Currency Futures Question

[keymoo]

Soul, see my blog Forex News Trading Journal I have been trading forex and now much prefer currency futures as the forex bucket shops are unregulated and they have stop hunting software designed to take you out of trades. Most bucket shops take the other side of your trade so it is in their interest for you to fail, not so with futures. The two best instruments are the euro @EC and the british pound @BP. @EC has much more liquidity than the @BP but the @BP is still tradeable if you stay under 10-20 contracts, expect slippage if you go higher than that. Hope it helps, my blog shows you my entries and slippage I get, I have screenshots of TS charts and ToS.

The best times to trade are from 0700 - 1500 GMT.

[notouch]

Keymoo, sounds like you're using one of those nasty autoclick services. Which one, Felix, Dustin or Sanjay? I think they're all a rip-off because you can program one yourself in Excel which performs much more quickly. I don't trade that way anymore though. Too much hit and hope.

[keymoo]

I use Safwan's, I think it's superb value as it is an institutional level feed which is quicker than any retail-level feed. I can often be in the trade within 1 second of the release, you wouldn't get that with a retail feed. One trade pays for a few months membership, I think it's amazing value - the software itself is superb. Felix's and Dustin's feeds are no good.

[notouch]

There's no such thing as "institutional level feed" or "retail feed". Safwan is such a BS merchant. You need access to Bloomberg or Reuters and you can be in a trade in less than a second if you a know a little bit of Excel VBA and Windows programming.

Also looking at your blog (which is nice by the way) you would get better fills straddling with tight stop-limit orders.

[torero]

	Quote:	notouch
	Most forex brokers are bucketshops - including the one with TradeStation. Your order never makes it to the interbank market so they are not really brokers at all. They create their own little market based on interbank price feeds. Their business model is based on the fact that most of their clients lose so they're happy just to take the money of their clients. They're really just bookmakers. It's in their interest if you lose. The exceptions are Interactive Brokers' IdealPro, EFX Group, HotSpotFX and Currenex. There's plenty of liquidity in British Pound futures if you trade during London hours.

I currently trade with MBTrading, great customer support. It's the reason I don't trade through tradestation. I get signals from TS but I place all orders through MBT. Try the demo. EFX and MBT have the same platform btw.

[torero]

	Quote:	notouch
	Long term fibs are even more important than short term fibs for GBP/USD and the weekly pivot points are also important so you would take these things into account before placing your stop but a stop above 1.9550 would have been good.

Notouch, did you mean to post images/charts on your posts? Because I'm having a hard time following your explanations. I like to hear you expand on the 61.8 fib movement in Frankfurt. Thanks.

[notouch]

Oh oops I accidently deleted them all. Let me fix that.

I can't edit the posts. It tells me 30 minutes have expired and I need to contact an administrator.

Is there any way to put those images back in their original posts?

[keymoo]

Safwan has his software connected to Bloomberg, yes. I don't want to invest the time in coding my own software when I can lease it from someone else that provides a high quality service, that's all.

I would be very interested to learn how I could use stop-limit orders to straddle news events - could you explain that. We could do it offline, or converse here, either way is fine with me. A few other people have suggested to me to straddle with stop limit orders, but I have heard some nasty horror stories of people getting whipsawed using straddle techniques. Please explain, thanks.

[notouch]

Keymoo the problem is latency. If you're getting filled 2 seconds after a news release then the service is worthless. With stop-limits you would get filled within milliseconds. Judging from your post in another thread you've already got stop-limits sussed. I personally don't use them very often.

[keymoo]

Isn't the problem really one of liquidity? There has to be someone on the other side of my trade, right? Sometimes with the autoclick my fills are within 1-3 ticks of the opening price of the candle, sometimes it can be much larger depending on liquidity at the time. My fill times also vary between 1-3 seconds after the release depending on network, release time, the report, and other factors. I wouldn't say the service is worthless because I do get filled quite nicely most of the time.

If you personally don't use stop-limits very often, what do you use?