ACTUALITÉS FOREX

For traders, the forex market is one of the main arenas for investing and attempting to profit from price differences between currencies. It is also the largest and most liquid financial market in the world, operating 24 hours a day from Monday to Friday, with every currency traded as part of a pair. Despite its enormous size, forex can still feel unfamiliar to beginners. There is no single central exchange, traders must get to grips with terms such as pips, lots and leverage, and prices can react within seconds to interest-rate decisions, economic data and global news. This guide breaks the market down one piece at a time. It explains how forex works, how currency pairs are priced, what drives profits and losses, the essential elements of a trade and the practical steps needed to start trading with a clear risk plan. Buckle up and strap in. To start trading forex, first learn how currency pairs are priced and how profit and loss are calculated. Choose a reputable broker, then practise on a demo account. Create a simple plan with a fixed risk per trade before placing a small first trade with a stop-loss. Forex trading is the buying and selling of currencies with the aim of profiting from changes in exchange rates. Currencies trade in pairs such as EUR/USD, so a trader makes a profit or loss according to whether one currency moves in the expected direction against the other. A currency pair is quoted as the base currency/quote currency. The first currency is the base, while the second is the quote. If EUR/USD is priced at 1.0842, for example, it means 1 euro costs 1.0842 US dollars. Buying EUR/USD means expecting the euro to strengthen against the dollar; selling it means expecting the euro to weaken. Every forex quote contains a bid price and an ask price. The bid is the price at which a trader can sell, while the ask is the price at which they can buy. Suppose an illustrative, not live, EUR/USD quote shows a bid of 1.0840 and an ask of 1.0842. The difference is 0.0002, or two pips, which represents the spread and creates an immediate trading cost when the position is opened. Retail traders do not normally deal directly with major banks or the institutional currency market. A forex broker provides the trading platform and prices, then either routes orders to liquidity providers or acts as the counterparty, depending on its execution model. The broker generally earns through the spread, a separate commission or a combination of both. The forex market operates through a global network rather than one physical exchange. Understanding this basic structure helps explain why prices, liquidity and trading costs can change throughout the day. For a beginner, knowing when and why liquidity changes can help avoid quieter periods when spreads may be wider and trading is unnecessarily expensive. Currency pairs are grouped into three main types according to the currencies involved and how widely they are traded: majors, minors and exotics. Major currency pairs include the US dollar alongside another major global currency. Common examples include EUR/USD, GBP/USD, USD/JPY, USD/CHF and AUD/USD. These pairs attract the highest trading volume and usually have the tightest spreads. Their deep liquidity and comparatively efficient pricing make them the usual starting point for beginners, although their prices can still move sharply around important news. Minor currency pairs, also called crosses, combine two major currencies without including the US dollar. Examples include EUR/GBP, EUR/JPY, GBP/JPY and AUD/NZD. Minors can still be actively traded, but their liquidity is generally lower and their spreads slightly wider than those of the major pairs. Some crosses, particularly GBP/JPY, can also produce noticeably sharper price movements. Exotic currency pairs combine a major currency with the currency of a smaller or emerging economy. Examples include USD/TRY, EUR/ZAR and GBP/SGD. These pairs usually have lower liquidity, wider spreads and a greater risk of sudden price movements. That combination makes exotics more expensive and difficult to manage, so they are rarely suitable for a beginner’s first trade. Read more: What is a currency pair? Definition, types and examples for beginners Currency prices react to a small number of recurring economic and market forces. Understanding these drivers cannot guarantee a profitable trade, but it can help a trader judge why a move is happening and when volatility may increase. Interest rates and central bank decisions affect the relative attraction of holding one currency rather than another. Rate changes and forward guidance from institutions such as the Bank of England, Federal Reserve and European Central Bank can therefore shift demand quickly; for example, an unexpected rate rise may support a currency if traders believe higher returns will attract capital. Economic data releases provide regular evidence about the strength of an economy and the likely direction of monetary policy. Inflation, employment and GDP figures can move currency pairs sharply within minutes, particularly when the result differs from forecasts, so traders should always check an economic calendar before opening a position. Political and global events can change expectations and risk appetite with little warning. Elections, trade-policy decisions and geopolitical tensions may trigger sudden currency moves; for example, escalating conflict can prompt investors to reduce exposure to risk-sensitive currencies and seek perceived safe havens. Liquidity and trading sessions influence both price behaviour and the cost of entering a trade. Activity usually peaks during the London–New York overlap, when more participants are active and spreads on major pairs are often tighter than during quieter parts of the trading day. Market sentiment is the overall attitude traders and investors hold towards risk at a particular time. Widespread optimism or fear can push currencies further than economic data alone might suggest, which is why a technically sound setup can still be steamrollered by a sudden change in the market’s mood. Read more: What Is Market Sentiment? Definition, Indicators and Strategies Every forex trade involves four connected elements: the spread, pip value, leverage and margin. Understanding them allows a trader to calculate the cost of entering a position, the money at risk and the account funds needed to keep the trade open. The spread is the difference between a currency pair’s bid and ask price. For example, an illustrative EUR/GBP quote of 0.8449/0.8450 has a one-pip spread, which is the immediate cost built into the trade when it opens. A pip is the standard unit used to measure price movement and equals 0.0001 for most currency pairs. Pip value converts that movement into money: on the later EUR/GBP example, a 0.05-lot position represents 5,000 euros and has a pip value of approximately £0.50. Leverage allows a trader to control a position worth more than the deposit committed to it, magnifying both gains and losses. FCA rules limit leverage for UK retail clients to 30:1 on major currency pairs, so the later EUR/GBP position worth approximately £4,225 would require about £141 in margin. Margin is the portion of account funds set aside by the broker to open and maintain a leveraged position; it is not a separate trading fee. A margin call or warning occurs when falling equity leaves too little margin available, and positions may eventually be closed automatically if the account reaches the broker’s regulatory close-out level. Beginners do not need to test every strategy at once. The table below shows how five common approaches differ before the deeper guides explain their individual rules and risks. Learning how to trade forex for beginners is easier when the process is divided into clear decisions rather than treated as one heroic leap into the market. The five steps below explain how to learn forex trading step by step, from checking a broker to placing and reviewing a small first trade. For a UK trader, choosing a broker starts with checking the exact legal entity on the FCA Financial Services Register or FCA Firm