How Traders Maximise the Benefits of the Weekly Market Updates

Traders have been loving the Weekly Market Updates provided through FXTRADING.com blogs, but what has people so amped up about these updates, and how can you maximise the benefits of this golden information?

Like the desert sands, financial markets shift frequently and even long term chart layouts offer setups more often than you might think. For many traders it is critical to understand the long term trend or expected movements to depict the direction of trade, even when seeking trades from smaller time frames such as a 5 minute chart.

You have probably heard the term “Trend is Your Friend”, and betting against the masses isn’t always the beneficial strategy that contrarians may have you believe. Whether you want contrarian type views of a turning point, or love trading in line with the current market direction, the Weekly Market Updates could be just what you need to help define and focus your upcoming trading week.

What do the Weekly Market Updates highlight?

With a focus on the weekly chart (W1) and the use of Bollinger Bands to help identify current price position relative to historic price, the Weekly Market Updates help to highlight markets that may be approaching key levels for a breakout from support or resistance on a weekly chart level. While this approach isn’t an exact science or strategy, it helps identify currencies, metals, cryptos and indices that may be at interesting price points. Without having checked the weekly updates, traders could easily miss the concepts presented in the highlights since few traders watch the weekly candlestick chart as weekly candles can take a long time to form trade setups on a single market.

By cycling through a range of symbols to find potential outliers and price abnormalities, the Weekly Market Updates can highlight opportunities that many traders are eager to watch, but would otherwise have slipped through the cracks.

How are the Updates Used?

Here’s some of the ways that traders are using the Weekly Market Updates to plan out their trading session for the week.

Look for Breakouts

Depending on the commentary, some weekly updates may highlight pairs that are likely to break out from previous pricing.

With price testing new levels or seemingly strong support or resistance levels on a weekly chart, this could present an opportunity for traders to watch the pair on a smaller time frame and look for further evidence of a breakout.

Seek Retracement

Rather than seeking further extension of the price movement, some traders look to rebalance the market back towards the mean price of recent times. The weekly chart is a host to many opportunities to rebalance the market closer to the middle Bollinger line.

Style of Trading

Different styles of trading can be used to work with the Weekly Update opportunities.

Scalping

Zooming into smaller time frames after setting a longer term directional intent helps traders look for opportunities around the key levels or prices that are out of their standard deviation on a longer timeframe. This macro view of the market coupled with small entries and exits based on more meaningful levels can help traders get better entries for longer term setups, minimising their stop loss distance, or alternatively seek a few pips around these levels.

Swing Trading

Looking for long term moves, holding for greater than a day means traders should have strong conviction of the direction of the market. Many markets may not appear to have any particular direction of trade over the coming days or weeks, so the Weekly Market Updates prove a helpful tool in finding markets that may have the potential to move strongly in a particular direction.

Carry Trading

When prices are at extreme levels or outside of their standard deviation on a longer time frame such as the weekly chart, traders may seek to take advantage of positive swap rates on the pair if they exist. For example, if the market seems highly likely to turn lower over the coming weeks or months due to the current price, a trader might check the swap rates for the direction they expect the market to go (long or short) and if it is positive, they may look to hold the trade in attempt to gain earnings from positive swap fees paid to them by the broker. If the market also move in their favour, it will be an added bonus.

Research and Learning

Most serious traders look to continuously learn and develop their skills in trading financial markets. One way to learn and develop trading knowledge is to review previous movements based on market conditions at the time, then check out what happened after the fact.

Seeing what happens on a longer time frame can help traders to better understand the ebbs and flows of financial markets over time. Using the Weekly Market Updates, traders can review the material and analysis from previous highlights and check the charts for what actually happened to get a feel for the macro movement of price. Traders who trade intraday may not see the bigger picture and understand the effects of what the market has to offer, so these Weekly Market Updates can help to build a longer term outlook for them and additionally offer trade ideas and adaptations to their current style of trade.

The Weekly Market Updates

Whether you just want to learn and adapt to the market by seeing what actually happens on the weekly charts, or perhaps you want to dive deeper and use the concepts as a trade plan of sorts,