The European Union has published new regulations applying to retail Forex, CFD, and the few remaining binary options brokerages in its territory. If you have an account with one such brokerage, the regulations will affect you when they come into force during the late spring and summer. This article will outline how the new regulations will impact your bottom line.
Details of the New ESMA Regulations
In March 2018, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), the financial regulator and supervisor of the European Union, announced new regulations concerning the provision of contracts for differences (CFDs) and binary options to retail investors. It is unclear exactly when the regulations will come into force, but some time in May or June 2018 looks to be the most likely date, and Forex and CFD brokerages located within the European Union (including the United Kingdom, for the time being) will be forced to comply. The regulations will need to be renewed by ESMA every three months to remain in force over the long term.
The regulation concerning binary options is very simple: they may not be sold. In simple terms, this is the end of binary options as a product sold from within the European Union.
The regulations concerning CFDs are more complex but still relatively straightforward. Firstly, there is some confusion as to what exactly is a CFD, with many traders thinking that spot Forex is not considered a CFD and will therefore be exempt from the new regulations. They are wrong: spot Forex is technically defined as a CFD. In fact, every asset you see available for trading at Forex / CFD brokers will most likely be subject to the new regulations.
The new regulations will implement the following changes for retail client accounts (more on who is a retail client; later).
-
The maximum leverage which can be offered will be 30 to 1. That will apply to major currency pairs such as EUR/USD, GBP/USD, USD/JPY, etc.
-
Other currency pairs, major equity indices, and gold will be subject to a maximum leverage of 20 to 1.
-
Individual equities cannot be offered with leverage greater than 5 to 1.
-
Cryptocurrencies are subject to a maximum leverage of 2 to 1.
-
Brokers will be required to provide negative balance protection, meaning it will be impossible to lose more money than you deposit.
-
Brokers will be required to close a clients open positions when the account equity reaches 50% of the required minimum margin by all open positions. This ;margin call; provision can be tricky to understand, so will be explained in more detail later.
-
Bonuses or any other form of trading incentives may not be offered.
-
Brokers will be required to display a standardized risk warning which will include the percentage of their clients who lose money over a defined period.
Understanding the ;Margin Call; Regulation
The best way to understand the 50% margin call provision is to use an example. Imagine a client opens an account with a Forex broker, depositing ;100 in total. The client opens a short trade in EUR/USD, by going short one mini-lot (one tenth of a full lot). One full lot of EUR/USD is worth ;10,000, meaning one mini-lot is worth ;1,000. To find out the minimum margin required to support that trade, we divide the size of the trade (;1,000) by 30, which comes to ;33.33. This is the minimum required margin to maintain the trade. Half of that amount is ;16.67. Now assume the trade goes against the client, with the price of EUR/USD rising above the entry price. As soon as the price rises far enough to produce a floating loss of ;83.33 (;100 - ;16.67), the broker must close the trade out, even if the trade has no stop loss or has not yet reached the stop loss. In theory, this means that a client;s account can never reach zero. Examples involving multiple open trades will be more complex, but will operate according to the same principles.
What Will This Mean for Traders?
The regulations will only apply to ;retail clients;, so you might try to apply to be classed as a professional trader. To get a broker to classify you as anything other than a retail client, you will have to show you have financial qualifications, a large amount of liquid assets, plenty of experience trading, and usually that you also trade frequently. Most traders will be unable to qualify, although it is worth noting that one London-based brokerage, IG Group, has stated that their proportion of clients now classified as recently increased from 5% to 15% of their total customers.
The major impact these regulations will have on traders is simple ndash; the maximum trade size they can possibly make at brokers regulated in the European Union will shrink. Many will say that the maximum leverage limits still offer far more than any trader could need, and I agree. I am wary of leverage and I hate to see anyone using leverage greater than 3 to 1 for Forex under any conditions, or any leverage at all for stocks and cryptocurrencies. Commodities can also fluctuate wildly in value. Too many people forget that the biggest danger in leverage is not overly large position sizing, it is that a ldquo;black swan rdquo; event such as the CHF flash crash of 2015 could happen and wipe out your account through huge price slippage. However, there is another factor that is widely forgotten: why assume that a trader rsquo;s account at one Forex broker is all the money they have in the world? For example, a trader might have $10,000 in the bank. If they deposit $1,000 at a broker offering maximum leverage of 300 to 1, they can trade up to $300,000. At a leverage limit of 30 to 1, that trader will have to deposit their entire $10,000 fund to trade at the same size. In a real sense, that trader might now have to take on more risk to operate in the same way, because if the broker goes bust, while beforehand they might lose $1,000 now they could lose $10,000! Even without negative balance protection, that broker would still have to come after them to try to get an extra $9,000 which they theoretically risk. Yet we saw after the CHF crash that brokers don rsquo;t come after every single client whose losses exceeded their deposit, due to legal costs and reputational issues. This shows that although the stated purpose of the regulation is to protect traders from excessive losses, the story is not as simple as you may think.