Checker. Confirm that the firm is authorised for the service being offered and that its website, contact details and reference number match the official record; clone firms often borrow the name of a legitimate company and hope nobody looks too closely. Next, check the practical protections and costs attached to the account: These CFD protections and standardised risk-warning requirements are confirmed by the FCA. You are ready for the next step when you have verified the broker’s legal entity and permissions independently and understand the protections, costs and risks attached to the account. Read more: How to choose the best forex broker in 2026 Opening a forex account normally requires proof of identity, proof of address and basic personal and tax-residency information. These checks form part of the broker’s identity-verification and anti-money-laundering process, so a legitimate provider should not simply wave every applicant through after collecting an email address and a deposit. A UK broker offering CFDs will also ask questions about your trading knowledge and experience. The purpose of this appropriateness assessment is to judge whether you understand leveraged products, including the possibility of rapid losses, rather than to provide a box-ticking quiz whose answers can be guessed. You are ready for the next step when the account is verified, and you understand its pricing, leverage, order types and funding rules. A demo account allows you to practise with virtual funds while learning the platform, testing order types and seeing how price movement affects a position. It removes financial risk, but it does not reproduce the emotional pressure of live trading, when even a small red number can suddenly look like a personal insult. Suggested checkpoints before moving from demo to live include: These are practice benchmarks, not guarantees of future profitability. You are ready for the next step when you can operate the platform correctly and follow the same written rules across a meaningful sample of trades. A trading plan is a written set of rules covering when you trade, why you enter and how much you can lose. For forex trading for beginners, one straightforward plan is far more useful than six half-tested strategies competing for attention. The percentage above is an educational example rather than a promise that the plan will be profitable. You are ready for the next step when you can write down the entry, stop, target and maximum cash risk before opening the platform. Read more: How to Make a Profitable Trading Plan: A Senior Trader's Guide Position size should come from the amount you are prepared to lose if the stop is hit, not from how confident you feel about the setup. Confidence is not a unit of measurement, and the market has never accepted it as margin. Set the stop-loss before opening the trade, calculate the distance in pips and then choose the position size that keeps the cash risk within the plan. Consider this illustrative EUR/GBP trade: The permitted pip value is calculated as £10 ÷ 20 pips = £0.50 per pip. On EUR/GBP, that corresponds to 0.05 lots, or 5,000 euros. If the target is reached, the gross gain is 40 pips × £0.50 = £20; if the stop is triggered, the planned loss is 20 pips × £0.50 = £10. The trade therefore has a 1:2 risk-to-reward ratio before allowing for the spread, commission or possible slippage. Once the trade closes, record the following in a journal: You are ready to continue trading only when you can explain the risk, position size and result of the first trade without relying on the platform to do the thinking for you. Ready to put a carefully tested plan into practice? Check that the account and regulatory protections are appropriate for your circumstances before depositing funds, then start small and keep the stop-loss in place. All figures in the EUR/GBP example have been checked: the pip value is £0.50, the position value is £4,225, the 30:1 margin is £140.83, and the risk-to-reward ratio is 1:2. The best time to trade forex depends on the currency pair and strategy, but UK traders often concentrate on the London session and especially the London–New York overlap. These periods normally attract greater participation, deeper liquidity and tighter spreads on major pairs, although the extra activity can also produce faster price swings around economic releases. The table uses standard GMT reference times. During British Summer Time, add one hour to convert them to the UK clock; regional daylight-saving changes can also shift the precise overlap during transition weeks. Quieter periods, including parts of the late Asian session, may bring lower participation and wider spreads, so trading merely because the market is technically open can be an unnecessarily expensive hobby. Read more: Best time to trade forex: When to enter the market during the day Forex trading can be accessible to beginners because many accounts accept relatively small deposits, demo accounts allow free practice, and major currency pairs are highly liquid. However, accessible does not mean easy: leverage magnifies losses as well as gains, and the risk warnings published by CFD providers show that most retail accounts lose money. Forex is therefore most suitable for beginners who start on a demo account, use small positions and follow a fixed risk rule on every trade. Forex, shares and commodities can all be traded through online platforms, but their market hours, costs, liquidity and price drivers differ considerably. These leverage figures apply to UK retail CFD trading; buying shares outright is normally unleveraged unless a separate borrowing arrangement is used. The FCA’s margin requirements correspond to maximum leverage of 30:1 for major forex pairs, 20:1 for minor pairs and gold, 10:1 for other commodities and 5:1 for individual shares. What makes forex different is its near-continuous weekday trading, its use of currency pairs and the ability to take a view on either a rising or falling exchange rate. Most beginner losses come from a small number of repeated mistakes rather than from the market mysteriously plotting against one particular trading account. Trading without a stop-loss means opening a position without defining where the loss must end. Beginners often avoid setting one because they hope an adverse move will eventually reverse, but hope provides no limit on the damage. In the EUR/GBP example, a trade designed to lose £10 at a 20-pip stop would lose £50 if it moved 100 pips against the position with no stop. Avoid this mistake by setting the stop-loss before opening the trade and never removing it simply to postpone accepting a loss. Using too much leverage means taking a position far larger than the account can sensibly support simply because the platform permits it. Leverage magnifies losses just as efficiently as gains: the same 20-pip stop at 0.5 lots rather than 0.05 lots would lose £100 instead of £10, wiping 10% from a £1,000 account in one trade. Avoid this mistake by calculating position size from the chosen 1% risk limit, not from the maximum leverage available. Trading without a plan means entering positions on impulse with no fixed rule for entry, exit or risk. This makes results almost impossible to review or repeat; a beginner may chase a sharp move after a news release and then discover they have no idea where to place the stop or take profit. Avoid this mistake by writing down the pair, session, entry rule, stop-loss rule and risk per trade before trading, as shown in Step 4. Increasing position size after a loss means trading bigger in an attempt to recover the money quickly. After losing £10 at 0.05 lots, doubling to 0.1 lots puts £20 at risk on the next 20-pip stop; losing that trade and then another at 0.2 lots increases the cumulative loss to £70. A small setback has now become a 7% account drawdown, courtesy of impatience rather than analysis. Avoid this mistake by keeping risk per trade fixed at 1% regardless of the previous result. Moving to a live account too early means risking real money before the trading plan has been tested properly on a demo. A beginner may go live after only a few winning