To Scalp or Not To Scalp - Which Are The Best And Worst Currencies to Scalp

I have been scalping the forex market for about 10 years now and have recently started writing and talking about my strategies to other forex traders both newbies and pros. The first thing I tell them is get your timings right. Not every hour is a good hour to scalp. Secondly, get your currency pairs right as not all pairs are good for scalping. So I thought I’d write up a short blog post on what I think are the best currencies to scalp.

The Right Mixture For Scalpers

Scalpers are traders who are looking for extremely short term buying and selling opportunities. These traders are trying to take advantage of prices that show up for a very short period of time. This means that they may hold a trade for a few minutes, or even less! As such, it is important for these traders to know what type of currency pairs they should use for trading their strategy. The right currencies will have plenty of liquidity for trading and will be easy to understand and somewhat predictable. If those three qualities are present, then the currency is probably a great one for scalping.

The Majors
The major currency pairs are a great option to trade for scalpers. These are the currency pairs that are among the most commonly traded. These include the US dollar versus the British Pound, the Euro versus the US dollar, and more. All of the majors include the US dollar as part of the pair because the dollar is the most commonly traded currency in general. As such, scalpers would do well for themselves to get a better understand of the way that the dollar trades to do their best.

The majors are the right currencies to trade for scalpers because they do have a lot of liquidity. They are the most traded, and this helps the make the moves that these currencies trade more predictable. If you start to follow the way that these currencies trade, then you should be able to quickly learn what you need to learn for scalping them.  I tend to do my scalping on USD/GBP and GBP/EUR in the morning (NYC time)

What Currencies You Shouldn't ScalpIt is not a wise idea to just try to scalp any and all currencies. This can feel very tempting to do at first when scalping starts to work in the way that you want it to, but this is a very bad idea. Certain currency pairs simply do not have all of the pieces together to offer very good conditions for scalping. It is recommended that traders avoid the exotic pairs when scalping.

The exotic pairs are unusual currency pairs that are not nearly as heavily traded. These pairs often contain the US dollar, but they are pairs that you would not expect to trade against each other. This means things like the South African Rand versus the US dollar. Pairs like this are not nearly as liquid as the majors, and the pricing action on these types of pairs make them very difficult to scalp successfully. Avoid at all costs.