Is August the most difficult trading month?

Apart from the Xmas and New year time, is August the most difficult month to trade? Please tell me your view!

No one here who has traded enough month to comment?

No, no month is the most difficult to trade. They are all the same.
Price movements, small or big come anytime.

J.

Even the period between 15 Dec and 15 Jan the same as other part of the year?

Yes, August is the worse and this is every year. Check out volume and that's the answer. All summer months aren't good, but August the worse. Why? Because this is the highest vacation time for the big boys.

Christmas Day is the most difficult hedge fund managers are pumping their secretarys hence low volume liquidty etc

There's no most difficult trading month. There's a Trader & some graphics. I've been trading this whole August and it's been one of the most illuminating time of my entire trader career. Very interesting trading due to low liquidity but high activity, political, global... The markets only close on Saturday

Check what volume?
Does volume has anything to do with price change?

J.

as mentioned above, It all depends on what type of trader you are , if you can adapt easily there will be no difficult times to trade. But if you are a trend trader or a scalper there are diffidently times when things wont go your away and you will suffer some drawdown. I think it is best to mix it up having both long term and short term trades to keep you profitable and balance your account.

Some think, yes, tick volume, that is the number of price changes, can be used to gauge actual dollar volume. You might want to read this:
http://forums.babypips.com/newbie-is...tml#post246891

I've found this August to be particularly difficult, however last year I had a really good August.

I'm not sure if it really makes a difference year on year, but I find things slow and uncomfortable whenever there is low volume.

LD.

Fire up the daily chart and take a look at how August of this year has been unfolding.

There are 20 bars on my daily chart for this month and out of those 20 there are fully 10 days where the price ended up or down only 35 pips or less from where it opened.

Compare that to August of last year, which only has 5 days where the price change from open to close was 35 or less.

Scroll back further to August 2010 and you'll see that it was more in line with this year. Not as much movement.

Back further still and you see that August of 2009 was more like this year at least where open/close difference is concerned, but there were a lot of long wicks for August of '09 which means that price moved fairly well over the course of the day even if it ended up pretty close to where it started.

All-in-all, August seems to be pretty slow. It doesn't work very well at all for my system of trading. Probably going to end up at break even for the month. I'm pretty sure that I'll not be trading in August from now on because of this. If it's highly likely that I'll break even or take a small loss because my system and August conditions don't mesh well, then I can break even by not trading and save myself 200 hours worth of work.

It's most difficult month for me, yes.

Good reasoning. Like the sun and the rain. They come all year so there is no such thing as seasons.

2 of the dumbest posts i have seen.

Low volume in August means the Market tends to move less
Trading is a 0 sum game minus transactions costs
So transaction costs are in effect higher in August because the cost of business is the same but the possible returns are lower.

Actually, this isn't a dumb question at all.

You can have large orders that move price on low volume, so trade volume isn't necessarily representative for price movement.

Most traders aren't watching real volume anyway, so it's not something that can be checked. There are a few reasons for this.

First, Forex isn't traded on a closed exchange, so it doesn't have actual volume data like equities or futures. Also, the market itself has structurally changed so while there may be more activity during larger moves, it only shows part of the picture of what's really going on.

Order algos have become much more sophisticated in the past few years. Besides dark pools that are off exchange, you have black ice or hidden orders, iceberg orders that only show partial order volume, and shading algos that work on incremental fills. This heavily skews "so called" volume data.

Anyone using an inferior platform like MT4 is getting a limited feed through a market maker, so not only is the feed itself not representational of the market order fllow, but the broker often manipulates or doesn't make available real trade volume to the end user.

Tick data isn't volume, it just shows the number of ticks of a move, so of course larger moves equal more ticks. People look at a bar at the bottom of their chart and think, look at all that "volume".

If you have a real market feed that's connected to the major Interbank providers, you can watch T&S and see something closer to actual order volume involved in a move. Most times the most money that's changing hands takes place between the spread when price is stalled because these are the critical tipping points for disequilibrium. You can see the hidden algos at work by what price is doing that's not lining up with represented order flow.

The larger the institution, the better they are at masking intent. Since the CBs began heavily manipulating price after the 2008 crash coupled with the advent of HST, the scale of unnatural order flow has increased exponentially.

The bottom line is, making trading decisions based on severely limited information in a market where large players are hiding their orders makes zero sense and isn't an edge.

This isn't to open a debate or discussion on the validity of tick volume. People should take the time to learn the fundamentals of market structure themselves so they can make an informed decision individually. If they don't understand market structure, then they don't understand the basic functionality of what they're observing.

As for trading August, life is short. Wasting time watching a low liquidity market whipsaw between minor SR isn't much fun and unhealthy for most people's account balances. Same goes for the 2 weeks prior and post New Year's day.

The two most important aspects of trading are time and price.

Understanding when not to trade works on lower and higher time cycles respectively.

August was very bad for me too...
can somebody explain the reason for this heavy stop hunting in august..

August is when the bankers take a summer holiday break and is for this reason renowned for its unpredictability. Previous years have seen insane markets falls with no one there to catch it or vice versa.

The low volume basically makes it easier to play the game that is played every day in the markets. But it is simply taken too another level as there is no one there to keep it honest. So to speak.

This is my interpretation of August anyway. This month with little movement just represents the current market. People are scared to commit one way or the other with all the background developments that are happening.

Likely what has taken hold is liquidity risk, with large players fearful of getting into poisons that (with the low volume) they cannot escape from without the liquidity they need.

Just a guess. Your charts represent what is not on them. Not the other way around.

Hey,everyone!

I'm backtesting my self-developed renko system(works both in trending+sideways condition),,,andso,i need to find the time when EUR/USD showed most choppiness/whipsaws within last 5-6yrs..


I only tested last 16months of data..
Do u think thats enough?

Any suggestions appreciated.....