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Here's the current British Pound futures daily chart. It should look identical to a spot GBP/USD chart because UK and US interest rates are both at 5.25%.

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.

The 0930 GMT economic releases out of the UK are the big market movers for GBP/USD. Also you'll notice some great patterns between the Frankfurt open (0700 GMT) and the London open (0800 GMT) which might be suitable for someone trading from Japan.

CME British Pound Futures & Options The GLOBEX symbol is 6B but I'm not sure that's what TradeStation would use. $6.25 per pip. Definitely you wouldn't want to trade that during Tokyo hours - it moves within a very narrow range. I would be especially careful trading FX during the Tokyo session because it's usually very quiet - just Japanese exporters filling orders - but sometimes banks go on stop hunting sessions are there's a massive and unexpected move. USD/JPY is dominated by the carry trade so the trend is steadily upwards but sometimes the hedge funds will liquidate their carry trades causing a massive drop. Very risky business. Also consider the Australian and New Zealand Dollars which probably have more life at that time of day.

If you use stop orders you're exposing your account to unlimited slippage at the time when the risk of slippage is highest. With a stop-limit order you can limit exactly how much slippage you're willing to take. How you set up your stop-limit order depends on what volatility you're expecting and how much slippage you're willing to take. Also make sure your order is held at the exchange rather than at your broker.

The problem is that CME quotes the JPY/USD rate whereas if you were trading spot the quote is the USD/JPY rate. There's something called CME e-quivalents that converts it the other way round. It's a better idea to trade Euro or British Pound futures, especially if your trading hours are during US hours. They move in the same way as EUR/USD and GBP/USD although there will be a premium or discount if there is an interest rate differential. For Euro futures one pip is equal to $12.50 so if the price moves from 1.3050 to 1.3150 (that move would be a little bit more than the daily average true range) then you would win or lose $1250. British Pound futures are good because it's $5 a pip. The liquidity is reasonable between the London open and the New York close. FX is especially sensitive to data releases and interest rate meetings but also great for swing trades lasting a few days or weeks.

Office 2007 is total junk. It's designed so that people who didn't know how to use the previous versions can find stuff easier but if you already know how to find what you need then you'll be annoyed that everything has been moved. I'll definitely be trying the 64 bit version of Vista though because I hear that if you have a decent system it will run faster than XP.

There are not many news events that are good for a straddle but the quarterly Bernanke testimony is one of them. I set up hotkeys for a straddle on my platform and hit them 2 seconds before 10 am, that way you can keep the straddle tight and get in at the best level. It's best to use stop-limit orders so you don't get slipped too much.

I just use TICK, time and sales, price and volume. I like TICK on a candlestick chart and it gives very reliable signals. I'm sure PREM is great if you use it properly - buying the cash index and selling the futures when there's a buy signal and vice versa for a sell signal - but I don't think it's that good just for futures trading.

ESignal plots it fine. Maybe you could enlighten me on "what the reading mean".

Perhaps you could explain and illustrate some of these patterns. I've watched it for several weeks and have not noticed any consistent patterns. It's easy with hindsight to say "Look! TRIN was going down as price was going up!" but this is useless because if price is going up why do we need TRIN to "confirm" this? On a day like today when price was going up should we not have gone long just because TRIN wasn't going down?

So the TRIN was flat for most of the day even though we had a nice up trend in ES and YM. Supposedly TRIN trending down signifies price is trending up, but if price is trending up then that will be obvious from looking at price. Why would you need TRIN to "confirm" this? It seems when TRIN "confirms" price then you follow it but when it contradicts price you ignore it. In other words you see whatever you want to see. Totally useless.

TradeStation totally sucks for data reliability and execution speed. For order execution you can't go wrong with IB's own BookTrader. You just need to configure it to exactly meet your needs. For charting Ensign is superb and is only $40 a month with IB data.

It's probably not spelled like that but I hear Ben and Al from tradersaudio refer to them quite often. I know all the investment banks and I'm fairly sure they are not one. Who are they?

Excellent analysis. It looks impressive the way price seemed to go through the VAH and then retest it before moving down but the VAH was at 12674 while the previous day's close was at 12672. Having broken through that confluence zone it tested the previous day's close before collapsing. There seems to be a trend over the past few weeks for price to rally after a fall from about 1430 EST time into the close. Calling the bottom was difficult today though but would have been easier if I'd known about that VPOC. Are those volume histograms or price histograms you have on the chart? It seems to me that you can get more information from looking at candlesticks with a volume histogram on top than you can with TPOs.

You've been very lucky so far. If you use a market order there's a risk of massive slippage - getting filled at the top or bottom of the spike. The price is obviously gapping straight through the tiny number of bids or offers. You've obviously been one of the lucky few to get filled at a good price. One bad case of slippage could wipe out everything you've earned.

I wrote my own Excel macro that was linked to Reuters and my broker that automatically placed a trade based on the actual figure's deviation from consensus. Is that what you do? I didn't get filled most of the time so moved on to better ways of trading. I notice the liquidity on YM immediately before 0830 economic data being released is sometimes single figures and the price gaps rather than moves up. I'm sure that if you looked at the time and sales hardly any contracts actually traded. Has anyone actually tried this straddling method on a live account? Looking at the charts, fading the spike seems a better strategy but I've never tried it.

It would be easier just to pay the $50.

I personally love to trade in range-bound markets. It's easy to identify support and resistance and risk and reward is more easily defined. Markets spend 80-90% of their time in ranges. There are always great micro-trends and fib trades with YM even if it looks like a range-bound market.

ESignal has some great videos on their website to help newbies. To get volume it's just right click, basic studies, volume.

If you use eSignal you can subscribe to Market Profile for $50. Volume is available on eSignal charts.

You can tape read Globex FX futures and see proper volume - much better than trading with a bucketshop.

For intraday trading Mind Over Markets focuses on the TPO count but that was probably more useful in the days when intraday volume was not widely available. The developing intraday value area on top of a candlestick chart may not provide the same strict support and resistance levels that yesterday's value area does but it does give you a good idea of which prices the market is comfortable trading at.

I'm also reading Mind Over Markets. A question I have is, do you focus on the value area from the previous day, or do you also pay attention to the value area that develops during the day? Of course right at the start of the day you would use the value area of the previous day but as the day develops, the current day's developing value area becomes more useful than that of the previous day I've found. I don't know if that fits in with standard Market Profile theory.

This is in the eSignal PivotConsole. The formula is (O+C)/2. I googled it but didn't find much information. It does seem to provide good support/resistance in YM though.