EUR/USD advanced today for the third session as the International Monetary Fund wants to boost its lending resources by $500 billion to safeguard from the global economy from the European crisis. Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos will talk with private bondholders to convince them forgive Greece at least half of its debt. Today’s reports from the United States were good for the most part, except the Producer Prices Index that unexpectedly dropped.

PPI declined 0.1% in December, while it was expected to rise by the same rate. The index rose 0.3% in the preceding month. (Event A on the chart.)

Net foreign purchases were $59.8 billion in November. The actual value was well above the average forecast of $27.3 billion and the October reading of $8.3 billion (revised $4.8 billion). (Event B on the chart.)

Industrial production and capacity utilization advanced in December. Industrial production rose 0.4%, much better than the revised November drop by 0.3%. Capacity utilization increased to 78.1% last month from 77.8% in November. Forecasts were near the actual readings: 0.5% and 78.2% respectively. (Event C on the chart.)

Yesterday, a report on NY Empire State Index was released, showing an increase to 13.5 in January from 9.5 in December, while the expected figure was 10.8. (Not shown on the chart.)

Taking losses in an imminent part of Forex trading process. Some traders seek the no-loss strategies (including omitting the stop-loss), but such attempts are rarely successful. On the other hand, any loss can be a serious hit in the emotional state of a currency trader, while some losses may also be lethal to the trader’s account balance. Personally, I aim to limit my losses with very small amounts, but occasionally I open long-term trades with open target and loss allowance. Such trades may end up with unexpectedly high loss. As of now, my biggest one-trade loss is $372.76 closed in October 2011. It’s also not a pure Forex trade because I’ve made it in Platinum, but I count it as it was on my Forex account. And how about you?

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EUR/USD dropped today, erasing yesterday’s gains and touching the lowest level since August 2010, on fears of potential credit downgrades of European countries by Standard & Poor’s. Confidence of US consumers improved more than was predicted, but trade balance deficit widen more than was forecast, while import and export prices declined.

Trade balance deficit rose to $47.8 billion in November up from $43.3 billion in October. Not a good news as only a little increase to $44.8 billion was predicted by market analysts. (Event A on the chart.)

US import and export prices fell in December. Import prices dropped 0.1%, following the 0.8% increase in November, while they were expected to stay unchanged. Export prices declined 0.5%, following the 0.1% advance in the month before. (Event A on the chart.)

Michigan Sentiment Index rose from 69.9 (revised from 67.7) in December to 74.0 in January, according to the preliminary estimate. An average forecast was 71.2. (Event B on the chart.)

EUR/USD jumped to the highest level this week today after European Central Bank kept its main interest rate unchanged at 1.0% (event A on the chart) and ECB President Mario Draghi said he sees signs that European economy is stabilizing (event B on the chart). Most of today’s reports from the United States were worse than predicted, adding to the weakness of the dollar.

Seasonally adjusted retail sales rose 0.1% in December, according to an advance report. The figure was lower than the median forecast (0.3%) and the November reading (0.4% — revised from 0.2%). (Event B on the chart.)

Seasonally adjusted initial jobless claims unexpectedly rose from 375k to 399k last week. They were expected to remain little changed at 373k. (Event B on the chart.)

Business inventories rose 0.3% in November, compared to the rise by 0.8% in October. Forecasters predicted a 0.4% increase. (Event C on the chart.)

Treasury budget deficit shrank from $137.3 billion in November to $86.0 billion in December. That’s not bad, but market participants were expecting a bigger decrease to $79.0 billion. (Event D on the chart.)

Yesterday, a report on crude oil inventories was released, showing an increase by 5.0 million barrels from the previous week and growth of total motor gasoline inventories by 3.6 million barrels. (Not show on the chart.)

Update 2012-01-21: It looks like there was a major error in the MetaQuotes hourly data for the currency pairs. The first several years of data was only one hour per day, and that day was 00:00 server time or exactly 23:00 GMT. That’s why there was such a high peak in the last day’s hour average bar. I am now updating all the pictures and the respective descriptions to fit the real market statistics. The statistics script is also updated to let the user skip first N bars in the chart.

In theory, the hourly statistics of the currency pairs should be pretty consistent in Forex. Some pairs should be traded more actively during the European session, some during the US trading session, and others during the Asian session. Of course, the conjunctions of the sessions should be even more active for some of the currency pairs.

Fortunately, the availability of the MQL coding language and the simple accessibility of the H1 data for any currency pair in the MetaTrader 5 platform make it really easy to test the above assumptions. I’ve created a script that would gather the (High — Low) values and calculate the average for every hour of the day. Then I applied it to several major and cross currency pairs to find out the most active and the stillest hours of the day for them.

The results turned out to be quite surprisingusual. Although I have expected to see the peak of activity for most currency pair during the time when both Europe and the USA are trading, I haven’t expected at all to see the highest hourly average between 23:00 and 0:00 GMT. This hour beat any other hour on all but one currency pair that I’ve checked. The only explanation that I have is that it coincides with the weekly Forex market opening and the beginning of the Asian session, making it very volatile.