Beyond having to deposit more margin, and automatic margin calls, the other major change for traders will be that they will enjoy negative balance protection. This is a positive development which hopefully will make brokerages focus more heavily on the risks they are taking with their business model in the market. At the same time, a possible side effect of the new regulation is the potential increase in average deposits, leading to brokerages being more stable and better capitalized with client funds. Two final notes: brokerages will have to report on their websites the percentages of clients who are losing and making money, although the period over which the statistics must refer to is currently not clear. This will help to shed light on the debate over what percentage of retail traders are profitable, although some brokerages have already released what they claim to be accurate statistics showing that clients with larger account sizes tend to perform better as traders. Additionally, bonuses and promotions will be banned. I welcome this, as not only do they trivialize the serious business of trading, they are almost always a trick offering the illusion of free money whilst preventing traders from withdrawing any profits until a large number of trades are made (read the fine print the next time you squo;).
What If Yoursquo;re Not Happy Remaining in the EU?
Traders with accounts at affected brokers who cannot obtain professional status classification and feel they really need higher leverage than the ESMA limits outlined above might look for a solution by opening accounts with brokers outside the European Union. The most obvious destination would be Australia or New Zealand, where it will still be possible to find reasonably well-regulated Forex brokerages offering leverage in the range of 400 to 1. A recent development that is not talked about much is the growing difficulty of transferring funds to and from Forex brokerages in less tightly regulated jurisdictions. You might decide to open an account with a brokerage in Vanuatu, but you may find that a bank within the European Union might just refuse to send your money there for a deposit. This means that going far offshore, depending upon where you live, may not be a feasible option. In any case, the new regule impossible to live with, and overall there is a compelling case that they are a net benefit to any trader, so why migrate?
The Winning Trading Strategies of 2017 | Trading Forex
Now that we are only a few weeks away from the end of the calendar year and the start of 2018, the time has come to look back over the year. Which trading strategies have performed best in the Forex market so far?
All trading strategies can be broken down into two types: trend trading strategies, and mean reverting strategies. With trend trading strategies, traders define the direction of the longer-term trend and enter trades only in the same direction. Mean reverting strategies define an average price, and traders seek to enter trades back towards the average when the price has become over-extended away from it. As over 80% of the volume of the Forex market is traded in just EUR/USD, GBP/USD, and USD/JPY, I’m going to apply a rough strategy of each type to these three major Forex currency pairs and see which came out ahead. I’ll then dissect the results and see if it tells us anything useful about the way the Forex market is evolving.
Trend Following Strategies
My favorite basis for a trend following strategy, because it is so elegantly simple, is just to check the opening price of each week to see whether the price has been going up or down over both the past three months and six months. If yes, then that’s the trend direction, and each week is just measured as a trade from open to close without any stop loss. If these results are good, then any trend following strategy should also have produced positive results. So, here are the results for 2017 to the end of October:Currency Pair | Trade Results | Winning Trade % |
EUR/USD | 2.01% | 45.45% |
GBP/USD | 3.27% | 52.42% |
USD/JPY | -3.65% | 42.31% |
TOTAL | 1.63% | <50.00% |
This is a poor result – it would be negative if the costs of all the trades were factored in. In my blog I wrote recently about using linear regression analysis, and I found that using the slope of the line of best fit over the past 20 weeks can work better. What if we try this trend-following method?
Currency Pair | Trade Results | Winning Trade % |
EUR/USD | 4.90% | 50.00% |
GBP/USD | -3.45% | 53.84% |
USD/JPY | -6.58% | 46.51% |
TOTAL | -5.13% | ~50.00% |
Using linear regression, we got an even worse result. So overall, we must conclude that trend following strategies have not worked well this year. This isn’t surprising: trend following strategies tend to go through lengthy periods of losses, before profiting excessively during big winning streaks.
So, what about mean-reverting trading strategies?
