Tomas Vyšniauskas

How To Hold Trades Overnight

Some traders say that you should never hold trades overnight because it’s risky. But what if you got into a rare big pip trade which you know will take a few days to hit TP?

If you close it before going to sleep you may be leaving a lot on the table. But if you leave it running you risk of being stopped out during rollover and not making anything.

I coded some spread tracking EAs and watched a few pairs on different brokers. Spread during rollover usually go up to 12-30 pips depending on the pair (higher spreads on minor pairs).

To be on the safe side, that would mean having a stop of 50p during rollover for short trades to avoid being stopped out by the invisible asking price (variable spread). But that sounds like a risky proposition especially if you’re in a 50/50 chance scalping trade. So how can we approach this better?

I observed that quite frequently, the price at 1:30 (of the new day) would be around the same or better compared to the price at 22:30 (of the previous day). If not at 1:30 then there’s also a good chance price will come back to a favourable level during the night. Also, the spreads get increased between 23:00 and 1:00. Before and after the conditions are normal. 

The table below uses EURUSD data of 3 years and displays the average pip difference between a certain start and end time.

StartEndAvg Pips Diff
21:3001:308.44
21:3001:158.22
22:0001:306.50
22:0001:156.30
22:3001:305.51
22:3001:155.32
22:4501:305.08
22:4501:154.79

The strategy

Do what works for you. I simply exit the trade at 22:30 and open it again at 1:30, or create a limit order if price has moved already. My timezone is the same as broker’s timezone, so I do the closing manually and I’ve automated the re-opening of the trade at 1:30 because I’m asleep at that time.

The interesting part is that in most cases price will not have moved much because that’s the nature of rollover period. That way you don’t need to add 50p extra risk to your short trades, you also lock in some profits before midnight and you’re still open for taking more profits during the following trading day.

Now how about long trades? They’re safer in the sense that they can’t be stopped out by the invisible asking price. But it’s quite common that during rollover the price gets moved down to take out the most recent swing low by a few pips.

The solution could be to simply put your SL 10-20p below the most recent swing low. But that also poses unnecessary risk. If the market gaps after midnight, your SL may be slipped through. So it depends on your risk profile. Either follow the same rules as for short trades: exit at 22:30, re-enter at 1:30 or simply do nothing and let the trade breathe its life.

When not to use this strategy

If your target is 150p away and price has already moved 100p then your vulnerability to rollover tricks is almost not existent. The best thing to do in this case is don’t change anything just wait, and make sure you didn’t trail your SL too close to pre-rollover price (best to leave it at breakeven).

Thanks for reading and have a good time dealing with rollovers 🙂

Week 50 (2024) Trading Statement

I’m sharing my trading statement of week 50 (December 9-13, 2024) for transparency reasons.

The total was 230 pips.

And here’s the statement (click the image to enlarge it).

Thanks for reading and have a good weekend.

P.S. (July 2025 update) Some of you will be suspicious and ask why the commission column is 0. At the time, I was using XM Global Ultra Low account, which doesn’t charge commission but adds an extra markup to spread.

Week 49 (2024) Trading Statement

I’m sharing my trading statement of week 49 (December 2-6, 2024) for transparency reasons.

In total, I made 498 pips.

And here are the daily statements.

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Thanks for reading and have a nice afternoon!

Remembering Robert Taylor

Robert Taylor (1965-2024) was a legendary forex trader. He lived off of forex trading for the last 20 years of his life.

He had a true, undeniable understanding of forex market and an excellent prediction skill. He was passionate about trading and selflessly helped others almost until his last breath, even from a hospital bed.

He passed away in Gibraltar in July 2024. I was honoured to be his mentee between 2021 – 2024.

If you’d like to watch my detailed statement about Rob in video format, you can do so by following this link.

If you’d like to visit his archived blog which carries a wealth of knowledge and experience, you may do so here.

Rob, you’ll be remembered forever.

