Forex Ranking: 5 years later - Ron Schelling

The last 5 years a group of Forex experts have been invited to Barcelona to share their knowledge with the entire Forex crown at the International Traders Conference. They answered the call and joined the FXstreet.com's headquarters city for three days with their own strategies.

Today, 4 editions later, they survive in the worldwide crisis ocean with their updated strategies. If you would like to know how these tactics are currently working, how they have been developed and then make your own conclusions, just read the new ITC series.

FXstreet.com has asked speakers, attendees and members of its own staff to expose their thoughts about the previous editions of this famed International Trader Conference. Today the call was answered by Ron Schelling, Owner & Trader of 2HEDGE and 2007 speaker.

Forex Ranking, 5 years later

In 2007 I was invited to do a presentation for the International Traders Conference (ITC) of FXStreet in Barcelona. A great event to meet interesting people with different views and trading experience on the Forex markets, but all with the same passion to trade those markets.

The 2007 presentation had several subjects on Time and Price, Arbitrage and partly Ranking of the currencies pairs which can be traded on most retail platforms. So what is the situation 5 years later? If you wish, you can watch the video and download the presentation. For the Spanish version, click here.

Now, in 2012, we see most retail traders trading Forex on intraday or daily bars for speculative reasons, however there is more action in the Forex markets than only (retail) speculation. Also the number of brokers, platforms, technology and fast internet connections has changed the Forex landscape as well compared to 5 years ago.

Think about long-term investment in Forex, interest advantage (Carry Trade) or even corporations which like to hedge their foreign currency risk on, for example, imports or exports of goods, products, services etc.

To get a general view of the Forex spectrum we like to see what is strong and what is weak on a longer term basis. This can be a reason to rank the total Forex spectrum, but of course many use it for speculation as well.

For stock traders the view on raking is different, they like to buy the strongest and sell the weakest as they are looking for long trends, however most currency pairs have not, in general, such very long and strong trends compared to stocks.

My advice is to read the presentations as in the links mentioned above to understand the ranking strategy before I explain today's view.

As we can see in the table the ranking is positive when it has a ranking value of 100 or higher and a negative ranking when the ranking value is lower than 100. How this was calculated is in the articles as mentioned above.

In the table we see that the currency pairs expressed in Japanese Yen are at the bottom and short for a long time due to the stronger Yen against many currency pairs.

New Zealand Dollar is on the top of the table so the strongest in the long run and not on daily basis, but a longer period.

So what can we do with this table for the speculative trader?

Look at the 100 or zero line which is changing the color from red to green v.v.

Due to shorter Forex trends we can consider a long trade when the currency pairs is moving from below 100 (red) to above 100 (green) or consider a short trade when the currency pairs is moving from above 100 (green) to below 100 (red).

Of course this needs a short term trigger indicator to get actually in the market.

The ranking is a delayed long term indication of what is strong and what is weak, but therefore needs a trigger to actually buy or sell.

The advantage of the ranking table is that you have a total view, in real-time, of the most popular currency pairs in the Forex spectrum.

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