practice trades, then abandon the plan as soon as an actual loss makes the experience feel different. Early damage often reflects skipped preparation rather than a run of extraordinary bad luck. Avoid this mistake by meeting the demo checkpoints in Step 3 before going live and beginning with a small position size. Read more: 10 Common Forex Trading Mistakes and How to Fix Them To start forex trading as a beginner, learn how currency pairs work, choose an FCA-authorised broker and practise placing orders on a demo account. Move to a small live account only after you can follow a written plan consistently, calculate the risk before each trade and use a stop-loss without changing it impulsively. It can be, if you approach forex as a skill to learn rather than a shortcut to quick income. Begin on a demo account, use small positions and place a stop-loss on every trade. Leverage magnifies losses, so keep the amount risked on each position low and fixed. Many brokers accept relatively small deposits, but the starting amount matters less than the proportion placed at risk on each trade. With a 1% risk rule, a £1,000 account would risk approximately £10 per position, although this rule cannot prevent losses or guarantee that the account will be profitable. To teach yourself to trade forex, learn the basic terminology, study one or two major currency pairs and practise one clearly defined strategy on a demo account. Maintain a trading journal and review it every week to identify repeated mistakes, rule-breaking and any conditions in which the strategy performs poorly. There is no fixed time required to become profitable in forex trading, and many traders never achieve consistent profitability. Building sound habits commonly takes several months of structured practice, careful record-keeping and disciplined risk management, but time spent trading alone does not guarantee improvement or positive results. No, you do not need advanced analysis to begin, but you should understand basic chart structure and the risks of the product being traded. Basic chart reading helps identify possible entries and stop-loss locations, while checking major scheduled news releases reduces the chance of entering just before a sharp volatility spike. Live trading always carries financial risk, so there is no risk-free method of trading a real forex account. A demo account provides the practical alternative by allowing orders, stop-losses and strategies to be tested with virtual funds before any real money is deposited or placed at risk. Starting forex trading responsibly means understanding how the market and currency pairs work, knowing the costs attached to each position and choosing a properly regulated broker. Practise on a demo account before placing a small live trade and calculate the position size from a fixed cash risk with the stop-loss set in advance. The practical next steps are to check the broker independently on the FCA register, open a demo account and test a simple plan using a maximum 1% risk rule as an educational starting point. In my view, a beginner’s progress should be judged by how consistently the plan is followed, particularly after a loss, rather than by the result of the first few trades. Lee W. is a seasoned professional trader with over 10 years of experience. Passionate about sharing valuable expertise and unique market insights, Lee W. now serves as an external and independent market analyst for RADEX MARKETS. Reviewed by RADEX MARKETS Risk Warning Trading derivatives and leveraged products carries a high level of risk, including the risk of losing substantially more than your initial investment. Related concepts:

In a milestone deal announced on Wednesday, Payward Inc., the parent company of US cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, signed an agreement to acquire Lithuania-based Saldo Bank. The deal, if completed, would represent the first acquisition of a commercial bank based within the European Union by a crypto-native company. Saldo Bank is a CRD credit institution, as regulated under the EU’s Capital Requirements Directive, meaning it can legally handle yield-bearing bank deposits and lending operations. Such privileges would subsequently fall to Kraken, thereby awarding the crypto company direct access to customer deposits for the first time. Beyond Lithuania, the acquisition would immediately open the door to a number of other European markets, including Finland, Sweden, Germany, and the Netherlands. Payward has spent years aggressively compiling a massive stack of financial regulations and registrations, spanning hundreds of jurisdictions and geographical regions throughout the world. The firm holds a special purpose Federal Reserve charter in its home state of Wyoming, allowing it to interface directly with dollar payment systems without relying on third-party intermediaries. In Europe, Kraken holds Electronic Money Institution (EMI) and Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) licences via the Central Bank of Ireland, as well as the equivalent licences in the United Kingdom via the Financial Conduct Authority. Further afield, various registrations extend the company’s sphere of influence all the way from the US to Dubai to Australia. The novel deal perfectly exemplifies what happens when the crypto industry is backed into a legal corner: rather than endlessly waiting for approval, companies are simply buying out the necessary licences. It is no secret that cryptocurrencies have been bogged down in a regulatory quagmire for many years, facing unfair scrutiny and punitive measures while receiving next to nothing in terms of constructive guidance. The recent failure of the Clarity Act to pass through US Congress is merely the latest example in a long chain of proverbial kicks in the teeth. The problem is simply that crypto firms are not allowed to offer the same services as traditional financial institutions. The obvious solution of acquiring banking charters did not work because such licences were continuously denied. The frustration has built up to the point where crypto companies are now buying existing financial infrastructure, bypassing the stubborn legal gatekeepers. Another problem is the issue of fiat on/off ramps. Crypto exchanges are entirely dependant on traditional banks to handle client deposits and withdrawals, which constitutes a huge architectural choke point, leaving them exposed to the possibility of being ‘de-banked’. Buying a fully licenced bank completely nullifies such threats. To play devil’s advocate for a minute, the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) has in fact changed its tune in recent times, granting conditional banking charters to no fewer than 12 crypto and fintech companies so far this year. Unfortunately, these conditional charters do not grant the same rights as full banking charters, such as housing customer cash balances, which is precisely why Kraken is seeking to purchase a bank of its own. The acquisition of Saldo Bank still needs the green light from the European Central Bank, which will deliberate the matter over the next 3 to 6 months. Chances of outright rejection are low, although Kraken will have to prove that Saldo’s balance sheet is insulated from its other liabilities, while the capital used for the purchase will have to be provably clean. Crypto firms have tried for years to ingratiate themselves within the correct regulatory circles, to no avail. Denying companies that apply for banking licences is easy, ignoring them when they outright buy those licences is another matter. The new approach was perfectly predictable. About the Author Lawrence J. came from a strong technical and engineering background before pivoting into a more financial role later on in his career. Always interested in international finance, Lawrence is experienced in both traditional markets as well as the emerging crypto markets. He now serves as the financial writer for RADEX MARKETS. Reviewed by RADEX MARKETS Risk Warning: Trading derivatives and leveraged products carries a high level of risk, including the risk of losing substantially more than your initial investment.

