Focus On Too Many Pairs Could Lead You to Failure

The more pairs you focus on trading, the greater you increase your chances for failure.

I sometimes wonder if this is why brokers make so many pairs available on their exchanges for retail to trade. Perhaps it is because the more choices you have, the more difficult it is to pick the right one. In other words, it causes confusion, which leads to failure.

It would be interesting to see the success rate of traders who only focus on a few pairs compared to those who focus on five or more pairs. It's my guess the people who focus on less are likely more successful than those who are trying to keep track of more.

What do you think about this?

I trade multiple pairs with multiple positions on each. But for anyone with not enough experience should focus on 2 at most, do your analysis on both but trade the chart that has the best Skew. Just my 3cents

Good thread idea btw

Or, limit your trading pairs to the market your trading in. Dont trade GBPCAD in Asia session. If you trade London stick with London pairs, if in the U.S stick with U.S pairs until you have a good understanding of market structure. That my two cents.

Well that depends mostly on personal preferences, but even more on trading style. You can’t just throw in that advice to someone with a longer term swing trading or position trading approach…

For scalpers? Definitely. I would stick to 1-3
Day traders? Maybe 3-5?

It really depends on the time frames you look at and your trading style.

As alluded to in post above, I too think it's a question of what is practical re the edge you are trading. For eg I trade multiple repeating set-ups across multiple t/f's on one instrument only. If I was only looking for say one set-up on much fewer t/f's, I would look for it across multiple instruments. If I was trying to do what I do across multiple instruments, I would need 5 screens per instrument so it just wouldn't be practical as I would miss too many set-ups and couldn't keep up to speed with potential support and resistance on every instrument and relevant t/f's, as price discovery takes place, (which is a key part of my Edge's methodology, ) let alone all the fundie releases that might affect them.

One of the advantages of only trading one instrument is that you get to really know it's 'character' and particular idiosyncrasies. Whether one way of trading is generally more profitable than the other in this respect though, I have no idea, but if I had to guess, I would probably side with your guess.

How about 1 pair and 2 other asset classes?

Still the same issue as I stated above

this post is %100 accurate..


my winning increase immediately I'm trading only one pair

this is the best answer. It depends.