Straddle technique for news announcement?

Does anyone use straddle strategy like place long and short stop order on major pairs, maybe 10-15 pips away from current price when major event like NFP,CPI,GDP looms in few seconds ? One of orders will be executed and we cancel another one manually. Stop loss maybe put 10 pips. Does anyone use this technique successfully in long term?

I used to do it, but what I usually see is that you have to be ready to close out the trade quickly, because the jump is usually followed by a reversal back to where it cam from. Personnaly, I hate the way the market reacts to monthly news releases. All knee-jerk, and no substance. On NFP days, many brokers freeze their platforms so that you do not get your price, but my broker just widens the spread as much as 30 to 40 pips on EURUSD and GBPUSD for about 1 to 2 minutes. I take the day off on NFP Fridays.

here are a few links from our friend hiyo...

http://www.forexfactory.com/forexfor...light=straddle

http://www.forexfactory.com/forexfor...light=straddle

there are those who successfully straddle the news. the major problem you face as a straddler is that you are trading at the most volatile time possible, meaning you will experience major slippage. it can be done successfully, but it's not as easy as it may seem, youd have to really dedicate yourself.

I have only been trading a very short time. But one thing that I noticed, (I haven't had time to see if this is really the way it is) the market seems to take a sharp move in the oppisite direction of 10-30 pips from the way the news will make it move. This seems to happen 2-3 minutes before a news release to 5 minutes after. I don't know if this is due to speculative traders making market orders just prior to news release or not.

But it may trigger your stops before the news release only to move in an undesireable (sp?) direction moments later.

If you plan to straddle then this straddle calculator might be useful.
Check it out....

I think that's because everybody's closing their current positions before acting according to news...

Reason is because, there is hardly any broker out there that will fill you in properly. You either get slipped BIG time, or filled at the top of the spike (i hear MT4 brokers have a plugin to make this happen).

For ECN's spread widens dramatically just before news. You can be filled and stopped out before you blink. Many brokers widen spread b4 news.
I straddle anyway, It's my main strategy,but after the news.

Read about it here.
http://www.forexfactory.com/showthread.php?t=69871

hi there
I am a newbie and have been trading with a demo account for 2 months now. I have experience of option trading where you can use many kinds of straddling strategies.

I have been trying the straddle during news time and although there are many pitfalls I have been getting more and more success with it lately.

One of the main advantages is that you can trade many correlating pairs at once during news and thus doubling and trippling profits. I have experienced the big slippages and getting filled at the top/botom of the spike but you learn through experience where and when and how to put the straddle to avoid the whipsaws and minimize the problems. You have to be selective of which news to trade and which pairs to focus on. News-retracement straddles works much better as well.

I am now at the point where I have good results with my demo account using straddles during news and want to go live, but I'm told that brokers simply wont allow stradding on a live account or that they just close your account if you do. Why is it not allowed?

Yet, I see many threads here of people doing it successfully. Am I missing something? Are there other ways to do this by maybe using 2 accounts simultaneously?

Which brokers should I try and which ones to avoid? I would prefer not to use MT4 but I suspect its ony MT4 brokers which allow it.

I would appreciate any reponses. If I can make this work as well with a live account I will share my knowledge here.

I don't think *many* people are doing it successfully.

You have a few like BurgerKing and MaXeY, but they've been doing it for some time, and are very skilled.

If you can do it, good luck to you.