Small cracks in the semiconductor trade appeared earlier this week, particularly among memory manufacturers, which are facing increased competition from China. Chinese company ChangXin Memory Technologies recently unveiled a breakthrough architectural leap that substantially reduces DRAM chip size; the company plans to launch new products based on the design before the end of the year. The development directly challenges the South Korean monopoly on the DRAM market, which explains the 7% and 10% drops incurred by Samsung and SK Hynix on Tuesday. The Kospi index, half the weight of which is accounted for by the two above companies, slipped over 5% yesterday, following on from a 4% slide the day prior. The extreme technological narrowness of the Kospi is doing no favours for the index, which now sits 35% off its record high. Intimately intertwined as they are, the Nasdaq-100 is also on the back foot, and for many of the same reasons. Micron (MU) suffered back-to-back losses over the last couple of sessions, dragging shares in the American chip maker to a 7% loss so far this week, while Western Digital (WDC) and Seagate (STX) drop around 4% over the same time frame. SpaceX (SPCX) also suffered a 4% loss on Tuesday in sympathy of the wider tech sphere. The timing of the fall is somewhat awkward, with ASML releasing its latest quarterly earnings report later today and TSMC following suit tomorrow. US CPI figures are scheduled to hit the newswires in the following hours, with economists predicting marginally higher headline inflation in September; excluding oil and food prices, the core element of the reading is expected to remain stable. Elevated crude oil prices have been the obvious contributor to inflationary pressures throughout the world, but an increasing number of investors are now coming round to the idea that, at least in the US economy, expensive oil is in fact the only culprit pushing prices higher. The broader US economy has showed fewer signs of systemic, structural inflation in recent months, as evidenced by the more modest core inflation readings. Month-over-month, core CPI is predicted to fall to just 0.2% in September, while the headline number is expected to rise to 0.6%. The disconnect serves as confirmation of the lack of contagion so far. The shift in sentiment has also reflected on interest rate predictions, with FedWatch now showing an 80% chance of a rate hold during the next meeting, programmed two weeks from now, although the implied odds of a rate hike in December remain elevated at around 90%. Speaking of oil, the Brent Crude benchmark has been on the rise once again this week, climbing to $107 per barrel earlier this morning, while WTI contracts lag far behind at just $95. The huge spread reflects the high demand for seaborne petroleum, as well as the abnormally high sea freight costs which are currently inflating international shipping rates, to say nothing of the increasingly isolated nature of American oil markets. As striking as a $12 spread between the two benchmarks is, it is nothing compared to the widening chasm between US and European natural gas prices. Dutch TTF natural gas futures rose to a whopping €87 per MWh on Tuesday, the highest level since 2022 and roughly eight times more expensive than equivalent natural gas futures in the United States. The winter months are just around the corner and EU underground storage sites are currently only 73% full. #DRAM #NDX #CPI About the Author Lawrence J. came from a strong technical and engineering background before pivoting into a more financial role later on in his career. Always interested in international finance, Lawrence is experienced in both traditional markets as well as the emerging crypto markets. He now serves as the financial writer for RADEX MARKETS. Reviewed by RADEX MARKETS Risk Warning: Trading derivatives and leveraged products carries a high level of risk, including the risk of losing substantially more than your initial investment.

Most Supertrend formulas published online are incomplete, so a line rebuilt from them in a spreadsheet rarely sits where the platform draws it. The flips land on different bars, and rechecking the arithmetic does not close the gap. This guide gives the full calculation, including the locking rule that most write-ups leave out, explains why two different default settings are in circulation, sets out which settings fit the timeframe you trade, and covers three things that go wrong when Supertrend is used on forex instead of stocks. The Supertrend indicator is an ATR-based trend-following overlay that plots a single line on the price chart: below price in an uptrend and above price in a downtrend. The line switches sides when a bar closes through it. It takes two inputs, an ATR period and a multiplier, and the common default is 10 and 3. Put the line on a live chart and watch where it flips. Open an account and test the settings on the pairs you trade. The Supertrend indicator is a trend-following indicator that draws a single line on the price chart, set a fixed multiple of ATR away from price. In simple terms, it shows the direction of the current trend: when the line sits below price the trend is up, and when it sits above price the trend is down. Traders apply it in three ways: What the line does not show is how strong the trend is. A line sitting below price in a slow drift looks exactly the same as one sitting below price in a powerful rally. Where the line sits depends on volatility. Its distance from price is the multiplier times ATR, a measure of how far price typically moves per bar, so the line stands further away in a volatile market and closer in a calm one. A flip means a bar has closed on the far side of the line. The line then jumps to the opposite side of price and the trend reading reverses. In practice, traders treat a flip as the point where a position in the old direction is no longer supported by the indicator. Supertrend was put forward by the French trader Olivier Seban in the early 2000s and grew out of retail charting platforms, with no academic literature behind it. That history has two consequences that come up later in this guide: there is no authoritative paper that fixes a reference version, and each platform has implemented the indicator in its own way. Read more: The best forex indicators every trader should use in 2026 An indicator matters to a trader because it turns a judgement call into a rule. Supertrend does this for trend direction, which brings several practical benefits. As a result, Supertrend can serve as the backbone of a simple trend-following plan, as long as its limitations are respected. The table sets Supertrend beside other popular technical indicators, with a last column on how each one fits around a Supertrend signal. Supertrend is calculated in three stages: basic bands, locked bands, and a direction rule that picks which band to draw. Most published formulas stop after the first stage, which is why a spreadsheet built from them never agrees with the chart. The stages below follow the logic that TradingView publishes for its built-in version. The basic bands are the midpoint of the bar plus and minus a multiple of ATR. Midpoint = (High + Low) ÷ 2 Basic upper band = Midpoint + (Multiplier × ATR) Basic lower band = Midpoint − (Multiplier × ATR) Take a daily EUR/USD bar with a high of 1.0889 and a low of 1.0797. The midpoint is 1.0843. With ATR at 0.0062, or 