What Is The Best Time Frame To Trade Forex?

[Jameen]

You all will be Surprise. Trading the 4 hour time frame gives you the best of both worlds in that it enables you to generate the kind of profits that a lot of short-term traders are able to generate every single day, whilst ensuring that you don't necessarily have to be sitting at your computer all day long because you only need to be alert when a good set-up looks like presenting itself.

This brings me on to my next point which is that trading the 4 hour charts is a very relaxing way to trade the markets. You can analyze various different currency pairs and really take your time planning your trades. This is certainly not the case with short-term trading where you have little time to think and have to be very quick on the button to realize any gains, or minimize any of your losing trades.

This time frame is just about ideal in my opinion because you can generate winning trades of say 100-200 pips in a single day or you can let them run for a few days to capture 300-500 pips in some instances. Just one of these trades per week can give you an excellent full-time income and I think you would agree that it's much better to spend your week looking for one or two high probability set-ups on this time frame rather than trading lots and lots of positions on the shorter time frames which may only give you 10-20 pips per trade.

Also because each trade doesn't necessarily last that long (often no more than a few days at most) you avoid much of the boredom that arises when you trade the daily or weekly charts, for example. Some people like to trade the daily charts but you do need a great deal of patience. You also need to use fairly large stop losses to ensure that the price ultimately moves in your favour without being stopped out prematurely.

So as I say I personally think the 4 hour time frame is by far and away the best time frame to trade, although different time frames obviously suit different strategies.

So What do you 5 , 10 , & 15 timeframes have to say? lets here from you to

[kris]

Hi Jameen,

Those are some good points, but I'd just like to make clear to people reading this thread that frequent trading does not necessarily have an advantage over longer term trading in forex. You have two things working against you: more risk due to higher leverage required to collect profits from small price movements, and spreads making up a larger percentage of your profit targets (e.g. you pay 3 pips on a 20 pip profit vs. 3 pips on a 100 pip profit- which one eats more into your profits?).

Another thing you have to realize is that there is a lot more randomness due to daily import/export activity on the smaller time frames. If you really want to capture sustainable moves and get out of the "noise" you should trade larger time frames.

Thanks for the contribution.

Kris Matthews

[Somya Gabriel]

Best Times of the Day to Trade
# Learn the start and end times of the different sessions:
London session hours are 8:00 to 17:00 GMT. New York session, 13:00 to 22:00 GMT; Sydney, 22:00 to 7:00 GMT and Tokyo, midnight to 9:00 GMT.

Understand that these times are only guidelines; London traders may start their day earlier than 8:00, for example. Get aware of this by watching price action closely about an hour before the stated session start time. Watch especially the length of the candle, regardless of the timeframe(s) you trades on. Candle length grows noticeably when London and New York sessions start, and shrinks when they end.

If you like high volatility and liquidity, trade when the most volatile sessions--London and New York--overlap: 13:00 to 17:00 GMT.


If you prefer times when price is less likely to shatter your stop loss, trade during the low volatility Sydney or Tokyo sessions.