For me, a market that’s easy to win / a market that’s hard to win [Kazuo Sato]

As anyone who has traded FX for a long time knows, there are favorable and unfavorable phases in the currency market. From the perspective of Kazuo Sato, a trader and famous blogger, what situations constitute a “easy-to-win” market and a “hard-to-win” market? He will explain using charts.

*This article is a reprint and revision of an article from FX攻略.com June 2020 issue. Please note that the market information written in the body may differ from the current market.

Kazuo Sato Profile

An investor who at one point stepped away from the FX world due to a sharp yen appreciation during the Lehman Shock. Currently, he engages in system trading and long-term investing using high swap points, while conducting comparisons and verifications on his blog.

Blog：https://www.tryjpy.com/
Twitter：https://twitter.com/tryjpyfx
YouTube：https://www.tryjpy.com/youtube/

The Easy-to-Win Market Is a Stable Range

Hello, I’m Kazuo Sato. This time I’d like to talk about “markets that are easy for me to win versus markets that are hard for me to win.” First, my easy markets are those in which price movement repeats within a consistent range, in other words, a “range market.”

Some people might point to easy-to-predict events such as the ADP employment report (the employment survey based on data from Automatic Data Processing, a major US payroll processing company) after which US payrolls are released, or the FOMC policy rate announcements following hawkish or dovish comments by Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. But all of these, taken together, refer to a market that moves within a range over the long term.

Since I profit from swap points through long-term investments and automated trading, abrupt market moves that cause price to move in one direction are problematic. Here, to be clear, let’s consider it in the context of automated trading.