Changing Market & Adaptation

I'm relatively new to this thing. I've been studying it since 2005 but really buckled down with a partner this time since May of this year. I've worked harder at this than anything else in my life, probably. We have been demo trading now going on 5 months. When the madness with the Euro happened in August, it affected us greatly. So we then tried to find some different currency pairs to trade. With what happened this past week, it's affected the currency pairs that we've been trading since switching from the eur/ usd and a couple others. When the debacle of August happened it forced us to look, sooner, into some other methods that we had always said we would check out later- fibs and pitchforks. What I'm wondering is do you guys have any suggestions for what traders can do to adapt more quickly to the changes in the market and consequently the behavior of the currency pairs. I was told methods such as the fibs and pitchforks can work in any market condition.

I'll take any suggestions.

Thank you

hang on !

Won't come down to pairs. Every pair as some correlation to the USD (it is a reserve currency after all), so there's no way around that volatility.

IMO, adjust your position holding times to fit the market. In markets like the ones we have now it's hard to hold a position very long and the weekends have killer gaps. But intra-day is swinging 200+ pips on some of the majors, so it'd be a mistake to not trade the opportunities the market gives.

Fibs and pitchforks are... eh, they work when they work, and don't work when they don't. I don't think they're overly reliable, but it probably comes down to how you're using them. I wouldn't be so attached to a singular method or set of indicators tho.

Stop trading those 4h and up charts. Do 15m-5m-1m. These are the tfs where you no longer have to guess what will happen or wait a month for a single good and proper opportunity, here you see it directly with your eyes and trade directly what you see (with no fundumentals, news or politics to guess, no small moves that mess up the large perspective or the abundance of potential s/rs on the way and so on and so forth). You can make several trades per day with reasonable risk and large profit due to many more trades overall. You see currently that one double top on Daily chart from this year ? I see 1-3 double tops/bottoms per day. You see 9 months with 9 monthly pivots, I see dozens of weeks and hundreds of days with their pivots and a few potential trades and also small scalps per day accordingly. Not to mention, that trading the daily price action each day will quickly expose you to all possible market conditions, which you apparently didn't get on higher tfs - I assume you just used simple trend following while the euro was rising steady, and will really teach you to trade (or even not to when you shouldn't) which in turn will make you even larger profit.

Also, my personal recommendation at least, trade only EU. It probably has the best volatility to spread ratio. It is the most liquid and high money volume pair and as such the most indepent. It will give you the "smoothest" rides and won't do freaky stuff like others because where it goes the other pairs ussualy follow in one way or another and not the opposite.