Saturday, April 27, 2013

Narrow Focus Or Wide Exposure: How Many Pairs Should Your Forex Robot Trade? - Finance

Although a forex robot may focus on a single pair, you can probably alter its settings to focus on another pair or group of pairs. If after altering your forex robot's settings away from its pair of choice you notice a sustained losing streak or big drawdowns, switch the settings back or find a new forex robot?

What Is Better: To Have Options Or Predictability?

We're not really going to extoll the virtues of a forex robot that trades just one forex pair while deriding the forex robots that trade multiple, nor will we single the latter's praises while bashing one-pair forex robots. The idea here is to give traders a sense of what to expect from each type of forex robot.

With a single-pair forex robot, more often than not, the pair is going to be the EUR/USD, though we have come across some single-pair forex robots that focus on the GBP/USD and the USD/CHF. The EUR/USD pair is a typical one to focus on simply because it is the most traded pair in the forex market and it has very defined ranges during each trading session. For example, during the New York session, the range for the EUR/USD pair is about 30-40 pips and this is the case usually on most days. What the single-pair robot is offering here is the ability to exploit what it perceives to be defined ranges and predictable trends.

Does this work? Yes, if the forex robot was programmed to take a small amount of trades per day or in a week and if it was programmed with ample trading data, it should be able to exploit a single pair's trends with consistency. However, there are many downfalls, the primary one being not even the most volatile pairs moves all day during all three trading sessions, so your forex robot could be left out to dry in a choppy, sideways market.

Now this may lead you to think that a forex robot that trades multiple pairs is better than a forex robot that does not. While it's definitely nice to have options, especially when one pair is in a lull, there is no empirical evidence to suggest that multi-pair forex robots outperform their single-pair brethren. In fact, the risk here is that a forex robot that trades multiple pairs, particularly if its focus is intraday trading, may over trade and expose the trader to too much in the risk in the process.

Now you know what we mean when we say there is no holy grail in the forex robot world.

Who's The Big Winner?

It's hard to say if one genre of forex robots is superior over the other solely on the basis of number of forex pairs traded. If you're the kind of trader that likes having a menu of options, find a forex robot that trades multiple pairs. If you're more comfortable with an intense focus on one pair, buy a forex robot that only trades one pair. It's that simple.





iAutoblog the premier autoblogger software

No comments:

Post a Comment