The Illusion Of Forex Market Turnover

The brokers have created an exciting picture of the forex market. They say its turnover is $7.5 trillion per day. They make it believe that this market is just there, people and businesses are just exchanging currencies in their every day life and they have no clue that they could exploit this market, it’s like an untouched treasure, and just imagine if you could extract just 0.000001% of that, it would be 75k in a day! Wow, anyone can do it, right?

Well, you have to understand that your forex trading business at the broker has nothing to do with what’s going on out there in the world. Let me give you a couple examples of how the foreign exchange works.

1. A tourist from Europe lands at the airport in Australia. He goes to the exchange booth, gives 500 euros to the teller and receives 820 Aussie dollars.

2. A company in the USA receives an invoice from a European supplier and the amount to pay is 1,000,000 euros. They login to their bank account and make an international transfer. Their bank deducts 1,090,000 US dollars from their account.

In both of these examples, foreign exchange happened. Both of these transactions are added to the daily FX turnover of $7.5 trillion per day.

If you think that by clicking buy/sell at your broker’s platform you can rob these people, you’re making a big mistake. Even if you could, that would be considered as theft and you would get into trouble for that. Imagine that the European supplier received just 900K instead of 1M for some weird unexplained reason (i.e. because of you). This wouldn’t go unnoticed and the deal would break.

Understand that these transactions did not happen through your broker. So how can your broker pay you from that elusive $7.5 trillion per day market? They can’t.

There’s no such thing as the global FX market. The total FX turnover is just a sum of individual transactions that happened, but it’s not the market’s turnover per se. All of the FX transactions are happening at individual sandboxes.

The tourist who is exchanging money at the airport is doing that in the sandbox of foreign exchange booth. The money that the booth receives doesn’t go to any global FX market, it just stays there.

Same thing with the company who wants to pay the supplier in another currency. Their FX transaction is happening in the sandbox of the converting bank.

Likewise, your trades at your broker stay in the sandbox of that broker. So you can only make as much as your broker can pay you. You won’t magically extract money from that $7.5 trillion FX market.

However, the sandboxes are not isolated. There are connections between certain sandboxes around the world, which makes FX a truly global thing, but there’s no centralised market in FX through which all of that $7.5 trillion per day flows.

Is it a dystopia? Does it mean that when you’re trading with a broker you’re buying thin air? It’s kind of true, but when you do it in a bank it’s quite the same – just a different sandbox. Reputable brokers have a similar likelihood of bankruptcy like reputable banks. Neither brokers nor banks are 100% reliable, but they are reliable enough to do business with and make money. Just do your due diligence and avoid obvious scams.

Proactive VS Reactive Trading

Many traders want a simple, mechanical trading plan that is based on indicators and chart patterns. It’s like you get something on the chart and you react by either trading it or not.

However, we see that indicators are more often failing than working. Chart patterns are also more often failing than working. So what can you do about it?

You need to be proactive.

First of all, you have to identify price areas where you’re going to expect a chart pattern or indicator signal to happen.

When you identify your price area and expect a certain pattern or signal to happen, you’re making a prediction (step 1). After you’ve predicted what’s going to happen, you wait for it to happen (step 2). And then you know that if A happened, followed by B, then it’s very likely that C will happen as well. So then you trade (step 3).

Sometimes I wait until evening for my morning’s predictions to happen. Or until tomorrow. Or longer.

Remember – patience is the name of the game and if you use proactive approach then you’re less likely to fall into greed/fear traps and also more likely to make money.

Two Sides Of Forex Market

There are two sides to the forex market: retail and professional. Do not confuse it with broker’s definition of retail vs professional client (by broker’s definitions). It doesn’t matter what kind of client you are.

What matters is how you trade. The two differences, compared to retail trading, are as follows: 

  1. In professional trading you trade by using a professional, not a retail strategy;
  2. To successfully employ your professional strategy, you are using your professional understanding of how the forex market works.

The two sentences above may not make any sense to you, but to put it short – when professional traders are long, retail traders are usually short and vice-versa. The difference is obvious and there’s a very clear line between professional and retail trading.

There’s just one correct way to trade the forex market and that way is called the professional way. If you trade on the professional side, you can make money consistently. Trading on the retail side is very unpredictable and it’s usually a losing game.