Important guidelines for short-term trading

5 guidelines that you will need to know when doing short-term trading:

1)Trade only the most liquid currency pairs, such as
EUR/USD, USD/JPY, EUR/GBP, EUR/JPY, and EUR/CHF. The most liquid pairs have the tightest trading spreads and fewer sudden price jumps.

2)Trade only during seasons of peak liquidity and market interest. Consistent liquidity and fluid market interest are essential to short-term trading strategies. Market liquidity is deepest during the European session when Asian and North American trading centers overlap with European time zones — about 2 a.m. to noon Eastern time (ET). Trading in other sessions can leave you with far fewer and less predictable short-term price movements to take advantage of. Hence, it isn't really advisable to trade in other sessions.

3)Focus your trading on only one pair at a time. It’ll also improve your feel for the pair if
that pair is all you’re watching. No worries about any other pairs, you can comfortably focus all your attention on the only an only pair. This will help you yield better results.

4)Preset your default trade size so you don’t have to keep specifying it on each deal. This could say you time.

5)Avoid trading around data releases. Carrying a short term position into a data release is very risky because prices can gap sharply after the release, blowing a short term strategy out of the water. While we can't predict which way we could go, to play safe, avoid trading during data releases.