62 pips, and a multiplier of 3, the offset is 0.0186. The basic upper band is 1.1029 and the basic lower band is 1.0657. The Average True Range (ATR) is the average of True Range over a set number of bars, used as a measure of how far price typically moves per bar. True Range is the largest of three values: the current high minus the current low, the distance from the previous close to the current high, and the distance from the previous close to the current low. These basic bands are not the Supertrend line. They are recalculated from scratch on every bar and move up and down freely, so plotting them gives a channel that wobbles with each candle. The next stage is what turns them into the line on your chart. Read more: Forex Volatility: Measuring and Trading Currency Pair Swings Band locking is a ratchet: the upper band is only allowed to move down, and the lower band is only allowed to move up. On each bar, the new basic band is compared with the band carried forward from the previous bar, and the indicator keeps whichever one is closer to price. The second condition in each rule is the reset. Once price has closed through a band, that band is released and starts again from its basic value. Seen this way, Supertrend is an ATR trailing stop and not a channel. In an uptrend the lower band follows price up and never steps back, which is exactly how a trailing stop behaves. A trailing stop is a stop-loss level that moves in the direction of a profitable trade as price advances and stays where it is when price pulls back. Here is the rule at work on four daily EUR/USD bars in an uptrend, using an ATR period of 10 and a multiplier of 3. The prices are illustrative. On bars 1 and 2 the basic lower band rises, so the locked band rises with it. On bar 3 price pulls back and volatility picks up, which drops the basic band to 1.0635. The locked band ignores that and stays at 1.0679, which is 44 pips higher. Bar 4 repeats the pattern with a gap of 25 pips. A spreadsheet that plots the basic band is therefore 44 pips away from the platform's line on bar 3, and that is the divergence you were trying to track down. Our view: band locking is the part of Supertrend we consider most important to understand, and the part most guides leave out. Once you know the line can only move in the trend's favour, you read it as a stop that tightens rather than as a forecast, and that changes how you handle every flip. Read more: What is a stop-loss order and how to set it The direction rule decides which of the two locked bands is drawn. Only one is visible at a time. In the four bars above, the uptrend holds throughout because every close stays above 1.0679. A daily close at 1.0670 would flip the direction: the lower band would disappear and the line would reappear above price at the locked upper band. With all three stages in place, your spreadsheet follows the same logic as the platform. It can still disagree with the chart, though, and the cause has nothing to do with the formula. Two things make the same inputs produce different lines: the way ATR is smoothed, and the default values your platform ships with. ATR is an average of True Range, and there is more than one way to take an average. On TradingView, ATR is by default a Relative Moving Average (RMA) of True Range, the smoothing method devised by J. Welles Wilder. The standalone ATR indicator on cTrader defaults to a simple moving average. Custom builds for MT4 and MT5 use whichever method their author chose. Say ATR over 10 bars stands at 0.0062 and the next bar has a True Range of 0.0095. Wilder's smoothing gives the new bar a weight of 1/10 and moves ATR to 0.00653. An exponential average gives it a weight of 2/11 and moves ATR to 0.00680. With a multiplier of 3, the two band offsets differ by about 8 pips. A gap of that size is enough for a close to break one line and miss the other. That is how the same settings end up with flips 1 or 2 bars apart on the same chart. The defaults are the second source of confusion. TradingView and cTrader both ship Supertrend with a period of 10 and a multiplier of 3. Many tutorials quote 14 and 3 instead, a convention carried over from other charting platforms and from the usual 14-period default of ATR itself. Neither pair is the correct one. What matters is which pair your own tool is using. The table lists what each platform's own documentation confirms. Before comparing anything, open the indicator's settings panel and read off the smoothing method and the two default values. The answer to "my indicator is broken" is almost always in that panel. In our experience, when two charts disagree, the smoothing method is the first thing to check, because it explains the gap far more often than a fault in the indicator does. Pick one platform's line as your reference before you test any setting. The best Supertrend indicator settings depend on the timeframe you trade. A period of 10 with a multiplier of 3 is the usual starting point for daily swing trading, a period of 7 to 10 with a multiplier of 2 to 2.5 suits 5 to 15-minute charts, and a period of 14 or 20 with a multiplier of 2 or 3 cuts the number of signals on daily charts and above. Each choice has a price, shown in the last column. Treat tuning as a method. Start from the row that matches your timeframe and change one input at a time, beginning with the multiplier, because it has the more direct effect on how often the line gets hit. If whipsaws are stopping you out too often, raise the multiplier by 0.5. If signals arrive so late that most of the move has gone, lower it by 0.5. Then test the new value over at least 100 signals before treating it as settled, since a handful of trades tells you nothing about a setting. A whipsaw is a signal that reverses almost immediately, so a trader enters on one flip and is taken out by the opposite flip a few bars later. Every setting is a trade-off between how early a signal arrives and how often it is wrong. A tighter line reacts sooner and gets broken by noise more often. A wider line filters the noise and reacts late. No value improves both at once, so there is nothing to gain from hunting for a perfect pair of numbers. Our view: we would start every new pair on the platform's own default of 10 and 3 and move away from it only when a test gives a clear reason. A setting borrowed from a tutorial written for another platform makes it hard to tell whether a result comes from the market or from the setting. Combining Supertrend with other indicators means using a second tool to decide which flips to act on. Supertrend loses money in ranges because price crosses the line again and again without going anywhere, and each crossing is a flip. A filter leaves the signal as it is and tells you when to ignore it. The first filter measures trend strength. The Average Directional Index (ADX) rises when price is trending in either direction and falls when it is drifting. A common rule is to act on Supertrend flips only when ADX is above 25 and to skip them below that level. Read more: Trend Trading Strategies: How to Use Indicators with Examples The second filter sets direction on a larger scale. With a 200-period exponential moving average (EMA) on the chart, flips up are taken only when price is above the average and flips down only when it is below, so signals against the larger trend are skipped. Both filters cost the same thing: fewer signals and later entries, because ADX