Trade according to your time zone

In the next part of our series on successful FTMO Traders, we take a look at a trader who leveraged the fact that forex is open 24 hours a day — and that different currency pairs are best traded during different time zones — to his advantage.

Forex is the most liquid market in the world, with an average daily turnover of more than $7.5 trillion. One reason for this is that it is traded virtually non-stop, 24 hours a day, from Sunday evening until late Friday. However, this does not mean that every currency pair is traded in the same volumes throughout the day; the opening hours of global exchanges vary widely.

Our featured trader today lives outside of Europe, and the composition of his currency portfolio — in which the British pound and the Australian dollar play a significant role — reflects that. He has effectively used his time zone to trade currency pairs (and gold, of course) that tend to show interesting volume during his local trading hours, making them worthwhile to trade.

The trader’s balance curve looks very strong. Aside from a small loss at the beginning of the trading period, he remained in positive territory throughout. Losses are an inevitable part of trading — that much is certain — but it’s clear that this trader avoided any critical drawdowns and successfully kept his losses under control. The high consistency score further supports the idea that this was no coincidence.

The trader’s strong performance was aided by the fact that he never incurred large losses that might have affected him psychologically. As a result, neither the Maximum Daily Loss nor the Maximum Loss limits ever became an issue, allowing him to focus fully on his strategy and plan—without resorting to unnecessary “revenge trading.” Turning nearly $26,000 into profit on a $200,000 account represents almost a 13% return, which is excellent.

Over ten trading days, he opened 32 positions—about three per day—which is a balanced pace. In total, he traded 236.76 lots, averaging roughly 7.4 lots per position. Given his $200,000 account, this sizing was appropriate, even though he occasionally opened multiple positions simultaneously. His reward-risk ratio (RRR) of 1.55, combined with a win rate of nearly 70%, virtually guaranteed overall success. Consequently, he experienced only one losing day—an outcome most traders aim for.

The journal again shows that this is an intraday trader holding positions from a few minutes up to several hours. In a few cases, he kept positions open overnight, but that wasn’t the norm. That’s actually positive, since holding positions overnight usually incurs unnecessary swap costs.

We also appreciate that the trader set both a Stop Loss and a Take Profit on every trade—especially useful for overnight positions. Of course, this depends on the trader’s location and whether his time zone aligns with FTMO’s, but a Stop Loss is always prudent. On the other hand, he frequently didn’t adhere to his planned SL and TP levels, closing positions before price reached them. In any case, he deserves praise for keeping his losses below 1%, which is the maximum we recommend to our traders.

From the additional statistics, we can see that the trader opened trades according to his local time zone, which is five hours ahead of the platform’s time. He earned almost twice as much on long positions as on short ones — though he was significantly profitable in both cases. He was most successful trading gold (XAUUSD) and also performed well with British pound pairs, while Australian dollar pairs proved less successful for him.

We will also take a look at the trader’s most successful trades. The first is a short position on gold, which the trader entered after a bounce and a false breakout of resistance. A well-placed Stop Loss proved effective when the price returned to retest the resistance a few hours into the trade. The trader showed patience and didn’t move the SL to break even too early, allowing the trade to continue into profit.

It’s a bit of a pity that the trader ended up closing the trade well before his Take Profit level. With a bit more patience, the trade could have yielded over $10,700 at a price of $3,345 per troy ounce. In the end, he secured a profit of $5,124 — still an excellent result and the most profitable trade of the trading period.

The second trade was also on gold, but this time it was more of a bounce off a trend line. The trade moved in the trader’s favor almost the entire time, and he eventually closed it at the original Take Profit level. He did adjust the TP upward during the trade and could have reached that higher level as well, but overall, there’s little to criticize here. The profit of $4,868 is also a strong result — definitely one to be satisfied with.

Note: Since we cannot clearly define the exact trader's strategy from the chart, this is only the private opinion of the author of this article. FTMO Traders are free to choose their strategy and as long as they do not explicitly violate our Terms and Conditions and follow our risk management rules, the choice of strategy and execution of individual trades is up to them.