New Forex Trading Strategy

Monday, August 24, 2009

News Straddling (Part I)

By Ahmad Hassam

Major short term currency moves are almost always preceded by changes in fundamental views influenced by the news. Traders around the world make a living by processing and translating information into money. The forex market is extremely sensitive to the flow of news related to it.

We live in an era where information can be extremely powerful and strategic asset. Timely information is vital to an individual or a corporation and information equals money especially to a trader. Shutting yourself off to the news can be suicidal.

The speed of the news dissemination is very important to traders. Traders especially the day traders require the latest up to the second news updates. This facilitates their trading decisions which have to be made at the lightening speed.

Online news services display the latest financial and economic news on their websites. You can also get breaking news alert through your email. Many professional traders opt for instant online news services such as the Bloomberg, Dow Jones Newswires, CNBC and Reuters. Reuters and Bloomberg are very popular.

News is important to currency trading. Each new piece of information can potentially alter the traders perception of the current or future situation relating to the outlook of certain currency pairs. Market work on perceptions! Perceptions change, expectations change and prices change.

News that is of great importance to forex traders is generally related to a countrys economic, monetary and political situations. Socio-political events that are happening around the world like in Middle East and North Korea also tend to affect the forex market in major ways.

Based on this news, these traders will be preparing to cover their existing positions or initiate new positions. A traders action is based on the expectation that there will be follow through in prices when other traders see and interpret the same news in a similar fashion and adopt the same directional bias as the trader as a result.

This is in a way an anticipatory reaction on the part of the trader as he or she assumes that the other traders will be affected by the news as well. Because of the expected impact it has on other market players, news is a very important catalyst of short term price movements. Markets hate surprises. If a news item has a very low surprise value, market may not react much. But if the news item has a high surprise for the market, the reaction will be extreme volatility until the surprise has been digested by the market.

Suppose the news item happens to be bullish for the US Dollar. Traders who reacts the fastest will be the first to buy US Dollar. They are anticipating an uptrend in US Dollar. They will be followed soon by other traders. Other traders may be slower. They maybe were waiting for some technical criteria to be met before they jump on the bandwagon. However, all of them anticipate an uptrend to develop.

There will be many who will join in the frenzy at a later stage when they get hold of the delayed news in the morning newspapers or from their brokers. This progressive entry of the USD bulls over time is what sustains the upward move of USD against another currency.

The reverse will happen on the surprise bearish USD news. Instantly traders will start selling USD on the assumption that when other traders will hear the news, they will also start selling. - 23305

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