Mean Reverting Strategies
Mean reverting strategies, as I explained earlier, are the exact opposite of trend following strategies. This suggests that 2017 should have been a good year for this type of trading strategy, so let’s test a couple of good mean-reverting strategies on the same three Forex pairs.The first strategy is to wait for a weekly candle to make a new high or low – we will try the same period as the last test, 20 weeks. If the candle makes a new high and then closes down, or makes a new low and then closes up, enter at the open of the next week and close at the end of that week. Here are the results:
Currency Pair | Trade Results | Winning Trade % |
EUR/USD | -0.40% | 50.00% |
GBP/USD | 1.12% | 50.00% |
USD/JPY | -1.15% | 0.00% |
TOTAL | -0.43% | ~50.00% |
There were less than 10 trades in total using this strategy, but the overall result was slightly negative. This strategy did not work well this year. Let’s look at another typical mean reversion strategy, which uses the Bollinger Bands indicator, set to its standard 20-day, 2 standard deviations bands, on the daily chart. This strategy waits until a daily candle touches one of the outer bands, and then enters once the price breaks past the other end of the candle (i.e. the candle is reversed). The trade is then held until the opposite extreme band of the Bollinger Bands is reached. Unfortunately, this strategy also produced a negative result. There is one final pure mean reverting strategy which has worked well in the past that is worth back testing: whenever a weekly candlestick moves from open to close by more than 2% in value, enter a trade in the opposite direction at the start of the next week, then close it at the end of the week. This strategy only gave a few trades all year, and the result was, again, a small loss.
A ”Time of Day” Trading Strategy
There is no doubt this has been a hard year for Forex traders. It seems that all types of mechanical strategies, whether trend following or mean reverting, would, at best, have failed to make any profit this year. Trying to find a mechanical trading strategy which did perform well, I looked at a “time of day” strategy based upon the position at 9am London time compared to the previous midnight, on just EUR/USD and GBP/USD. This strategy exploits the statistical tendency of the London and New York sessions to follow any clear lead given by the Asian session, which begins at roughly midnight London time. The rule is simple: if the price is at least 25 pips higher at 9am London time than it was at Midnight, go long, or short if at least 25 pips less. The trade is closed at 5pm New York time, and no stop loss is used. There results for 2017 until the end of October were as follows:Currency Pair | Total Pips | Winning Trade % |
EUR/USD | 533 | 66.03% |
GBP/USD | 367 | 53.26% |
ALL | 1,000 | 58.33% |
These are impressive results: not only is there a high winning percentage of trades, but the average result per trade was very good (about 10 pips for EUR/USD, 3.5 pips for GBP/USD). Even when you factor in the spread / commission, it was a nicely profitable strategy. Yet this is the only “brainless” trading strategy I know of which was a winner in 2017. Unfortunately, it was a tough year in the Forex market.
I’ve only looked at the Forex market, even though many Forex brokers also offer trading in major stock indices and commodities. Major stock indices, especially U.S. indices such as the S&P 500 and Dow Jones 30, have been in strongly bullish trends the entire year. If you buy stocks directly, the highest leverage you can get is perhaps 3 to 1, but many brokers offer 20 to 1 on major indices. The S&P 500 Index is up almost 16% year to date, and at leverage of 20 to 1 you could be up 320%, although there is a risk of being wiped out at such leverage in the event of a major market crash slipping a stop loss by more then 5%. Many brokers also charge expensive overnight fees making it costly to hold these positions for many weeks or months.
If you do use trend following strategies based upon price alone, don’t panic. A bad year is not unusual. Some of the best years for trend followers come just after very bad ones. It could be that the Forex market is getting more chaotic and harder to trade, yet there is no rule that you must stick to Forex alone. Stock indices and commodities often provide opportunities when the Forex market is flat.
Source
The Winning Trading Strategies of 2017 | Trading Forex
Now that we are only a few weeks away from the end of the calendar year and the start of 2018, the time has come to look back over the year. Which trading strategies have performed best in the Forex market so far?
All trading strategies can be broken down into two types: trend trading strategies, and mean reverting strategies. With trend trading strategies, traders define the direction of the longer-term trend and enter trades only in the same direction. Mean reverting strategies define an average price, and traders seek to enter trades back towards the average when the price has become over-extended away from it. As over 80% of the volume of the Forex market is traded in just EUR/USD, GBP/USD, and USD/JPY, I’m going to apply a rough strategy of each type to these three major Forex currency pairs and see which came out ahead. I’ll then dissect the results and see if it tells us anything useful about the way the Forex market is evolving.