and a long moving average both lag price. The share of signals removed varies by pair and timeframe, so count it in your own test before you rely on it. Some traders add a momentum oscillator such as RSI as well, although RSI measures the speed of recent price changes, which is a different question from trend strength. The table sums up what each tool measures and how it works alongside Supertrend. Filtering does not turn a losing configuration into a profitable one. It removes the conditions in which the indicator was never going to work. Read more: What is RSI in forex? Meaning, formula and signals The flip is the signal. When a bar closes above the line in a downtrend, the line moves below price and the reading turns up. When a bar closes below the line in an uptrend, the line moves above price and the reading turns down. Because the line is itself a trailing stop, it also marks where a stop naturally sits: just beyond the line, which moves in the trade's favour as the trend extends. Suppose EUR/USD flips up on a daily close at 1.0868 with the line at 1.0679. A stop at the line sits 189 pips from the entry. On a 0.10-lot position, where 1 pip is worth $1, that is a risk of $189. Supertrend sets no profit target, so a trader who wants a risk-to-reward ratio of 1:2 has to add one separately: 378 pips above the entry at 1.1246, worth $378. Without a target, the exit is the next flip. Read more: What is take profit? Understanding how it works in trading The second point is the one most often misread. While a bar is still forming, the line and the direction can change with every tick, so a flip can appear mid-bar and be gone by the close. Completed bars are never rewritten, which means Supertrend does not repaint in the strict sense. Acting on a mid-bar flip still causes trouble, because it can put you in and out of the market twice within one bar. Take signals on closed bars only. The third point is structural. Supertrend tells you direction and nothing about strength. It has no oscillator reading and no scale, so a flip in a flat market looks identical to a flip at the start of a strong trend. That gap is why the indicator needs a separate strength filter, as covered in the section on combining it with other indicators above. Most Supertrend guides are written for stock markets, which have an opening bell, a closing bell and commission-based costs. Forex has none of those, and three consequences follow. Figures measured on our own platform are marked where they are still to be confirmed. Forex trades around the clock from Monday to Friday with no exchange close, so the start and end of a daily bar is a convention set by the broker's server time. Some servers close the day at 17:00 New York time, while others use midnight GMT. The two conventions slice the same price action into different candles. The daily highs and lows differ, so True Range differs, so ATR and the bands differ, and a flip can land on a different bar. Two traders running 10 and 3 on daily EUR/USD at two brokers can be looking at different signals without either platform being wrong. Currency pair checked, period covered and number of bars between the flips under the two cuts: (to be confirmed with the brand side). Check your broker's server time before you compare a daily Supertrend line with a chart from any other source. When the market reopens after the weekend at a price away from Friday's close, the gap enters True Range through the previous-close terms of the calculation. One unusually large value then feeds into ATR and widens the bands. The arithmetic alone looks like this. With ATR over 10 bars at 0.0060 under Wilder's smoothing, a Monday bar with a True Range of 0.0140 lifts ATR to 0.0068. At a multiplier of 3, a newly calculated band sits 24 pips further from the midpoint than it would have done. Under Wilder's smoothing the outlier never drops out of a window. Its weight shrinks by 10% on each new bar instead. A wider band is harder for price to close through, so a trend that would otherwise have flipped can stay in place for several more days. Measured effect on our own data, meaning how much ATR widened after a specific gap and how many bars it took to return to normal: (to be confirmed with the brand side). Fast settings produce more flips, and every flip is a round turn that pays the spread. Take a period of 7 and a multiplier of 2 on a 5-minute EUR/USD chart, a configuration that can flip many times in a single session. The cost is simple to work out. On 1 standard lot of EUR/USD, 1 pip is worth $10, so each 0.1 pip of spread costs $1 per round turn. Multiply that by the number of flips in the period and you have the drag the method must overcome before it earns anything. Total drag per lot = Number of flips × Spread in pips × $10 EUR/USD spread from our own pricing, number of flips for 7 and 2 on the 5-minute chart over a defined period, cost per round turn and total drag: (to be confirmed with the brand side). The average move captured per flip shrinks as the timeframe gets shorter, while the spread per trade stays the same. A faster setting therefore hands a growing share of each move to costs, and slippage on fast entries adds to the bill. Faster is not the same thing as better. Read more: What Is Slippage in Trading? Causes & 6 Tips to Reduce It Supertrend is not among the standard indicators supplied with MT4 or MT5. To use it on either platform you have to install a custom indicator, whereas cTrader and TradingView include it in their built-in lists. The consequence goes beyond the extra step. A custom indicator is written by a third party, and its author decides how ATR is smoothed and what the default inputs are. Two traders on the same platform, with the same period and multiplier, can therefore see flips on different bars because they installed different files. Before trusting any comparison, open the indicator's inputs tab and look for a smoothing or averaging option. If the method is not shown, read the description that came with the file, or test the indicator against a spreadsheet built from the three stages above. The most detailed public backtest of Supertrend comes from Liberated Stock Trader, which ran 4,052 test trades on the 30 stocks of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. On daily charts, 1,455 trades produced a win rate of 43%, with an average winning trade of 7.8% and an average losing trade of 4.3%. On 5-minute charts, 2,597 trades produced a win rate of 42%. Its author concludes that Supertrend is not a reliable or profitable standalone indicator and should never be used in isolation. The figures, and what each one leaves out, are set out here. A win rate of 43% does not disqualify a method by itself. Trend following earns from the size of its winners and can afford to lose more often than it wins: winners of 7.8% against losers of 4.3% give a reward-to-risk ratio of about 1.8. What that asks of you is harder than it sounds. You have to sit through runs of losing trades, let winners run until the flip, and keep each position small enough to survive the losing streaks. The author's verdict is still negative, and the test includes no forex costs at all. Claims at the other end of the range deserve the same scrutiny. Headlines promising a 98% win rate, or a gain of 11.07% per trade, contradict the test above and come without the detail needed to check them. Ask four things of any performance figure: the