Podcast:

How Long Should You Leave Trades Open?

In this video:

00:22 – Last video and podcast for 2016

00:35 – Trader asks about leaving trades open overnight

01:45 – Other markets often have opening gaps

02:45 – News announcements don’t often create gaps in the FX market

03:55 – Daily trades have made clients +35% account gain this year with low risk

04:40 – Client makes +27% gain since June with a 3% drawdown

05:30 – Spend some time to review your trades

06:05 – I start trading again on Monday 9th January 2017

06:40 – Thanks for watching and listening to my weekly videos

How long should you leave your trades open in the market? Let's talk about that and more right now.

Hello Forex traders, it's Andrew Mitchem here, The Forex Trading Coach. Today this is video and podcast #208.

Last video and podcast for 2016

It's the last video on podcast for the year of 2016. What an amazingly quick year it has been, but more about that shortly.

Trader asks about leaving trades open overnight

The subject of today, and it comes about as a result of an email I had from a follower of mine on Forex Peace Army, a guy called Ray. Ray said, "Andrew, I love your podcast. Can you do one about the possibility of an overnight gap jumping right past your stop-loss? What's the possibility of a flash crash while you are sleeping? How do you deal with that? Is Forex more immune to this than other markets?"

Ray goes on to say that he used to trade futures where gaps were always a possibility. How do I trade the longer time frame charts? The great news is Ray is that the Forex market doesn't really have gaps, being a 24 hour market from its open to it's close; you don't really get gaps. You can occasionally get a gap from the market closing at the end of the week until the beginning of the next week, and that can sometimes happen. It generally doesn't become an issue for most people the way that they trade. If you're trading a longer time frame charts then the gaps generally, if you leave your trades open over the weekend, don't become too big of an issue. If you're trading shorter time frame charts, so for me anything from a daily chart and lower, I always close them at the end of the week or before the end of the week anyway. If we get a gap open at the beginning of the next week, it's not really a big deal.

Other markets often have opening gaps

What you're referring to, Ray, being a futures trader or a previous futures trader, is that you get gaps of say between the market opening and the marketing closing on most of those other markets you look at commodities et cetera. Most Forex brokers now offer far more options available to us, different markets, than just the currency markets like they used to. You can trade things like coffee and soy and different markets as well on most Forex brokers. When you look at those, they are largely dependent around the market times that they open and close and they're certainly not 24 hour markets, most of them. Most of them are dependent on the US. If you're not in the US then they become really difficult markets to trade.

For me over here in New Zealand, most of those US markets open somewhere between two and four o'clock in the morning, and I certainly don't want to be up looking at charts at that time of the day, but you do get gaps on those markets.

News announcements don’t often create gaps in the FX market

Even in the Forex market when you get news announcements and the announcement's massively better or worse than expected and you get some decent price action, very rarely do you actually get gaps in the market.

Ray, to answer your question, to leave your trades ... when you say overnight,