Trend Following Strategies
My favorite basis for a trend following strategy, because it is so elegantly simple, is just to check the opening price of each week to see whether the price has been going up or down over both the past three months and six months. If yes, then that’s the trend direction, and each week is just measured as a trade from open to close without any stop loss. If these results are good, then any trend following strategy should also have produced positive results. So, here are the results for 2017 to the end of October:Currency Pair | Trade Results | Winning Trade % |
EUR/USD | 2.01% | 45.45% |
GBP/USD | 3.27% | 52.42% |
USD/JPY | -3.65% | 42.31% |
TOTAL | 1.63% | <50.00% |
This is a poor result – it would be negative if the costs of all the trades were factored in. In my blog I wrote recently about using linear regression analysis, and I found that using the slope of the line of best fit over the past 20 weeks can work better. What if we try this trend-following method?
Currency Pair | Trade Results | Winning Trade % |
EUR/USD | 4.90% | 50.00% |
GBP/USD | -3.45% | 53.84% |
USD/JPY | -6.58% | 46.51% |
TOTAL | -5.13% | ~50.00% |
Using linear regression, we got an even worse result. So overall, we must conclude that trend following strategies have not worked well this year. This isn’t surprising: trend following strategies tend to go through lengthy periods of losses, before profiting excessively during big winning streaks.
So, what about mean-reverting trading strategies?
Mean Reverting Strategies
Mean reverting strategies, as I explained earlier, are the exact opposite of trend following strategies. This suggests that 2017 should have been a good year for this type of trading strategy, so let’s test a couple of good mean-reverting strategies on the same three Forex pairs.The first strategy is to wait for a weekly candle to make a new high or low – we will try the same period as the last test, 20 weeks. If the candle makes a new high and then closes down, or makes a new low and then closes up, enter at the open of the next week and close at the end of that week. Here are the results:
Currency Pair | Trade Results | Winning Trade % |
EUR/USD | -0.40% | 50.00% |
GBP/USD | 1.12% | 50.00% |
USD/JPY | -1.15% | 0.00% |
TOTAL | -0.43% | ~50.00% |
There were less than 10 trades in total using this strategy, but the overall result was slightly negative. This strategy did not work well this year. Let’s look at another typical mean reversion strategy, which uses the Bollinger Bands indicator, set to its standard 20-day, 2 standard deviations bands, on the daily chart. This strategy waits until a daily candle touches one of the outer bands, and then enters once the price breaks past the other end of the candle (i.e. the candle is reversed). The trade is then held until the opposite extreme band of the Bollinger Bands is reached. Unfortunately, this strategy also produced a negative result. There is one final pure mean reverting strategy which has worked well in the past that is worth back testing: whenever a weekly candlestick moves from open to close by more than 2% in value, enter a trade in the opposite direction at the start of the next week, then close it at the end of the week. This strategy only gave a few trades all year, and the result was, again, a small loss.
A ”Time of Day” Trading Strategy
There is no doubt this has been a hard year for Forex traders. It seems that all types of mechanical strategies, whether trend following or mean reverting, would, at best, have failed to make any profit this year. Trying to find a mechanical trading strategy which did perform well, I looked at a “time of day” strategy based upon the position at 9am London time compared to the previous midnight, on just EUR/USD and GBP/USD. This strategy exploits the statistical tendency of the London and New York sessions to follow any clear lead given by the Asian session, which begins at roughly midnight London time. The rule is simple: if the price is at least 25 pips higher at 9am London time than it was at Midnight, go long, or short if at least 25 pips less. The trade is closed at 5pm New York time, and no stop loss is used. There results for 2017 until the end of October were as follows:Currency Pair | Total Pips | Winning Trade % |
EUR/USD | 533 | 66.03% |
GBP/USD | 367 | 53.26% |
ALL | 1,000 | 58.33% |
These are impressive results: not only is there a high winning percentage of trades, but the average result per trade was very good (about 10 pips for EUR/USD, 3.5 pips for GBP/USD). Even when you factor in the spread / commission, it was a nicely profitable strategy. Yet this is the only “brainless” trading strategy I know of which was a winner in 2017. Unfortunately, it was a tough year in the Forex market.
I’ve only looked at the Forex market, even though many Forex brokers also offer trading in major stock indices and commodities. Major stock indices, especially U.S. indices such as the S&P 500 and Dow Jones 30, have been in strongly bullish trends the entire year. If you buy stocks directly, the highest leverage you can get is perhaps 3 to 1, but many brokers offer 20 to 1 on major indices. The S&P 500 Index is up almost 16% year to date, and at leverage of 20 to 1 you could be up 320%, although there is a risk of being wiped out at such leverage in the event of a major market crash slipping a stop loss by more then 5%. Many brokers also charge expensive overnight fees making it costly to hold these positions for many weeks or months.
