Forex Trading Overnight
Every Forex Trader I know trades differently. Some are mechanical traders while others are purely discretionary in a nature. Some even use “bots” to trade automatically with little or no intervention from them. No matter what kind of Forex Trader you are, the one thing I learned in trading these insane markets is that when you find something that works, stick with it!
If you’ve been following my $100 Forex Experiment, you’d know that my Forex education has had its ups and downs. You know that I experimented with a few different methods and paid the financial price. Despite my roller coaster ride, I slowly started to figure out what works best for me, my account, and my hair. Want to know what that is?
I just go to bed after I entered a trade or an order and sleep on it. Most of my trades are placed as limit orders in the evening (Sunday and weekdays) and are usually triggered when the London market opens. I place these trades on weekday evenings before I go to bed and then sell half in the morning (if up). Sometimes my orders get triggered in the wee hours of the morning and then get promptly stopped out, so finding the right place for them can be tricky!
My overall strategy is to take advantage of the lull in action between market actions. My orders are triggered as the Japanese market quiets down and the London market begins to waken. I wake up early, (5:30-6:00AM) and then sell half of my position if its profitable. I keep the other half in the market because there’s usually a carry through in the price action when the USA markets open. Then I close the trade whenever I feel like it, usually later that day.
While this may not work for everyone, it works for me. The trick to trading Forex profitably is to try different methods and strategies till you find the right one that works for you.
Update
This strategy fell apart during the 2008 MBS implosion. All the leverage in the debt market evaporated and asset markets sold off. This affected the Forex market a lot and wiped out a lot of traders. Since 2008 to about 2016, we saw very little volatility which made my overnight break out strategy dead on arrival.
Markets change and you need to evolve your strategies to make money. That’s the lesson here.