Forex
Forex Range Trading
The same pair behaves like a different market depending on what time it is. Click through the trading day and watch the range widen, tighten, and occasionally break, hour by hour.
Click a session, watch the range change
Forex trades 24 hours a day, but liquidity doesn't stay constant. Click a wedge on the clock to jump into that session and watch a live price path react: tight and contained during quiet hours, wider and more breakout-prone once London and New York overlap.
How it works
- The trade is fading the edges of a session's own range. Once a pair has traded quietly for a while, its recent high and low mark a range. The trade sells near the top of that range and buys near the bottom, betting the range holds rather than breaks.
- Range trading works best when liquidity is thin and directional conviction is low. That's most true during the Asian session, when Tokyo and Sydney are open but London and New York are asleep. Fewer large participants means less reason for price to travel far.
- The London/New York overlap is the opposite environment. Both of the world's largest forex trading centers are open at once, volume and volatility both spike, and ranges that held all night frequently don't survive the first hour of overlap.
- The range itself isn't a fixed number. It has to be redrawn for the session actually being traded. A range measured during the Asian session and applied to the London open is measuring the wrong kind of market.
Where this breaks
Fading a range that's actually a coiled breakout
A range that's held for hours doesn't mean it will keep holding, it can mean pressure is building for the eventual break. The Asian session in particular can look artificially calm simply because the biggest participants haven't shown up yet, not because the pair has found genuine equilibrium. Fading the edges of that range right into the London open is a common way this strategy loses: the same tight range that paid all night becomes the exact level that gets run through once real volume arrives.