If you do use trend following strategies based upon price alone, don’t panic. A bad year is not unusual. Some of the best years for trend followers come just after very bad ones. It could be that the Forex market is getting more chaotic and harder to trade, yet there is no rule that you must stick to Forex alone. Stock indices and commodities often provide opportunities when the Forex market is flat.
Source
The Winning Trading Strategies of 2017 | Trading Forex
Now that we are only a few weeks away from the end of the calendar year and the start of 2018, the time has come to look back over the year. Which trading strategies have performed best in the Forex market so far?
All trading strategies can be broken down into two types: trend trading strategies, and mean reverting strategies. With trend trading strategies, traders define the direction of the longer-term trend and enter trades only in the same direction. Mean reverting strategies define an average price, and traders seek to enter trades back towards the average when the price has become over-extended away from it. As over 80% of the volume of the Forex market is traded in just EUR/USD, GBP/USD, and USD/JPY, I’m going to apply a rough strategy of each type to these three major Forex currency pairs and see which came out ahead. I’ll then dissect the results and see if it tells us anything useful about the way the Forex market is evolving.
Trend Following Strategies
My favorite basis for a trend following strategy, because it is so elegantly simple, is just to check the opening price of each week to see whether the price has been going up or down over both the past three months and six months. If yes, then that’s the trend direction, and each week is just measured as a trade from open to close without any stop loss. If these results are good, then any trend following strategy should also have produced positive results. So, here are the results for 2017 to the end of October:Currency Pair | Trade Results | Winning Trade % |
EUR/USD | 2.01% | 45.45% |
GBP/USD | 3.27% | 52.42% |
USD/JPY | -3.65% | 42.31% |
TOTAL | 1.63% | <50.00% |
This is a poor result – it would be negative if the costs of all the trades were factored in. In my blog I wrote recently about using linear regression analysis, and I found that using the slope of the line of best fit over the past 20 weeks can work better. What if we try this trend-following method?
Currency Pair | Trade Results | Winning Trade % |
EUR/USD | 4.90% | 50.00% |
GBP/USD | -3.45% | 53.84% |
USD/JPY | -6.58% | 46.51% |
TOTAL | -5.13% | ~50.00% |
Using linear regression, we got an even worse result. So overall, we must conclude that trend following strategies have not worked well this year. This isn’t surprising: trend following strategies tend to go through lengthy periods of losses, before profiting excessively during big winning streaks.
So, what about mean-reverting trading strategies?
Mean Reverting Strategies
Mean reverting strategies, as I explained earlier, are the exact opposite of trend following strategies. This suggests that 2017 should have been a good year for this type of trading strategy, so let’s test a couple of good mean-reverting strategies on the same three Forex pairs.The first strategy is to wait for a weekly candle to make a new high or low – we will try the same period as the last test, 20 weeks. If the candle makes a new high and then closes down, or makes a new low and then closes up, enter at the open of the next week and close at the end of that week. Here are the results:
Currency Pair | Trade Results | Winning Trade % |
EUR/USD | -0.40% | 50.00% |
GBP/USD | 1.12% | 50.00% |
USD/JPY | -1.15% | 0.00% |
TOTAL | -0.43% | ~50.00% |
There were less than 10 trades in total using this strategy, but the overall result was slightly negative. This strategy did not work well this year. Let’s look at another typical mean reversion strategy, which uses the Bollinger Bands indicator, set to its standard 20-day, 2 standard deviations bands, on the daily chart. This strategy waits until a daily candle touches one of the outer bands, and then enters once the price breaks past the other end of the candle (i.e. the candle is reversed). The trade is then held until the opposite extreme band of the Bollinger Bands is reached. Unfortunately, this strategy also produced a negative result. There is one final pure mean reverting strategy which has worked well in the past that is worth back testing: whenever a weekly candlestick moves from open to close by more than 2% in value, enter a trade in the opposite direction at the start of the next week, then close it at the end of the week. This strategy only gave a few trades all year, and the result was, again, a small loss.
