Trading NZD GDP today at 6.45 EST

A very strong storm just blew over our city and many power transmission lines fell from the heavy gust. We were left with no electricity since 10AM (10PM EST). I have been running on notebook power reserve since US GDP... By this morning (my time), I am left with 7% battery juice on my notebook 5 minutes into NZ news time.

Inspite of the low power, I managed to bag 34 pips from an instinct play - ie, I sold it at 0.6589 and bought back at 0.6555 (the support that has been playing for an hour prior to release)... Why I shorted?

Clues:
1. Very negatively Current Account
2. Very negative Trade Balance
3. no more rate hike (suggesting it is hurting their economy already...)
4. Lastly, no more "Lord of the Rings" movie sequel which was rumored to have spurred some NZ$500M worth of revenues to NZ... (joke)


Sorry I wasnt able to post this prior to news - I have very lower battery power to be online longer than 5 minutes...

NewstraderFX,
Can you describe your experience with your broker (DB) with regards to news trading. Fills/slippage/spreads/leverage etc?

Thanks in advance.

Hi Newstrader and forexplayer, just a headsup re dbfx: they told me they have plans to switch to variable spreads mid-October. Plans are often delayed, but this does seem to be the trend.

I've heard the same thing regarding DB. As for the performance of DB, it's been variable. There really isn't anything great there to report and the 2% margin requirement limits what you can do. You need to have $2000 on deposit for every 100K position. There are no mini lots and this to me is absurd. There platform is generic and they don't have a clear idea of exactly how it works during news releases. On the other hand, I get the overall impression that they're honest.

I mentioned the performance during the NZ trades as being very good. I used to be with forex.com, who were a disaster on newstrading, with their platform freezing, slippage etc. But even they were pretty good on NZD trades.

That's why I mentioned before that I'm thinking about only trading the NZ reports for a while. Going back the 8 months i've been doing this, if I would have traded only the NZ reports I would be doing very well indeed. Not all of the reports have caused the market to move, but I've never had a loser either.

My overall impression of pip widening is that it's the death blow to straddling, if you straddle with a stop-loss. They'll just widen the pips on you, grab your position and hit your stop. Hell, MB has done this to me on my demo account! None of these brokers like or want straddlers-we're considered the lowest of the low.

Here's a funny story regarding that very issue and this occurred during a conversation with DB. We were talking about straddling and how there system works. The guy compared straddling to a guy who walks into a store, asks the guy behind the counter for something, then shoplifts when the guy turns his back; a common petty thief...

People were talking up MB, because their stop limit order garuntees no entry slippage in all markets, which is true. They have an order that goes with that called a "tto", which basically works as your stop loss. So yeah, you get filled with no slippage, but if the market goes against you? Disasterous results with the tto order (stop loss)...i've heard of 20-30 point slippage on those. See, if they don't get you coming (slipping on the entry) they get you going (slipping on the exit). One guy even tried using another stop limit as a "stop loss" on his first order. He didn't realize that while will that order garuntees no slippage, it doesn't garuntee a FILL! Forget about what he lost...