What Time Frame and Currency Pairs Make the Most Money?

This has been an ongoing debate for a very long time and as far as traders continue to have different strategies and think differently, I don’t see this argument dying out any time soon. I can join in the controversy can’t I? Well, why not? I decided to write about this because I had been seeing this for some time all over the forums and just yesterday, I saw it again! Relax traders, I’m coming to the rescue.

what currency pairs make the most money?

I would like to associate the possibility of amassing pips to volatility for scalpers and day traders especially. The reason is because we as traders need the market to move, bulls or bears. It just has to move one way or the other and it has to move big and wide, this way, if we’re right with a trading decision, we tend to infect others with our sense of humour (hopefully). At least I know for one that I become more social then. A currency pair that’s most profitable for me would be one that is very volatile. There is no pair that’s known to be volatile all day each day of the year, this volatility rotates among most of the pairs. Volatility shouldn’t be mistaken with the most popular pairs because even the EUR/USD can sometimes become very boring to observe on the screen. Thankfully, there are free tools that monitor the volatility of currency pairs. It’s not true that the more popular a currency pair is, the more volatile it is as at the time of this writing the most volatile pair for the past month is USD/MXN with 1,820 pips in price movement, who would have thought.

what timeframe makes the most money?

Are we talking about market timeframes or the timeframes on our charts? Let’s talk about both.

Chart Timeframes: Assuming we’re all scalpers and day traders, trading shorter timeframes will be the best option here. I find the 15min timeframe to be ideal. I do use, though rarely, the 30min timeframe to reduce noise and confirm a trend before placing a trade. The longer timeframes are more for swing traders. There’s no talking about which timeframe makes the most money here as it just doesn’t fit if you get my point. This would depend solely on your strategy. And volatility can obviously be present in the highest timeframe.

Market Sessions: If you want volatility and nothing stagnant to ruin your day, you’d be trading when two market sessions overlap. This is for obvious reasons. During the overlap of two market sessions there is often high activity which would not necessary mean high volatility but you can almost always expect some vigorous oscillations. Serious market movements are caused by news breakouts and this is another topic on its own. The news traders have nothing to worry about here.

So to conclude the most money-making timeframe, I would say is when two trading sessions overlap and when there are news outbreaks to cause bigger price movements. But contrary to this, FXCM, a broker claimed it’s studied data covering a period of ten years of their live traders and analysed millions of trades only to find out that most traders lost during the times that the EUR/USD was most volatile claiming these traders were range traders that traded at the wrong time. I believe timing is essential in trading but I took this info with a grain of salt knowing especially very well that most brokers are against retails traders. Yes, that’s true! Believe it or not. But I know newbies are going to fall for that gimmick and lose even more. No one wants a consolidating market! But FXCM said,

You can see that periods of strong trader performance line up with low-volatility trading hours.

Yeah, this makes sense when you’re scalping and even swinging. I would have loved to see them post the sentimental report on this for the said period.

Feel free, use the free tools to find the most volatile pairs and join the ride, as with the time (of the day) for trading, it’ll will depend on which currency you’re trading and which strategy you’re using but the general idea I have talked about. You can experiment with small lots to see what works well for you. Wishing you all the best.

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