How to Trade Forex: Unveiling Trading Strategies & Top-Down Analysis

Understanding the Forex Market as a Trader

What is forex trading and how should you start looking for the best ways to get involved? Forex trading is a way of trying to benefit from the changes in the fluctuating exchange rates between two different currencies. It’s the biggest financial market on the planet and it operates 24 hours a day from Sunday to Friday, with the latest estimates suggesting that trillions of dollars are traded on it every day.

There are some solid reasons for wanting to start trading forex, from the high level of liquidity in the market to the relatively low costs and the flexibility offered by the many currency pairs and ways of trading. However, this isn’t a type of trading that you can just dive in and start making profits on.

First, you should know that forex trading involves a lot of analysis work and requires you to have a clear strategy in place before you start trading. One of the first points to cover here is around the different currency pairs available. While you can trade virtually any combination of currencies, they’re generally divided into the following groups.

• Major currency pairs are EUR/USD, USD/CAD, USD/JPY, AUD/USD, NZD/USD, GBP/USD and USD/CHF. These are all highly liquid combinations as they’re so popular that demand is almost always extremely high. As you can see, the US dollar is present on one side of all these pairs, showing how important this currency is in the forex world.
• Minor currency pairs don’t have the US dollar involved but always have at least one major currency. This gives us pairs such as EUR/AUD, GBP/JPY, NZD/JPY, GBP/AUD and so on. They’re less liquid than the major pairs but still offer good opportunities for trading large currencies with a certain level of demand.
• Exotic pairs usually consists of up to one major currency like the USD or EUR with another that is less commonly traded. Combinations such as USD/SGD, USD/HKD and EUR/TRY may be seen in this category. This is regarded as a riskier way of trading forex, as there’s less liquidity in these pairs and the prices might be more volatile too.

Basic Forex Trading Strategies

How do you start forex trading? The best approach for a newcomer to this market is to look at some of the basic trading strategies and choose which to begin with.

• Scalping is about trying to make regular, small profits on several trades during the day. It requires a high degree of time commitment as it involves studying charts and indicators like moving averages as well as the support and resistance levels.
• Day trading is like scalping but with fewer trades each day. The main point with both these forex trading strategies is that you close your position before the end of the day. With day trading, you might just open and close one position each day rather than several. This put more emphasis on the need to study charts to understand the market fully before opening a position.
• Swing trading is about identifying swings in the market and trying to gain a profit from them. A position may open for several days, meaning that you need to be patient and run the risk of overnight movement causing losses. You’ll want to use candlestick charts and bar charts to help time your entry and exit points wisely.
• Position trading is an alternative way to carry out online forex trading. You’ll plan to hold your position longer in this case, meaning that your analysis is about finding long-term value. It doesn’t require as much time commitment as the shorter-term strategies above. Position trading puts the emphasis on fundamental analysis more than technical analysis, but you’ll still want to analyse support and resistance levels as well as moving averages and other technical indicators.

Forex trading signals can be used to guide trading decisions, although these expert recommendations are speculative, with no guarantee of profits or outcomes. Signals can be effective intel for those traders short on time or experience, and they can also help traders to understand more about how the market works.

Each Forex trading strategy can be used with specific indicators and tools to help traders understand the rationale behind market movements. These aides can be used to help counteract the fast-paced nature of these strategies and support objective, logical trading decisions.

One popular indicator commonly used are Bollinger Bands, which use standard deviation and moving averages to highlight market movements and provide bullish or bearish signals. The Relative Strength Indicator (RSI) is also commonly used to measure how fast the price of an asset is changing to identify trends and pressure levels to determine whether the asset is overbought or oversold.

Technical analysis and price movements are also commonly utilised, such as simple moving averages on a candlestick chart and the Stochastic oscillator to highlight price momentum. Traders can also use indicators such as support and resistance levels, and average true ranges to inform decisions.

The MACD (Moving Average Convergence Divergence) is a popular momentum indicator used frequently in swing trading to identify potential uptrends or downtrends, as well as potential entry and exit points. Every trader will have indicators and tools that fit most logically with their strategy, which may depend on the stage of the trading journey and evolving financial ambitions.

The Power of Top-Down Analysis

It can be tempting to dive in and start trading a specific currency pair when learning forex trading. However, even the most experienced traders should undertake a top-down analysis to gain essential context and make informed trading decisions. This means gaining an overall picture of the market before narrowing the lens to focus on more specific trades.

