How many currency pairs should I trade?


The financial markets are consistently in a one of two modes. Either the trend is going up or down or the trend is broken with a correction or pre-trend pattern. When you follow only one currency pair and the trend is in a multi-month consolidation pattern there could be limited opportunities compared to other currency pairs. Another problem with only trading one currency pair could be that both currencies that make up the pair can either be very strong compared to other currencies or very weak relative to other currencies. When you have two currencies that are very weak or very strong the technical opportunities that come from strong trends are usually missing.

 

An alternative that could allow you to keep some time to yourselves while not being limited to only one currency: You can choose one currency pair that represents different markets or sentiment stories. So e.g. EURJPY is highly correlated to the stock market so that currency pair could be your focal point to take advantage of a stock market trend.

 

USDCAD is a currency pair that is positively correlated to Oil along with USDNOK and USDMXN. So when you like to follow commodities like USOil and want a currency play due to the correlation you could have a look at those currencies.

 

Another opportunity is USDCHF which is a nice major currency pair to follow because it has one currency with a central bank in the Federal Reserve that has discussed interest rate hikes in 2015 which is a rare event followed by another currency in the CHF which has a central bank that is dedicated to keeping the CHF week through a EURCHF floor of 120 in order to ensure the CHF does not weaken to a point that the Swiss Economy is hurt. This could also be an example of a strong/weak currency pair that you could analyze. The only problem with this type of analysis is that it have to be updated some times per month to ensure your focused currency pair is the strongest versus the weakest.

 

The thought of having one currency pair that you know better than any other is seductive but can leave you short-handed in some scenarios. It would be a better idea for you to have a handful of currency pairs that react to different events in the global financial market.

 

And you should never forget the spread. With exotic currency pairs you often haven enormous spreads. This can be very hard for a trader on a permanent basis.