A ”Time of Day” Trading Strategy
There is no doubt this has been a hard year for Forex traders. It seems that all types of mechanical strategies, whether trend following or mean reverting, would, at best, have failed to make any profit this year. Trying to find a mechanical trading strategy which did perform well, I looked at a “time of day” strategy based upon the position at 9am London time compared to the previous midnight, on just EUR/USD and GBP/USD. This strategy exploits the statistical tendency of the London and New York sessions to follow any clear lead given by the Asian session, which begins at roughly midnight London time. The rule is simple: if the price is at least 25 pips higher at 9am London time than it was at Midnight, go long, or short if at least 25 pips less. The trade is closed at 5pm New York time, and no stop loss is used. There results for 2017 until the end of October were as follows:Currency Pair | Total Pips | Winning Trade % |
EUR/USD | 533 | 66.03% |
GBP/USD | 367 | 53.26% |
ALL | 1,000 | 58.33% |
These are impressive results: not only is there a high winning percentage of trades, but the average result per trade was very good (about 10 pips for EUR/USD, 3.5 pips for GBP/USD). Even when you factor in the spread / commission, it was a nicely profitable strategy. Yet this is the only “brainless” trading strategy I know of which was a winner in 2017. Unfortunately, it was a tough year in the Forex market.
I’ve only looked at the Forex market, even though many Forex brokers also offer trading in major stock indices and commodities. Major stock indices, especially U.S. indices such as the S&P 500 and Dow Jones 30, have been in strongly bullish trends the entire year. If you buy stocks directly, the highest leverage you can get is perhaps 3 to 1, but many brokers offer 20 to 1 on major indices. The S&P 500 Index is up almost 16% year to date, and at leverage of 20 to 1 you could be up 320%, although there is a risk of being wiped out at such leverage in the event of a major market crash slipping a stop loss by more then 5%. Many brokers also charge expensive overnight fees making it costly to hold these positions for many weeks or months.
If you do use trend following strategies based upon price alone, don’t panic. A bad year is not unusual. Some of the best years for trend followers come just after very bad ones. It could be that the Forex market is getting more chaotic and harder to trade, yet there is no rule that you must stick to Forex alone. Stock indices and commodities often provide opportunities when the Forex market is flat.
Source
The Winning Trading Strategies of 2017 | Trading Forex
Now that we are only a few weeks away from the end of the calendar year and the start of 2018, the time has come to look back over the year. Which trading strategies have performed best in the Forex market so far?
All trading strategies can be broken down into two types: trend trading strategies, and mean reverting strategies. With trend trading strategies, traders define the direction of the longer-term trend and enter trades only in the same direction. Mean reverting strategies define an average price, and traders seek to enter trades back towards the average when the price has become over-extended away from it. As over 80% of the volume of the Forex market is traded in just EUR/USD, GBP/USD, and USD/JPY, I’m going to apply a rough strategy of each type to these three major Forex currency pairs and see which came out ahead. I’ll then dissect the results and see if it tells us anything useful about the way the Forex market is evolving.
Trend Following Strategies
My favorite basis for a trend following strategy, because it is so elegantly simple, is just to check the opening price of each week to see whether the price has been going up or down over both the past three months and six months. If yes, then that’s the trend direction, and each week is just measured as a trade from open to close without any stop loss. If these results are good, then any trend following strategy should also have produced positive results. So, here are the results for 2017 to the end of October:Currency Pair | Trade Results | Winning Trade % |
EUR/USD | 2.01% | 45.45% |
GBP/USD | 3.27% | 52.42% |
USD/JPY | -3.65% | 42.31% |
TOTAL | 1.63% | <50.00% |
This is a poor result – it would be negative if the costs of all the trades were factored in. In my blog I wrote recently about using linear regression analysis, and I found that using the slope of the line of best fit over the past 20 weeks can work better. What if we try this trend-following method?
Currency Pair | Trade Results | Winning Trade % |
EUR/USD | 4.90% | 50.00% |
GBP/USD | -3.45% | 53.84% |
USD/JPY | -6.58% | 46.51% |
TOTAL | -5.13% | ~50.00% |
Using linear regression, we got an even worse result. So overall, we must conclude that trend following strategies have not worked well this year. This isn’t surprising: trend following strategies tend to go through lengthy periods of losses, before profiting excessively during big winning streaks.
So, what about mean-reverting trading strategies?
