An Idiot's Guide to EURUSD: 5 Steps to Success 💲💲💲Synopsis
If you trade Forex then you know the weekends are the best time to analyse the market. Everybody likes to talk about how volatile EURUSD is, but what they don't tell you is that the market is ranging a good 80%-90% of the time; good deals do NOT last long. In fact, half of a days price movement can play out in 15-45 minutes, It's that fast. The best entries are usually snatched up in a matter of minutes, meaning that slow momentum oscillators and lagging trend following indicators don't perform well in these conditions. EURUSD in my opinion trades a lot like CL (crude WTI), where trading decisions need to be made while volatility is low to mitigate risk. Translation: if you can't win in a range, you're going to blow your account in this market, trust me.
I see so many people on here setting targets 2-3 times the daily atr with the expectation that they'll be paid by the end of the day or the next day. Don't do that, please. It's not a sprint, it's a marathon. Long term gains depend on practical consistent returns, not 10:1 RRs. It's actually a lot more realistic to take ZERO to two 20-40 pip trades per day. Over the course of a week it adds up.
The chart:
This week we came off of a really strong bullish surge away from parity, and the market then did what it does best, range. And the way that prices are moving right now is just classic EURUSD, I love it...I get so nostalgic, because ranges like these are how I learned to trade; the way that the market recycles over and over makes it so fun to trade, it never gets stale. Since it's the weekend and the markets are closed, I wanted to take this opportunity to share with anyone who might be wondering what it's like to day trade this market.
How to trade ranges:
Step 1: Find your levels...
The easiest way is to map out support and resistance zones. On the chart, I use my own variation of the Williams fractals indicator (I call them Neo fractals 😎) for every prominent swing high or swing low, the indicator draws a horizontal ray from the highest, lowest close and projects it out into the future. You can see the spots where lines start stacking up in a certain price range act as stronger support or resistance than the areas with only one dotted line. It only takes about 5-10 minutes per day to do this by hand though, so an indicator definitely isn't necessary. It's really important to be able to eyeball pivot points yourself anyways.
Step 2: Determine market phase...
After you've mapped everything out, it becomes a lot clearer what's happening in the market, and if the market is ranging or trending. If the market's ranging, you will see far more s/r lines on your chart especially once you start seeing s/r lines stacking up close to one another. A clear giveaway that the market is ranging is when price makes strong moves in one direction, only to return back from where it came, later in the day. Once you've determined what phase of the market you're even closer to spotting high quality trades.
Step 3: The next step is to find areas of value...
In general you want to find the areas within the range which provide the most exclusive prices, And steer away from price ranges that hold 80-90% of the activity on the cart. Being 5-10 pips in profit before a big move will completely change the way you feel about a trade when it starts to go against you (plenty winning trades will go against you, especially if you're trading reversals). On the chart you can see that the supply and demand zones only produced 2-4 trades this week, but all of them were for over 50 pips. These aren't the only trades you can take, but they're definitely the highest RR trades, you can get in a ranging market.
Step 4: What for confirmation...
There are so many ways to confirm a move, but my favorite for this market is a phenomena that I like to call a spike. (There's probably an actual name for it, but I'm self taught so I just make stuff up as I go 😅) Find a hammer or star candle on a higher chart like the daily or 4hr and it look at that time period again on a lower timeframe, what you'll see is that the hammer or star is actually just a large price movement in one direction followed by an equally large movement in the other direction. What might appear as a spike on a lower timeframe will appear as a hammer or star on a higher time frame, and the larger and longer the chart pattern takes to complete, the larger and longer the move will be in the opposite direction. These are the Rolls Royce of signals. When you realize that a head and shoulders pattern is really just a series of spikes, it will completely change the way that you trade. In my experience, trading price spikes alone out performs every other chart pattern there is, because most candlestick and chart patterns are made up of a series of spikes anyways. Most consolidation periods end in a large spike followed by a 1-200 pip surge in the opposite direction. They appear most often on higher timeframes as hammers and stars, or large engulfment. but on the lower time frames you can watch these things play out over 5 ,10 or even 100 periods sometimes. The key is to have very strict rules for what you consider a spike to be, how many pips? What kind of ratio are you looking for? is it happening in an area of value? etc.
Step 5: The range leads to the trend...
The reason that trend following strategies under perform in this market is because strong trends don't last long on EU AND getting good value is insanely competitive. The key is to spot these trends early, you have to be looking when nobody else is looking. That means waking up earlier than everyone else and having a plan in place before the move happens...Not seeing a big candle and just hopping in. I try to have a daily strategy in place before the Asian session ends, that way, I''m ready for London and NY. I live in the US, so that means I'm waking up everyday around midnight to 1 in the morning. But most of the time, if my trade starts well, I go back to bed and check back in around 7. If you want to trade EURUSD, that's what it takes though. There might have to be lifestyle changes that you have to make (especially for North and South American traders) in order to really commit yourself to this market and give your trading it the attention that it needs.
