Best Session to Trade - At a glance!Market Sessions Introduction
Watching the market 24/7 is completely unnecessary, considering price only moves during certain periods of the day.
These periods are known as "Sessions" and relate to an exchange's location on the planet.
The two most popular sessions - London & New York - typically see the most volatility and gross number of trades placed.
However, there are strategies designed around specific sessions, such as the "Asian Breakout", which targets the first two hours of the Tokyo session.
The sessions occur every trading day (M - F) during the following UTC times:
London: 0800-1600
New York: 1300-2100
Tokyo: 0000-0800
Sydney: 2200-0600
The London and NY session overlap for 3 hours - this is known as the "Golden Window" in Forex trading...but why?
Advanced Forex Session Analysis
I created a tool to explore the concept of the "Golden Window" and answer a few burning questions:
did every asset have the same golden window?
if the golden window shifted, could you detect it?
does restricting trading times to the golden window improve win rate?
what does the golden window even look like?
This tool is available for free and open source - Advanced Forex Sessions
It scores each session by Volatility (ticks moved) and Volume (number of trades placed), then displays the windows on chart.
I've discovered answers to a few questions and can confidently say, NO, not every asset has the same golden window.
In fact, nearly all small-cap cryptocurrencies have a golden window during the Tokyo or Sydney sessions.
YES, we can detect the window shifting by scoring each session via a rolling average.
MAYBE, it's hard to say if restricting trading times will work for every strategy, but I have seen minor improvements for traditional strategies that buy/sell with fixed take profits and stop losses.
WHAT does the Golden Window look like?
Check out the Advanced Forex Sessions indicator and see for yourself...
Dasanc
Week in Review: New Kid on the BlockHonorable Mentions
This week we've seen a flurry of new open-source scripts hit TradingView, empowering it's users with trading ideas and programming techniques. "By Traders For Traders" by Dunhua-Yao , a potent modification of JustUncleL's "Price Action Candles", uses tighter criteria for 'Hammers' and 'Shooting Stars'; "Blau Divergence RSI", by blindfreddy , gifts us with William Blau's RSI; Quansium's "Quansium Source Layout" suggests ways to use external sources with TradingView; and RafaelZioni's "Bollinger ratio" brings together the MACD and Bollinger Bands in a unique way.
There Goes the Neighborhood
But there was one coder in particular that really caught my attention, introducing new, interesting, accessible, exotic and useful concepts. In the last week he's published 8 scripts, with his most recent strategy garnering a seemingly-outlandish return of 6000%+, although he has been a member for seven months. So the shining light for me this week, a big fan of Ehler's (who isn't?), has to be dasanc: www.tradingview.com
Magnum Opus Currere
The script that encapsulates his talent (for me) is his most recent strategy, "Adaptive Zero Lag EMA v2": This piece of work uses Ehler's ZLEMA and the two methods for Instantaneous Frequency Measurement (IFM) that dasanc's published in the past week. You can also adjust your risk limit, change TP/SL levels and determine your gain limit from within the control panel. Not only that, but it's presented in a clean and understandable manner, allowing beginners and professionals alike to pick up and immediately get started with the algorithms.
Cherry on Top...
So what makes this script so special? Well, the two IFM techniques: (One) (Two) In what seems to be his typical fashion, he's provided excellent descriptions for how these should be used. In short, if you're using an indicator that uses a lookback period (RSI, EMA etc), instead of fiddling with arbitrary numbers you just use the output of either of these techniques as the source for determining the lookback. Realising this concept has resulted in the entire Pine community being gifted with something they might not even know they were looking for.
...And Some Cream
Low Lag Exponential Moving Average:
Cosine, In-Phase and Quadrature IFM:
Moving Forward
With a young account and a recent burst of activity, it's safe to assume that we'll be seeing more of dasanc. Hopefully his singular approach to signal processing (as far as the current TradingView library is concerned) will be emulated by others.
Want to learn?
If you'd like the opportunity to learn Pine but you have difficulty finding resources to guide you, take a look at this rudimentary list: docs.google.com
The list will be updated in the future as more people share the resources that have helped, or continue to help, them. Follow me on Twitter to keep up-to-date with the growing list of resources.
Suggestions or Questions?
Don't even kinda hesitate to forward them to me. My (metaphorical) door is always open.
Honorable Mentions