A thorough top-down analysis will examine long-term chart data (e.g. daily or weekly charts) to identify overarching trends; traders can then build on this knowledge by examining shorter-term charts (e.g. one-hour or three-hour timeframe charts).

Data will build a picture of overall market direction, trends and activity surrounding bullish and bearish movements. It helps to avoid getting unduly influenced by short-term price movements by looking at a wider set of data through an in-depth technical lens.

An effective top-down analysis will identify support and resistance levels to establish informed risk management strategies such as stop-loss levels. It will also identify potential entry and exit points. Technical analysis will give context to minor or major upward and downward trends as well as bullish or bearish momentum, all of which come together to give a comprehensive image of the overall direction of the market.

The Top-Down Analysis Process

A look at the overall economic situation is the starting point for a top-down analysis of the forex market. This means understanding macro factors such as global economic growth, inflation, and interest rates. You should start by looking at longer timescales and market reactions to these events, before starting to narrow in on shorter periods.

Geopolitical events have a part to play in this analysis too. From the global starting point, you can start zooming in on country-specific economic data and central bank policies that are currently affecting the value of their currencies.

A degree of technical analysis fits in here, as this complements your top-down analysis as you search for market trends and then find precise entry and exit points. For beginners to forex trading, this could be an ideal approach to help take the time needed to fully understand the market before making your first trades.

An Example of Top-Down Analysis in the Forex Market

Let’s say that you’re interested in trading in the GBP/USD pair. This is one of the most widely traded pairs and there’s a lot of information available on the latest financial data from the UK and the US. Look at the historical trends for these currencies and then focus on the most recent changes.

The latest inflation figures and central bank policies are reflected in the different analytic pieces you’ll find online for the GBP/USD pair. At the time of writing, increasing mortgage activity and easing inflation in the UK is highlighted, while the American economy seems set to slow down and there appear to be no more interest rate hikes expected from the Federal Reserve.

Looking at the latest news reports and financial data, you’ve not an idea of how this market might be heading, but what does it mean in terms of the buying and selling decisions you make? The next step is to look at the right charts and indicators to fill in the blanks and understand which trades you might want to carry out.

Case Study: Informed Forex Trading

You have seen how it’s possible to combine one or more of the basic forex trading strategies with top-down analysis. This provides a solid understanding of the market and the global context before making informed decisions on the currency pairs you’re interested in.

We can illustrate the importance of informed forex trading effectively with a case study of Japanese markets from July 2024.

Following an especially volatile period in which the yen fell to a 38-year low against the US dollar, Japan implemented a $36.8 billion (5.53 trillion yen) currency intervention in July 2024 to boost the yen. This marked the country’s first round of currency intervention since October 2022. It was implemented following months of pressure during which the yen was struggling in the face of Bank of Japan (BOJ) ending its monetary policy of negative interest rates in March 2024.

The yen is recovering swiftly and was trading at 150 per dollar of 31st July in comparison to the start of the month when it fell to 161.96 per dollar – the lowest rate since 1986. This volatility has had a major impact on the wider financial picture with BOJ raising its benchmark interest rates in a move that marked their highest interest rates since 2008.

Conclusion

Now that you understand the basics of forex trading, you may wish to try it for yourself to see if it suits your personality and if you feel comfortable with the ups and downs. The ever-evolving, fast-paced nature of this market won’t suit everyone but for those individuals who enjoy this style of trading, it can provide immense satisfaction and potentially healthy profits.

If you are intrigued by what you’ve learned in this guide, the next step is to put the theory into practice. Start by carrying out a top-down analysis that lets you get to grips with the market and feel that you’re starting to trade from a position of knowledge.

After that, you can start to assess the strategies for online forex trading that we’ve looked at here. They’ve each got some key advantages that make them right for certain traders, so you might like to give them a trial run with real-life trades to see which ones are perfect for you.

Carry on with further research to help build your confidence and knowledge levels, but don’t forget to make responsible risk management a priority. The situation can change rapidly in the forex market and even the best-researched predictions don’t always work out, so you need to have an exit strategy in place. Using controls like stop-loss orders helps to keep your funds safe and understanding how to use them should be one of your next priorities.