Podcast:

How to survive when the market is quiet

In this weekly video:

00:29 – Tight, rangebound trading conditions

01:00 - How to trade during tough conditions?

01:54 – Having a confluence of events in your favour

02:54 – Examples of what makes a good trade setup

04:53 – Giving yourself a higher probability chance of success

05:16 – Email me if you need any help

As a Forex trader, it's important for you to know how to survive when the market conditions are quiet and not favourable. So let's talk about that important subject and more right now.

Hi Forex traders it's Andrew Mitchem here, the Forex Trading Coach Video and Podcast Number 277.

Tight, rangebound trading conditions

I want to talk about the conditions right now. Go and look at your charts and you see that most of the currency pairs are in quite a tight range band market right now. There's not a lot of strength or weakness either way. I'll give you an example; have a look at the New Zealand dollar against the US dollar. It's stuck around the 70 level, the 0.7000 level against the US. It's been there for quite a while. If you look back over the last couple of trading weeks, you'll see that the pair has fluctuated around 100 pip movement; very, very hard to make money when that happens.

How to trade during tough conditions?

So what can you do about that and how do you trade those conditions? Because of course, I can look back now and say the last two weeks it's moved 100 pips in two weeks. But at the time you don't know that, and that's the hard thing with trading. Which is why I always say to people, a good trader has the ability to trade in realtime and from the right hand side of the chart. The internet trader, of which are there are many so-called experts out there, have the ability to show you charts and show you trades with the benefit of hindsight.

So that's what makes me different in that I take trades live for my clients on a daily basis, we post them on the forum site. I have specific trades, and of course I trade live on a live webinar. On top of that, I manage funds for people as well. But let's get back to the point in hand, which is how do you trade when the conditions are quiet?

Having a confluence of events in your favour

For me, it's all about having a confluence of events all showing at the same time. Because trading is about probability, and it's all about adding multiple layers upon each other to give yourself an overall higher probability chance of that trade being a good one and justifying why you should actually take the trade in the first place.

In general, if conditions are tough then be really, really selective about your trading and don't keep trying to want to take trades just for the sake of it. That's a really important first point. But when it comes to the charts, as a trader I give away my Engulfing Candle course for free, and it's looking for engulfing candles. But when it comes to my real trading and my coaching course, of course there's more to it than just looking for every engulfing candle. There's other candle patterns that we're looking for as well. But more importantly, it's knowing where they occur within the chart; what part of the chart are we in right now. So it's adding that confluence of events, multiple factors together.

Examples of what makes a good trade setup

For example, have we had a prior trend? Let's say we've had a prior downtrend and now we're looking for a bullish pattern. Fantastic, because now we're looking for a reversal or a continuation of a main trend after a pullback. What type of the part of the chart are we in? Are we near the upper Bollinger? The bottom? The middle? Are we in no man's land? What about divergence? Does that help us? Have we bounced at round numbers? Have we bounced at previous support or resistance levels? If we're taking a buy trade, are we buying directly into a level that may have recently or even some weeks ago have been a previous str...