I was reading an article in this month’s issue of SFO Magazine and wanted to make note of some key points for my own posterity. I am admittantly a novice when it comes to the Foreign Exchange market and have only recenlty become confident enough in my trading abilities to start thinking about expanding the scope of my nightly analysis to look at the charts of a few key FX Pairs.

Here is the link to the article on the SFO Mag Website.

But what I wanted to highlight was the market hours of 3 major FX Markets: Asia, USA, & Europe.

Asia: 7:00pm – 4:00am E.S.T.
Europe: 2:00am – 12:00pm E.S.T.
USA: 8:00am – 5:00pm E.S.T.

The most volume, and subsequent volatility, takes place during the times when there is overlap between these 3 major players. Those key times are:

USA & Europe overlap: 8:00am – 12:00pm E.S.T.
Europe & Asia overlap: 2:00am – 4:00am E.S.T.

Also, here is a list of the most actively traded FX pairs and their average daily volatility:

So if you work full time during the day and are interested in trying your hand at some actual day trading, then you might try testing the early morning FX markets.
 
 

This post is as much for my benefit as for anyone else’s as I have recently discovered the ProShares ETF series. As you probably know, you are not allowed to short securities in your IRAs or 401(k) plans. No biggie when the market’s going up, but when the markets are going down, it’d be nice to have another option other than cash.

Enter the ProShares ETFs. There are 8 of them that I’m aware of, you can read more about them on the AMEX Website Here.

The three that I’ll point out here are the:
QID: Which is the ETF symbol that goes up when the Nasdaq goes down
SDS: Which is the ETF symbol that goes up when the S&P 500 goes down
DDM: Which is the ETF symbol that goes up when the Dow goes down

I was going to just write these down for reference purposes in my trade log, but figured it’d be just as useful if I posted them here. Hope it helps.
 
 

For those of you who have TradeStation and are not familiar with TheRumpledOne, this post will be invaluable beyond belief. For those without TS, I’m afraid you won’t get much out of this unless you’re thinking about opening a TS account for charting. TheRumpledOne (aka: Avery Horton) single handedly transformed the way people approached the way TradeStation Radar Screen was used. He has the most popular post on TradeStation Support by a margin of over 2:1 above & beyond any other post. The reason is because of the quality indicators he created and openly shared to the trading community completely free of charge. Until one day when he was banned from support by what he calls “The Forum Police” for posting his address in the eventuality that someone may wish make a donation. It was a loss to the TS Support community but he didn’t go away or quit creating great indicators. Instead he opened his own Trading Group on Yahoo. TheRumpledOne Yahoo Group. Here is just one of the many indicators he has shared, that I am currently using in radar screen:

Instead of scrolling through 30 different charts each with a 5, 10, 20, & 40 period Moving average, with Radar Screen, all of this information is easily viewable in one place. The Moving Averages are customizable & this is just one example of how TRO has changed the way of looking at stocks.

The link to the TradeStation Support thread that got it all started can be Found Here

While the link to his group with all of his new & updated indicators can be found at the link above.