I have been at this for a couple of years, with mixed results. August of 2018 was explosive, the pair went up like crazy during a currency crisis in Turkey after a decade of rising, so I had been adjusting my short position daily but in the end the margin call was triggered. That was my last attempt…Then I took a break from TRY until July of this year when I opened another demo account and traded the 50k up to 56k in one month, using three 200k short positions, then two 50k short positions; I then decided that this was a good profit to keep until the end of the year, so I just opened a 25k short that I have left running and it has been at breakeven a few times but it has very small pip value so I am leaving it running to collect rollover with minimum risk (so far it has collected 300 Pounds in rollover).
The bigger positions (200k) were taken due to a mix of technical and fundamental factors giving me confidence to take short-term trades leveraged up (4:1 leverage); subsequent trades were smaller (50k, then 25k) to minimise losing the profits won thus far.
Rollover/swap, that is, overnight interest on positions held open into the next day, is the main reason for trading EUR/TRY because it has the highest interest on short positions of any pairs offered by any broker: on a good day it can offer £8 per day for holding a 10k short position overnight, with an average of £2 or £3 the rest of the time (the swap rate offered changes daily).
The main difficulty with this is that if you want to go long with a large position you need to be careful not to leave it open too many days as the negative rollover/swap is quite large and unless you caught a big move up it could eat your pip profits.
So I tend to trade this pair short, like I did with other high-yielding exotics (e.g. UsdMxn), because I prefer longer trades where possibe, accumulating rollover.
In July the shorter trades were due to the pair being quite active to the downside and I wanted to take advantage of the short-term momentum: as it apprached the 200-day moving average I pulled back and lowered my risk factor.
I should add that when trading high-swap exotics it is still crucial to get pip-profits, i.e. to correctly guess the direction of travel for the pair: however, of my 6k profits this half-year, about 25% were made of the rollover/swap, therefore this is an important part of determining how you will manage such trades.
Also, exotics like TRY pairs can move thousands of pips per day but the pip-value is small: while a 200k EUR/USD position would be worth about £16 per pip, an equivalent positiin in EUR/TRY is worth… £2.85 per pip.
Finally, margin requirements are greater for these pairs, due to lack of liquidity: a 200k position in EUR/USD would need a £6.6k margin but a 200k EUR/TRY would triple that margin (£20k, to be exact). This means that leveraging up on high-margin pairs is very risky and it is preferable to balance lower-margin with longer-term exposure, i.e. opening trades that yield enough pips through momentum and a good rollover, without destroying your account.
Does that answer your question?