Mean Reverting Strategies
Mean reverting strategies, as I explained earlier, are the exact opposite of trend following strategies. This suggests that 2017 should have been a good year for this type of trading strategy, so let’s test a couple of good mean-reverting strategies on the same three Forex pairs.The first strategy is to wait for a weekly candle to make a new high or low – we will try the same period as the last test, 20 weeks. If the candle makes a new high and then closes down, or makes a new low and then closes up, enter at the open of the next week and close at the end of that week. Here are the results:
Currency Pair | Trade Results | Winning Trade % |
EUR/USD | -0.40% | 50.00% |
GBP/USD | 1.12% | 50.00% |
USD/JPY | -1.15% | 0.00% |
TOTAL | -0.43% | ~50.00% |
There were less than 10 trades in total using this strategy, but the overall result was slightly negative. This strategy did not work well this year. Let’s look at another typical mean reversion strategy, which uses the Bollinger Bands indicator, set to its standard 20-day, 2 standard deviations bands, on the daily chart. This strategy waits until a daily candle touches one of the outer bands, and then enters once the price breaks past the other end of the candle (i.e. the candle is reversed). The trade is then held until the opposite extreme band of the Bollinger Bands is reached. Unfortunately, this strategy also produced a negative result. There is one final pure mean reverting strategy which has worked well in the past that is worth back testing: whenever a weekly candlestick moves from open to close by more than 2% in value, enter a trade in the opposite direction at the start of the next week, then close it at the end of the week. This strategy only gave a few trades all year, and the result was, again, a small loss.
A ”Time of Day” Trading Strategy
There is no doubt this has been a hard year for Forex traders. It seems that all types of mechanical strategies, whether trend following or mean reverting, would, at best, have failed to make any profit this year. Trying to find a mechanical trading strategy which did perform well, I looked at a “time of day” strategy based upon the position at 9am London time compared to the previous midnight, on just EUR/USD and GBP/USD. This strategy exploits the statistical tendency of the London and New York sessions to follow any clear lead given by the Asian session, which begins at roughly midnight London time. The rule is simple: if the price is at least 25 pips higher at 9am London time than it was at Midnight, go long, or short if at least 25 pips less. The trade is closed at 5pm New York time, and no stop loss is used. There results for 2017 until the end of October were as follows:Currency Pair | Total Pips | Winning Trade % |
EUR/USD | 533 | 66.03% |
GBP/USD | 367 | 53.26% |
ALL | 1,000 | 58.33% |
These are impressive results: not only is there a high winning percentage of trades, but the average result per trade was very good (about 10 pips for EUR/USD, 3.5 pips for GBP/USD). Even when you factor in the spread / commission, it was a nicely profitable strategy. Yet this is the only “brainless” trading strategy I know of which was a winner in 2017. Unfortunately, it was a tough year in the Forex market.
I’ve only looked at the Forex market, even though many Forex brokers also offer trading in major stock indices and commodities. Major stock indices, especially U.S. indices such as the S&P 500 and Dow Jones 30, have been in strongly bullish trends the entire year. If you buy stocks directly, the highest leverage you can get is perhaps 3 to 1, but many brokers offer 20 to 1 on major indices. The S&P 500 Index is up almost 16% year to date, and at leverage of 20 to 1 you could be up 320%, although there is a risk of being wiped out at such leverage in the event of a major market crash slipping a stop loss by more then 5%. Many brokers also charge expensive overnight fees making it costly to hold these positions for many weeks or months.
If you do use trend following strategies based upon price alone, don’t panic. A bad year is not unusual. Some of the best years for trend followers come just after very bad ones. It could be that the Forex market is getting more chaotic and harder to trade, yet there is no rule that you must stick to Forex alone. Stock indices and commodities often provide opportunities when the Forex market is flat.
Source
The Winning Trading Strategies of 2017 | Trading Forex
Now that we are only a few weeks away from the end of the calendar year and the start of 2018, the time has come to look back over the year. Which trading strategies have performed best in the Forex market so far?
All trading strategies can be broken down into two types: trend trading strategies, and mean reverting strategies. With trend trading strategies, traders define the direction of the longer-term trend and enter trades only in the same direction. Mean reverting strategies define an average price, and traders seek to enter trades back towards the average when the price has become over-extended away from it. As over 80% of the volume of the Forex market is traded in just EUR/USD, GBP/USD, and USD/JPY, I’m going to apply a rough strategy of each type to these three major Forex currency pairs and see which came out ahead. I’ll then dissect the results and see if it tells us anything useful about the way the Forex market is evolving.
Trend Following Strategies
My favorite basis for a trend following strategy, because it is so elegantly simple, is just to check the opening price of each week to see whether the price has been going up or down over both the past three months and six months. If yes, then that’s the trend direction, and each week is just measured as a trade from open to close without any stop loss. If these results are good, then any trend following strategy should also have produced positive results. So, here are the results for 2017 to the end of October:Currency Pair | Trade Results | Winning Trade % |
EUR/USD | 2.01% | 45.45% |
GBP/USD | 3.27% | 52.42% |
USD/JPY | -3.65% | 42.31% |
TOTAL | 1.63% | <50.00% |
This is a poor result – it would be negative if the costs of all the trades were factored in. In my blog I wrote recently about using linear regression analysis, and I found that using the slope of the line of best fit over the past 20 weeks can work better. What if we try this trend-following method?
