THE BEST TIME FRAME FOR FOREX TRADING
Forex trading can be extremely lucrative, however, if you’re at the start of your journey, it can feel like information overload. Everywhere you look, there are different strategies and different methods of making money from the markets, and even choosing a time frame to trade can leave you puzzled. Selecting a time frame to incorporate into your trading is a lot more important than it sounds, especially for beginner traders. Picking the wrong time frame is highly likely going to leave you without much success within the markets.
In this article, we’ll look at the best time frames you can trade as a beginner forex trader and why, so you can make the best decision possible. So, let’s get into it…
The Best Time Frame For Forex Trading
In our opinion, if you’re a newbie trader, the best time frame you can use in your trading is the daily time frame, sometimes known as the 1D or D1.
We’ve seen many new traders have the most success in this time frame because of numerous factors. Typically, traders like to use a lower time frame to begin with. This makes sense, as lower time frame charts will provide more potential opportunities per day/per week/per month. However, this isn’t the good news it appears to be. The daily time frame is superior in many ways. If you move even higher than the daily charts, you’re waiting weeks or even months for setups and entries on those setups to appear. If you move lower than the daily time frame, you have to be very agile in the markets – which works great, if you’re an experienced trader. However, as a newbie, this is likely to cause you many issues.
What Makes A Good Time Frame For Forex Trading?
There are several things you want to consider when deciding if a time frame is right for your trading style.
Can you trade the hours needed for the time frame? For example, if you’re trading the Daily chart, you only really need to be active on the daily close at 10pm. Whereas, if you’re trading the 1M, you need to be on the charts through every trading session.
Is there a suitable number of setups for your trading strategy? If you’re trading the monthly time frame, chances are you may only see 1 setup per year across all of your trading pairs. Using a lower time frame may be advantageous to increase this.
Is the chart slow enough to allow you to make the right decision? Lower time frames are very fluid and can cause traders to make the wrong decision under such tight time constraints.
These combined will help you decide if the time frame is right for you. We know professional funded traders making 7 figures per year that trade the 4H charts for entries, knowing that they can still live their life, attend meetings and travel, whilst only being active on the charts every 4 hours.
Fit trading around your life, not the other way around.
What Makes A Bad Time Frame For Forex Trading?
Conversely, it’s easy to identify a bad time frame for your forex trading…
Your strategy doesn’t work on that time frame.
Your life/job doesn’t suit trading on the time frame.
You don’t have time to plan your trades on that time frame.
You don’t have any opportunities on that time frame.
You have too many opportunities on that time frame.
You have to hindsight trade on that time frame.
If you find these points are reflective of the time frame you’re trading, then you should reevaluate the charts you’re trading.
How To Use Time Frames To Your Advantage In Trading?
There are advantages of using multiple time frames within your trading. Typically, you’d want to build out your trading strategy using the following:
Higher time frame charts. These will be used for direction and analysis. For example, GBPUSD may be incredibly bullish on the Weekly and Daily time frames after bouncing a key support level.
Lower time frame charts. These will be great for entry points. For example, using the same GBPUSD analysis, using 4H and 1H support levels for entries could allow you to capitalize on the daily time frame play, without needing a large stop loss, allowing a better risk to reward ratio.
This allows traders to increase their risk to reward ratio and capitalize on the higher time frame moves. Often, this allows trades to run further as you’re going with the higher time frame bias rather than a quick play on just the 15M time frame, for example.
When To Pivot To Using Multiple Time Frames In Your Trading
We cannot disregard all other charts in the markets, as they hold a huge amount of opportunity. When you reach a level of consistent profitability on the daily time frame, you should start looking at the 4H and potentially 1H time frames. We’d recommend not moving down to the fast-moving minute time frames, as they can frequently be much too fast for beginners and cause a huge amount of hindsight trading and human error. However, the 1H and 4H time frames allow for more time in the decision-making process. You have hours to figure out whether the trade is valid or invalid in your trading strategy, rather than 3 minutes. You also have much more time to manage the trade, which is hugely advantageous. Traders working on the 5-minute time frame have seconds to decide if they should be moving their stop loss to breakeven, etc.
We’d recommend, after 3 to 6 months of consistent profitability, start testing your strategies on the 1H and 4H time frames and gather the data to understand whether it’s a move you should make to increase your profits.
In Conclusion – The Best Time Frame For Forex Trading
In summary, if you’re a beginner forex trader, the daily time frame will be the best place to start. It’s slow enough and clear enough to allow for great trading and learning, with ample opportunities. After consistently trading for 3 to 6 months, we’d recommend adding some lower time frames like 1H and 4H into your trading to test the strategies and see if you can refine your risk to reward or increase your trading volume.
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