fifth highest volumes of any currency (due in part to international trading of natural materials, and due in further part to the carry trade), this apparent absence of any predictably enhanced period of volatility suggests that it is possibly not the best choice for daytraders who require significant directional price changes.