Operating in the Forex market without the ability to forecast what’s approaching is pretty much destined to end in failure. Accordingly, my approach to buying and selling foreign currency pairs owes its existence to the principle of interpreting the signs of the times—or of judging the times in which one is living, if you will.
For me, it’s all about making decisions that rely entirely on statistical probability based on careful observation.
Buying low and selling high is all well and good, but until price reaches zero, what’s “low” is completely relative, and since price can theoretically climb to infinity, “high” is an almost meaningless construct.
So in my case, the answer to this dilemma is in giving high and low a valid context, and this I accomplish by analyzing the relationships between trend, typical price range, horizontal support/resistance levels, and market structure, all in multiple time-frames.
For example, EURJPY gapped down at this week’s open so that it was sitting almost right on top of what I calculated as intra-day support on my one-hour chart based on my estimation of the typical four-hour price range.
Moreover, I deemed the overall day-to-day trend to be bullish (see the green arrow), another significant level of statistical support (for me) on which the open happened to be sitting. So even though the intra-day trend was bearish, one could not ask for a much stronger sign to enter a long position, so enter a long position I did.
I’ve elected to call the outer limits of typical price ranges: “statistical support and resistance,” and as of Friday’s close, statistical support is where GBPJPY happened to be sitting. So when it opened this week in the same general area, with the overall day-to-day trend being bullish as it was, it too was practically demanding that I enter a long position, so I did, even though the intra-day trend was once again bearish.
As indicated at the top of this post, both of these trades hit their take-profit targets, but the platform I was using slapped a big spread on them, which especially cut into my EURJPY trade, and it was only a single Lot to begin with.