sample size, the period and market covered, the spread and slippage assumptions, and the exit rule. Our view: the fair reading of this evidence is that Supertrend earns its place as a trend filter and a stop guide, not as an entry system on its own. We find a negative backtest more useful than a perfect one, because it shows where the indicator needs help, and the answer points back to the strength and direction filters covered above. The Supertrend indicator is easy to read because it reduces the chart to one line, and both its advantages and its limitations come from that same design. Weighing them shows where it fits in a trading plan and where it does not. For this reason, Supertrend works best as one part of a plan, alongside a strength filter, a fixed risk per trade and a separate exit rule. The basic bands are the bar's midpoint, (high + low) ÷ 2, plus and minus the multiplier times ATR. The locking rule then lets the upper band only move down and the lower band only move up until price closes through it, and the line shows the lower band in an uptrend and the upper band in a downtrend. The three stages are set out in the calculation section above. There is no single best setting, because it depends on the timeframe you trade. A period of 10 with a multiplier of 3 is the usual starting point for daily swing trading, and a period of 7 to 10 with a multiplier of 2 to 2.5 is typical for 5 to 15-minute charts. The settings table above lists the trade-off for each. Supertrend works best where trends persist, which in practice means higher timeframes such as the daily chart. On lower timeframes the number of signals rises faster than the edge does once the spread is counted. Not in the strict sense, because the values on completed bars are never rewritten. The value on the current bar is provisional until the bar closes, so a flip seen mid-bar can vanish, and signals should be taken on closed bars only. Not as a standard indicator. It has to be added to MT4 or MT5 as a custom indicator, while cTrader and TradingView include it, and the custom build you install decides how ATR is smoothed. It can, but the published evidence is against it. In a backtest of 1,455 daily-chart trades it won 43% of the time and the author concluded it should not be used in isolation, so it is better treated as a trend filter or trailing stop alongside a strength filter. Supertrend is an ATR trailing stop, which is why the locking rule decides where the line sits. The same period and multiplier give different lines on different platforms because ATR is smoothed in different ways. Settings follow the timeframe you trade, and no single value suits every chart. On forex, the daily cut, weekend gaps and the spread all shape the result before the indicator does. Four checks follow from that. Confirm your platform's smoothing method and defaults before anything else. Take signals on closed bars only. Change one parameter at a time and judge it over at least 100 signals. Pair the line with a strength filter instead of using it alone. The next step is to rebuild the line in a spreadsheet for the pair and timeframe you actually trade, then check each flip against your own chart. The RADEX MARKETS editorial team consists of seasoned financial professionals and market observers. Dedicated to delivering objective market summaries, macroeconomic insights, and educational content, the team strives to keep traders well-informed in a fast-paced financial environment. Reviewed by RADEX MARKETS Risk Warning Trading derivatives and leveraged products carries a high level of risk, including the risk of losing substantially more than your initial investment.

On the 6th of October 2025, Bitcoin struck an all-time high of $126,000. Four days later, all hell broke loose, culminating in one of the worst days in the history of cryptocurrencies. It is now one year later; time enough to perform a proper autopsy of the event. On the tenth of October 2025, seemingly out of nowhere, Bitcoin plummeted 7%. The wider crypto markets fared far worse. Ethereum and BNB took a 12% hit, XRP and Solana shot down 15%, while Doge suffered a full-on meltdown, bringing the lovable joke coin to a 60% intra-day drawdown before lifting it back up to a modest 22% daily loss. The pain had only just started. Over the following nine months, Bitcoin would go on to lose over half its value, finally bottoming at $57,700 on the 1st of July 2026. The major alts were crushed even harder, often incurring 75-80% losses. Further afield, some of the altcoins of lesser repute disappeared off the face of the Earth. Catastrophic losses as far as the eye could see… but this is crypto… such events are nothing new. The most recent bear market actually compares rather favourably to the kind of bloodbath that periodically besets the crypto industry, most obviously in terms of duration and drawdown, but also in a number of more subtle elements, which, taken together, illustrate a much more favourable picture of the carnage that ensued. Before we get to that point, a post-mortem of the event itself is necessary to properly understand what happened before, during and afterwards, and why the crypto industry now finds itself in a far better position than at any point in its history. One of the striking parts of the crash is the fact that, one year later, few people can fully agree on what actually caused it. The Trump tariff threat is often pointed to as the trigger, but as the last twelve months have clearly demonstrated, financial markets are more resilient than that. Such threats caused a market-wide selloff on the tenth of October, resulting in a moderate 2.7% decline in the S&P 500, from which the index would fully recover in a grand total of ten days. The drop is barely identifiable on long-term charts. Time for a better excuse. The reality is that the initial catalyst is completely irrelevant. When a damn breaks, there is little merit to blaming the final drop of water that sets the flood in motion. Even the smallest of ripples would have unleashed the financial torrent that came after. The problem is quite simply that crypto markets were overleveraged. Absurdly overleveraged. Everyone was long. Everyone was confident that a run to $250,000 was on the cards. Open interest in Bitcoin perpetual contracts reached a historic $70 billion in October of that year, while the wider crypto markets saw around double that figure. Funding rates hit ridiculous levels, reaching 27% on crypto derivatives platform Deribit. Synthetic dollars made everything worse. The pervading sense of optimism drove many to borrow heavily to get in on the action. Ethena’s USDe token played a pivotal role here. At the time, Binance offered a 12% promotional yield to users holding USDe, which was then used as collateral to borrow other stablecoins, which were then used to mint even more USDe, resulting in a deadly leverage loop that was never going to be safely unwound. The powder keg was well and truly primed. The only element missing was the spark. On the evening of the tenth of October, the spark appeared in the form of US President Trump announcing an additional 100% tariff rate on Chinese imports. Everyone knew that the crypto markets were overleveraged at the time, but none more so than the liquidity providers and market-makers. Sensing danger, algorithms immediately pulled the plug, withdrawing orders across all exchanges simultaneously in order