Currency Pair | Trade Results | Winning Trade % |
EUR/USD | 4.90% | 50.00% |
GBP/USD | -3.45% | 53.84% |
USD/JPY | -6.58% | 46.51% |
TOTAL | -5.13% | ~50.00% |
Using linear regression, we got an even worse result. So overall, we must conclude that trend following strategies have not worked well this year. This isn’t surprising: trend following strategies tend to go through lengthy periods of losses, before profiting excessively during big winning streaks.
So, what about mean-reverting trading strategies?
Mean Reverting Strategies
Mean reverting strategies, as I explained earlier, are the exact opposite of trend following strategies. This suggests that 2017 should have been a good year for this type of trading strategy, so let’s test a couple of good mean-reverting strategies on the same three Forex pairs.The first strategy is to wait for a weekly candle to make a new high or low – we will try the same period as the last test, 20 weeks. If the candle makes a new high and then closes down, or makes a new low and then closes up, enter at the open of the next week and close at the end of that week. Here are the results:
Currency Pair | Trade Results | Winning Trade % |
EUR/USD | -0.40% | 50.00% |
GBP/USD | 1.12% | 50.00% |
USD/JPY | -1.15% | 0.00% |
TOTAL | -0.43% | ~50.00% |
There were less than 10 trades in total using this strategy, but the overall result was slightly negative. This strategy did not work well this year. Let’s look at another typical mean reversion strategy, which uses the Bollinger Bands indicator, set to its standard 20-day, 2 standard deviations bands, on the daily chart. This strategy waits until a daily candle touches one of the outer bands, and then enters once the price breaks past the other end of the candle (i.e. the candle is reversed). The trade is then held until the opposite extreme band of the Bollinger Bands is reached. Unfortunately, this strategy also produced a negative result. There is one final pure mean reverting strategy which has worked well in the past that is worth back testing: whenever a weekly candlestick moves from open to close by more than 2% in value, enter a trade in the opposite direction at the start of the next week, then close it at the end of the week. This strategy only gave a few trades all year, and the result was, again, a small loss.
A ”Time of Day” Trading Strategy
There is no doubt this has been a hard year for Forex traders. It seems that all types of mechanical strategies, whether trend following or mean reverting, would, at best, have failed to make any profit this year. Trying to find a mechanical trading strategy which did perform well, I looked at a “time of day” strategy based upon the position at 9am London time compared to the previous midnight, on just EUR/USD and GBP/USD. This strategy exploits the statistical tendency of the London and New York sessions to follow any clear lead given by the Asian session, which begins at roughly midnight London time. The rule is simple: if the price is at least 25 pips higher at 9am London time than it was at Midnight, go long, or short if at least 25 pips less. The trade is closed at 5pm New York time, and no stop loss is used. There results for 2017 until the end of October were as follows:Currency Pair | Total Pips | Winning Trade % |
EUR/USD | 533 | 66.03% |
GBP/USD | 367 | 53.26% |
ALL | 1,000 | 58.33% |
These are impressive results: not only is there a high winning percentage of trades, but the average result per trade was very good (about 10 pips for EUR/USD, 3.5 pips for GBP/USD). Even when you factor in the spread / commission, it was a nicely profitable strategy. Yet this is the only “brainless” trading strategy I know of which was a winner in 2017. Unfortunately, it was a tough year in the Forex market.
I’ve only looked at the Forex market, even though many Forex brokers also offer trading in major stock indices and commodities. Major stock indices, especially U.S. indices such as the S&P 500 and Dow Jones 30, have been in strongly bullish trends the entire year. If you buy stocks directly, the highest leverage you can get is perhaps 3 to 1, but many brokers offer 20 to 1 on major indices. The S&P 500 Index is up almost 16% year to date, and at leverage of 20 to 1 you could be up 320%, although there is a risk of being wiped out at such leverage in the event of a major market crash slipping a stop loss by more then 5%. Many brokers also charge expensive overnight fees making it costly to hold these positions for many weeks or months.
If you do use trend following strategies based upon price alone, don’t panic. A bad year is not unusual. Some of the best years for trend followers come just after very bad ones. It could be that the Forex market is getting more chaotic and harder to trade, yet there is no rule that you must stick to Forex alone. Stock indices and commodities often provide opportunities when the Forex market is flat.
Source
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