What's in your basket and why?

I've been trading a basket of 15 pairs but feel more thought needs to be put into my choices. My basket was in effect 5 minibaskets of 3, which would be made up of 3 currencies and their crosses eg. EURUSD, EURJPY, USDJPY. To my reckoning, this kept a balanced holding of various currencies, and by having a total of 15 pairs, there was less volatility in the equity curve. However every time one pair made substantial gains, they would be tempered by another pair somewhere making solid losses. In the end I felt the basket was achieving results by way of slight gains month by month, but now I'm looking to reduce the number of pairs in my basket or otherwise fine tune it to get better results.

So to all the basket traders out there, care to share what you put in your basket and why? You don't have to explain your trading system in detail, but a short description of your rationale for choosing the pairs you did might be helpful to me and others out there that trade with baskets.

I trade relatively small timeframes intraday, so I only look at about 2-3, depending on volatility. I found that so many currencies are closely correlated, it really isn't beneficial for additional trade opportunities with more pairs. Essentially just increasing the risk on the same trades. I trade other markets on the side as well...like NQ, Oil, Gold, etc for a better balance. They are correlated but its not always that close on the intraday.

Anyways, with that being said...I look for high volume and decent volatility. I want fills with no issues (due to size, slippage, etc). I want leaders. I traded just EU and UJ for a while, but recently removed UJ as its volatility has been crap lately. Depending on what looks better, i'll trade EJ, EG, or GU in conjunction with EU. I also only trade the U.S. session...otherwise i'd probably change up GU for AU.

Hope this helps.

this always depends on your trading system. Strangely enough sometimes correlated pairs boost performances the best, while limiting drawdown. You need to get stats on each pair and then combine these results and try to find the best combination. No other way around.
Even if you would rationalize your pair selection by let's say only taking uncorrelated pairs, you might not achieve optimal results, you really need to see the results yourself. That means lots of work, but once you got that information, you definitely know which pairs work best together (for the system you trade).