notouch

I think everyone else apart from TS refers to it as the DOM. I can't see how anyone could trade futures without it. Interactive Brokers has there own BookTrader and lots of third party front-ends like ButtonTrader and BracketTrader. Also there's a free one from eSignal called VisionTrader that is compatible with different brokers. X Trader is for pros and is the most expensive but you can get it for free (apart from slightly higher commissions) with Global Futures and Velocity Futures.

Thanks for that TinGull. Investor/IT is a great bit of software but it's going to take a while to learn to use it properly. I'll play around with it and watch the videos and read the manual. If I can get all its features to work I think it'll be the best charting software I've ever used.

Thanks. I changed the MarketDelta Market Profile chart to 0830-1615 time and got the same results as mypivots.com. I was using the 24 hour chart. Investor/RT have a Value Area technical indicator you can add to a candlestick chart but it gives completely the wrong values. I'll ignore it in future. I'm very impressed with the MarketDelta Footprint chart by the way. Notice how today's bottom coincided with the Delta (the row along the bottom) flipping from negative to positive with a high value (positive Delta of 364). You can also see buying pressure building on the way up. I'll post more information on MarketDelta as I use it more.

I'm getting lots of different value areas depending on what charting software I'm using. MarketDelta's Market Profile value area is different to Investor/IT's value area which is different to the mypivots.com value area. What are the standard settings to get the "correct" value area?

Could you add the colours too? The little red, orange or yellow symbols. The red ones are the real market movers. That's the best thing about the forexfactory calendar.

Biannual, not quarterly. No prizes for guessing when the next one is.

The only Bernie speech that really moves the market is his quarterly testimony. It's quarterly so not too hard to work out when the next one is. In all his other speeches he tends to avoid making controversial statements.

Something interesting happened today in YM which happens quite often. If you looked at the order book 15-20 minutes after the open you would have seen about 450 bids sitting above the monthly pivot at 12764. Normally you don't see 450 bids or offers at any one price in YM so it was a fairly blatant example or order spoofing. The purpose of order spoofing is so newbies will try to put orders ahead of the big one. The spoofer then sells to the newbies and pulls his bids. The price then collapses, as happened today. If you can identify order spoofing you can be on the side of the big player and against the newbies.

I would have thought the mini Nikkei 225 futures would be right up your street. The exchange is the Osaka Securities Exchange and a data subscription is only about $10. Hang Seng Index futures are free. You can trade them with an Interactive Brokers account. Time and sales is there but I'm not aware of any market internals. Also you might like the DAX from EUREX which is the world's biggest exchange. It opens in the morning in Germany so good for an afternoon session in Japan.

If you're good at poker then online poker is a great way of fleecing newbies. Just be aware that there are other professionals and maybe a few bots at the table doing the same thing.

Just looked at the CME website. There are about 40 pairs to trade. CME Australian Dollar CME Brazilian Real CME British Pound CME Canadian Dollar CME$INDEX CME Chinese Renminbi CME Cross Rates CME Czech Koruna CME E-mini Euro FX CME E-mini Japanese Yen CME Euro FX CME Hungarian Forint CME Israeli Shekel CME Japanese Yen CME Korean Won CME Mexican Peso CME New Zealand Dollar CME Norwegian Krone CME Polish Zloty CME Russian Ruble CME South African Rand CME Swedish Krona CME Swiss Franc The above against the USD plus a lot of cross rates (like EUR/GBP).

They don't trade at exactly the same price level because of interest rate differentials. Let's say you want to buy USD/JPY on the spot market with leverage. What you are actually doing is borrowing JPY (at an interest rate of 0.25%) and investing in USD (at an interest rate of 5.25%). So every night you get paid interest. If it was the other way round you get charged interest. So while British Pound futures are identical to GBP/USD because there is no interest rate differential (both countires have 5.25% interest rate) there is a difference in Euro futures compared to EUR/USD and Yen futures compared to USD/JPY to reflect the fact that with futures you don't pay or earn interest. They move identically though so if EUR/USD goes up by 20 pips then Euro futures will also go up 20 pips. There are about 15 pairs to trade on GLOBEX. Some spot brokers allow you trade 30 or so pairs.

Spot is another word for cash. So the difference is between forex futures and spot forex. There is no reliable way of measuring volume in the spot market. ESignal provides volume but it's fairly worthless because it includes bucketshops like FXCM that have nothing to do with the interbank market. I think you can get volume based on some interbank banks but it's of limited use because it's incomplete. The marketdelta website has some interesting material on the use of volume for Euro futures but you have to remember that the futures market is only a fraction of the spot market.

Fibonacci set ups often work perfectly for the GBP and on both the intraday and daily time frame. It looks to me like we may be about to form the right shoulder of a head and shoulders top on the daily chart. Fundamental releases are not as important as some people claim. Often they just provide a good opportunity to fade the kneejerk spike in favour of playing the longer term move. Remember most currency trading has nothing to do with investing or speculation but is normal business transactions so even if there's a shock CPI release, importers and exporters still need to exchange currencies. However, there are some big market movers for each currency which you have to watch if you're not to get taken out by a spike. Investors and speculators are focused on interest rate differentials for the most part and to a lesser extend on trade balances. Interest rate announcements are big market movers. On Wednesday we have the minutes of the last Bank of England meeting and everyone wants to know how many members voted in favour of the no-hike decision and how many supported a hike. The quartlerly inflation report is a big market mover. CPI moves the market (Bank of England has a target of 2% and the governor has to write a letter if it deviates by more than 1% above or below that). Retail sales and industrial production are also market movers. Also anything that moves the US dollar like non-farm payrolls and FOMC day also moves GBP/USD.

They're trying to sell stuff like pivot point studies for hundreds of dollars that you can download for free elsewhere. I'm not sure what to make of that.

Liquidity is a problem that's why you have to be quick to take the best bids or offers. I don't trade news spikes much. I prefer technical trading.

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.

That's exactly how it works.

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?

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.

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.

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.

I would put the stop above the Frankfurt high if you're going short. It doesn't always work but the risk:reward ratio is good. There aren't any official opens in the currency markets but yes it took place before the London equities open. 0720-0740 London time is often interesting. I prefer medium term swing trades but sometimes trade intraday. How about this for an amazing move: 150 pips in seconds. It followed the surprise Bank of England rate hike.

Here's how that Frankfurt-London fib move worked out on Friday.

Movement starts with the Frankfurt open at 0700 London time and really starts moving about 0800 with the London open. You see totally wild moves before and after UK economic releases at 0930 and then it calms down a bit after 1000 until the US traders are awake. One very interesting technical set up is to look for a 0.618 retracement from the Frankfurt open to the next high or low. Look for a continuation of that after the London open. Also there's the "Big Ben" strategy which is just buying a breakout after the London open but that's never worked well for me. You need to keep your eye on a good economic calendar. Here's a good one: Forex Calendar @ Forex Factory Next big market mover is the Bank of England minutes on Wednesday.