Forex News Trading Is Not Newbie Friendly

One of the first strategies learned by the Forex newbies is following the news and trading in accordance with the various news releases that can be considered related to the currencies and the foreign exchange market. The good examples of such news are the macroeconomic reports, interest rate changes, political news, and corporate releases. Two main problems arise when the newbies try to trade on Forex news:

1. Trading too late. Usually, the main reaction to the news (if they are not too important and pivotal) goes out during the first several minutes after release. New traders often react to the news hours after the release (and the lack of the good source of the Forex news is not the least reason for that). They enter after the main price action has gone and the correction is setting up. That is quite a bad thing to do.
2. Trading inside the news. Some newbies try the other extreme – they try to trade immediately after the release. This approach has a serious disadvantage as only few brokers will offer smooth execution during news releases or will not widen the spreads by some unbelievable number of pips (and the newbies are usually quite bad at finding good Forex brokers to trade with).

So, what should be done if you are a Forex newbie, want to profit from the Forex news releases but do not want to get beaten by the losses that usually occur as a result of the mentioned problems? The answer is quite complex. I would recommend new traders to stay away from the short-term news trading for quite a long time before they get some real experience. Trading news in the long-term (of course, the news should have a long-term effect on the markets) is another story but it is rarely called news trading, usually it is called long-term fundamental trading and can be good even for newbies. But if you really want to try yourself at news trading, you first need to learn about the pending orders in Forex, learn to set them up, and understand how different Forex news affect the currency pairs. The main idea here is to set up the pending orders before the news release and hope that they will get triggered before the mad requotes and spreads start to interfere.

For example, you can set the pending orders to buy and sell 10 pips above the local maximum and 10 pips below the local minimum on EUR/USD before the US non-farm payrolls release with the target for some 50–100 pips profit. There is a high probability of triggering both the entry and target levels with such an influential news release, and you stay safe as the entry orders are likely to be hit during a period of rather slow market, while the exit orders can be triggered even with wide spreads as the price can go much farther than 100 pips after the NFP reports.

You can also use the following MetaTrader expert advisor to trade on news releases (but it is not very newbie friendly): News Trader Expert Advisor.

If you want to get news of the most recent updates to our guides or anything else related to Forex trading, you can subscribe to our monthly newsletter.