Tips for Trading Forex at Night

For a lot of us (especially in the US), the best times to trade Forex fall at the worst times of day—either during work hours or while we’re asleep at night. Fortunately for those who trade the dailies in the US, the start of the new candle tends to happen in the afternoon, but that often means that trades will span overnight on this and other timeframes. What do you do if your trading schedule is this inconvenient? Suggestions online usually range from “quit your job” to “move to Europe.” This is hardly feasible for most of us. Most of us are going to be faced with examining an option which is more viable but still challenging: trading Forex at night.

For many people, trading overnight is just a given since position traders who trade longer term charts like weeklies are going to be in trades for many days on end. These timeframes move slowly though and are easier to keep an eye on during the daytime than other trades on faster timeframes. What if you trade the dailies or hourly charts? You could be stuck making critical trading decisions in the dead of night.

Unfortunately many FX traders arrive at the solution, “I’ll just not sleep.” This is the road to disaster though. You cannot function without sleep. You need sleep to be healthy and also to keep your mind sharp and fresh. Trading on a sleep deficit is like trading inebriated. It’s just a really bad idea; it’ll destroy your health and your finances. So you have to sleep. How do you balance sleep with currency trading at night?

The trick is to set up alerts in such a manner that you can maximize your rest, minimize the complexity of your decision-making process, and maximize your returns. You want to only have your alerts wake you up at critical junctures, and you want those junctures to be clear cut. Making difficult, complex decisions in the dead of night will rob you of sleep and also harm your judgment, resulting in losses. The alerts should wake you up in order to make simple, straightforward decisions.

One technique you can use to trade during the night is to set alerts at pivot zones. Different techniques will be appropriate for different Forex systems, but if for example you exit trades partially based on support and resistance, then you will want to identify important pivot areas and set alerts in those areas. Choose a sound to signal when a trade is moving toward profit and another sound to signal when it is moving away. That way if you hear the “good” sound in your sleep you can roll over and go back to sleep (or get up and trail your stop). If you hear the “bad” sound you can get up and choose whether to exit. By letting the sound itself give you information, you can optimize your sleep. Also make sure to have the alert beep at you more than once so you don’t miss it in your sleep the first time.

Trading the foreign exchange market at night is one of the most challenging real life integrations you can do, but with some tweaking you should be able to make it work for you. You don’t have to move to another country or quit your job to trade during the day if you can learn how to trade at night and get adequate sleep!

Forex: Tools of Trade

Although, the success in the Forex trading is largely associated with the trading strategies and systems that can be usually bought for money, those are not the real tools of the Forex trader. They can only be considered as the «shortcuts to the riches». Every professional should employ his own tools of trade and the Forex traders should have them too. Independent on the professionalism level of the trader, these tools help to analyze the markets and to calculate all the necessary numbers for money management and position taking:

MetaTrader 4 platform — perhaps the most important of the tools, a successful Forex trader should have. Even if you don’t trade with MetaTrader broker you should still download this free platform and use it for charts and technical analysis. With MetaTrader you can browse charts and the past history of almost all currency pairs, you can apply dozens of standard indicators and use the custom user-tailored indicators, you can back-test strategies using their strategy tester and forward-test your systems and expert advisors on the free demo servers. MetaTrader is your number one tool if you want to go beyond the beginner’s level in Forex.

Risk and reward calculator — a helpful tool if you prefer to know your reward-to-risk ratio before opening a real money position and manage your risks correctly. This risk-to-reward calculator will only for the chart patterns with the distinctive local peak and bottom. It’s based on the Fibonacci retracements.

Pip value calculator — it’s not a trivial task to calculate the value of a pip if you trade exotic currency pairs and/or have your trading account in some exotic currency. Understanding the value of the pip is important to accurately calculate your profits and losses. The on-line pip value calculator tool will help you to determine the pip value with the minimum efforts from your side.

Pivot points calculator — this tool will be useful to you only if you prefer to trade using technical pivot levels. There are many types of pivot calculators available — floor pivots, Tom Demark’s pivots, Camarilla pivots, Woodie’s pivots, etc. I suggest you using the on-line pivot point calculator, which combines the calculation of all the possible pivot point types.

Fibonacci calculator — if you trade via the MetaTrader platform you don’t need a separate Fibonacci calculator because you can use the standard indicator to build Fibonacci retracement levels. But if you use some web-based or some other inferior platform, you’ll enjoy calculating the Fibo levels with the on-line Fibonacci calculator.