Australian (ASX) Stock Market Forum

Forex sources

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Guys, I have never traded Forex. I am a technical trader, so no big deal. However, there are several things I don't understand. For example, Oanda chart is showing current bar as 23:30, but it is close to 10 o'clock in Sydney. I don't want to bother people to explain mundane things to me (which I am sure are very basic), so could someone recommend a good Forex primer on the Net?

Thanks
 
I can't help much on the intro to forex. A lifetime ago when I was into forex, people used to recommend babypips.com. I see they still have a "forex trading school", that might help you with the basics, but I can't vouch for them anymore.

A couple of points I found important. Forex is a decentralised market. As opposed to all trades being done on a single exchange like the stock market. If you use volume in trading, be aware that the volume you see on your spot forex platform isn't the true volume of all trades for that pair. Some say that it's still useful, I can't comment except to say it's not the true volume.

Each broker can have different platform times. The broker I used to use was GMT+2 for example. So the close of each daily bar could be at different times depending on what broker you use. This is important if you care about candlestick patterns as the pattern you see on one broker may be different on another.

However, what's far more important than the open/close of each bar is the open/close of each market. I just saw Oanda has a market hours tracker themselves:
https://www1.oanda.com/forex-trading/analysis/market-hours

News can move currencies significantly. Find an economic calendar and be aware of when news impacting your currencies is expected. www.forexfactory.com has a calendar on their front page. Once again, I can't vouch for its accuracy anymore, but it does show it in your local time and colour codes the news items based on their expected impact.

Good luck.
 
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