Below, you will find my statistics for the following 11 currency pairs: EUR/USD, GBP/USD, USD/JPY, USD/CAD, USD/CHF, AUD/USD, NZD/USD, EUR/GBP, AUD/JPY, EUR/JPY, GBP/JPY. But you can easily get the same histogram charts for any other currency pair. Just follow these instructions:

1. Download my HLStats script.
2. Attach it to the H1 chart of the currency pair of your choice.
3. As a result, you’ll get a file called stats.csv in MQL5/Files/ folder of your MetaTrader 5.
4. Download my hourly statistics table for MS Excel.
5. Copy the data from the file into the Pips column in the Excel table.
6. The chart will redraw itself automatically.

EUR/USD shows the logical pattern — the first area of volatility is the first few hours of the European trading session and then peaks when the US session opens with Europe still in game. The last hour trading still beats them all with almost 40 pips of average difference between the hour’s High and Low levels. The peak hours are colored the same way in all the presented statistics charts: the European session beginning is red, the US one is green and the three most active hours of the Asian sessions are light blue.

GBP/USD is very similar to EUR/USD, except for that the European start is visibly shifted one hour forward and this peak is closer to the US/Euro cross-session. But the 23:00 hour average is even higher here.

USD/JPY is less active during the European and the US Forex sessions, but peaks most prominently during the last hour of GMT day. is almost as active during the Asian session hours as during the European one but peaks during the US session.

Unsurprisingly, USD/CAD shows a uniform peak during the US trading session and doesn’t rise much during the European FX session open hours. Even the 23:00 average is below the 4 most active hours of the US session.

USD/CHF looks quite similar to EUR/USD and there’s nothing unexpected here — after all, Switzerland is very close to the eurozone, both economically and timezone-wise.

AUD/USD is surprisingly similar to EUR/USD too. Except that its first 23 hours are smoother than in EUR/USD and the last hour goes farther up. its volatility distribution is much smoother.

NZD/USD hourly volatility picture is a much smoother version of USD/JPY. Looks like the first hour of the Asian market session accounts for the biggest changes in this pair.

EUR/GBP is a purely European currency pair and this is easy to spot on the chart below. The first three hours of the European session beat the first three hours of the US session. Which is a rare trait among the FX pairs.

AUD/JPY is similar to USD/JPY, but with more weight given to the last hour of the day (in GMT timezone) and less weight given to the usual European and US peaks.

EUR/JPY isn’t very different from the chart above, but is less smooth during the first 23 hours shows higher volatility during the colored active session hours.

GBP/JPY looks almost identical to EUR/JPY and is provided just for ”completeness”. Though the European session here is slightly stronger than with the EUR/JPY chart.

But how do I use this data? That’s a good question there. Some of the uses I could think of are:

• Breakouts during pair’s still hours are more likely to end up as fake-outs.
• If I to go scalping, I’d choose the pair’s most active hours for that.
• 23:00 GMT bar offers some interesting opportunities in almost any pair.
• USD/CAD is really hot during the US trading session, which can and should be exploited.

EUR/USD advanced for the second day today as German Chancellor Angela Merkel meets with the head of the International Monetary Fund in Berlin today, following the meeting with the French President yesterday. The meetings spurred risk appetite among investors, deterring pessimist from continuing sell-off. In the meantime, the US economy continued to show signs of recovery.

Wholesale inventories rose only 0.1% in November, compared to the October figure of 1.2% (revised down from 1.6%). Analysts expected an increase by 0.5%. (Event A on the chart.)

Yesterday, a report on consumer credit was released, showing an increase by $20.4 billion in November. That’s compared to the median forecast of $7.1 billion and the October reading of $6.0 billion (revised from $7.6 billion). (Not shown on the chart.)

EUR/USD dropped today as US employment growth was bigger than forecast and the unemployment rate provided a pleasant surprise, falling last month. It looks like the major concern of investors — the high level of unemployment in the United States — gradually loses its strength.

Nonfarm payrolls grew by 200,000 in December, compared to the average estimate of 152,000. The November growth was revised from 120,000 to 100,000. The unemployment rate surprised market participants, falling to 8.5%, while experts predicted it to stay at the previous level of 8.7% (revised from 8.6%). (Event A on the chart.)

EUR/USD dropped to the low last seen in September 2010 as concerns about the European crisis returned to the Forex market, while the US economy continued to show signs of recovery. Today’s data was good, especially the unexpected advance of employment. That allows traders to believe that nonfarm payrolls will be better than previously estimated.

ADP employment climbed by 325k in December from November, proving wrong forecasters that expected a drop to 176k from 204k in the preceding month. (Event A on the chart.)

Initial jobless claims were at 372k (seasonally adjusted) last week, near the forecast value of 375k. The reading from the previous week was revised upwardly to 387k from 381k. (Event B on the chart.)

ISM services PMI rose from 52.0% to 52.6% in December, but was below a predicted reading of 53.0. (Event C on the chart.)

Crude oil inventories increased by 2.2 million barrels and total motor gasoline inventories increased by 2.5 million barrels last week. (Event D on the chart.)

Yesterday, a report on factory orders was released, showing an increase by 1.8% in November (in line with forecasts) after a drop by 0.2% in October. (Not shown on the chart.)