to protect their capital. Order books were left empty. Liquidity vanished instantly. Price floors were simply removed from existence. Market depth shrank 98% within 20 minutes. Spreads widened to 4%. Then the selling began. Long positions were utterly destroyed, creating a cascade of liquidations that saw several billion dollars wiped out in a single minute. The sudden price movement prompted a surge in algorithmic trading that overwhelmed many exchanges, slowing them down to a crawl. The architectural bottlenecks throttling trading platforms dried up liquidity even more, while gas prices spiked to insane levels as a result of network congestion, often demanding hundreds of dollars in transaction fees to perform a simple swap. Centralised and decentralised exchanges alike ground to a halt. To make matters worse, it was at this point that USDe began to de-peg, reaching lows of just $0.65 on Binance. This effectively slashed the collateral valuation for thousands of traders, triggering a secondary wave of automatic liquidations. By the end of the day, a total of $19 billion worth of positions had been liquidated, around 90% of which were long. It is worth repeating that the actual trigger behind the crash does not matter. The fact is that the prices achieved at the end of 2025 should never have been reached in the first place. The crypto market was in an outrageously unhealthy position at the time. When the leverage finally unravelled, the crypto ecosystem violently purged itself of billions of dollars of toxic debt in a matter of hours. Centralised exchanges were not blameless in this regard. Binance suffered a number of critical infrastructure failures over the course of the crash, for which it ended up paying out almost $300 million in compensation to affected traders. The 10/10 crash was a huge wake-up call in this regard. Centralised and decentralised exchanges alike were forced into implementing significant infrastructure improvements to stop such an event from reoccurring. The fragmented architecture that prevailed previously has been done away with, resulting in more seamless liquidity pools. Oracle infrastructure is now much more robust, relying on decentralised, multiple source oracle networks instead of singular price feeds. Synthetic dollar protocols that rely on lower quality collateral can no longer be deployed as flippantly as before. Institutional market makers now make heftier order book commitments, helping to rebuild trust in exchanges’ ability to honour their clients’ trades. In many ways, the October tenth collapse was a rite of passage, one that promoted cryptocurrencies to a more mature asset class. Beyond the architectural improvements outlined above, another clue can be found in the charts. As stated in the opening paragraphs, the latest bear market was short and shallow. Crypto bear markets typically exhibited 90% drops that took several years to resolve, causing many to wonder whether the industry would ever recover at all. Such lamentations fell on deaf ears this time around. The unhealthy leverage was unceremoniously flushed out, the cracks were methodically repaired, and capital unpretentiously re-entered the market. Institutional interest serves as a moat to stabilise prices to a certain extent, but one of the bigger drivers currently impacting market sentiment is the ongoing consolidation between traditional and decentralised finance. Rather than an immature money playground, crypto is now increasingly thought of as the plumbing that will grant capital markets access to greater liquidity and interoperability. Financial conferences cannot go five minutes without bragging about bringing real world assets (RWAs) on chain. Crypto industry specialists now routinely speak at the Federal Reserve, whilst also occupying seats on advisory boards at the SEC and CFTC. The 10/10 crypto crash shares a lot of similarities with the conclusion of the dot-com bubble. The early 2000s stock market correction did much to separate the wheat from the chaff, removing poorly thought-out ideas but leaving the likes of Amazon to go on and thrive over the following decades. Such transitions are rarely painless. The cryptocurrency industry has just passed through the same crucible. About the Author Lawrence J. came from a strong technical and engineering background before pivoting into a more financial role later on in his career. Always interested in international finance, Lawrence is experienced in both traditional markets as well as the emerging crypto markets. He now serves as the financial writer for RADEX MARKETS. Reviewed by RADEX MARKETS Risk Warning: Trading derivatives and leveraged products carries a high level of risk, including the risk of losing substantially more than your initial investment.

US stock indices begin the week very close to record highs, ahead of a busy quarterly earnings calendar. The S&P 500 rose 1.15% over the course of last week, while the Nasdaq-100 edged 0.24% higher after coming down from intra-week highs. The Dow Jones meanwhile gained 0.9% over the same timeframe, although the narrower index remains comparatively further removed from potential new record highs of its own. Generally speaking, markets enter the fourth quarter of the year in somewhat high spirits, as investors expect the strong growth in semiconductors to continue to do the heavy lifting. With that said, international capital appears to be withdrawing from Korean stock markets, uniquely concentrated as they are around computer memory. Geopolitical turmoil, both in the Middle East and Russia, remains a sticking point for crude oil markets, although by and large the worst-case scenario is somewhat priced in. A shaky energy ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine is starting to emerge, after the former suffered a sustained campaign of long-range drone attacks against its oil refining capabilities. Unfortunately, such developments were offset by a Houthi strike on Riyadh airport that killed 13 people on Sunday. To complicate matters, hurricane Isaias is now ravaging the coastal United States, forcing local oil producers to halt production in the Gulf of Mexico, further restricting petroleum deliveries. Suffice to say there are many strings currently pulling oil markets in different directions, but the end result is that Brent Crude remains over $100 per barrel. Q3 is over and US companies up and down the leaderboard are primed to publish their latest quarterly reports. Earnings season fires up this week, starting with the major players in the banking sector and followed by semiconductor giants later on. JPMorgan Chase (JPM), Goldman Sachs (GS), Wells Fargo (WFC) and Citigroup (C) are all scheduled to report before market open on Tuesday, as are Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) and UnitedHealth (UNH). Bank of America (BAC), Morgan Stanley (MS) and BlackRock (BLK) follow on Wednesday, as attentions begin to turn to the chip manufacturing industry. ASML (ASML) also reports on Wednesday, before its primary client, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSM), delivers its latest on Thursday. Both companies together represent a reliable bellwether for the global semiconductor industry and in fact TSMC has already provided a decent clue in the form of last week’s preliminary Q3 revenue figures, which hit TWD 1.49 trillion ($46.8 billion) to easily beat estimates of TWD 1.46 trillion ($45.7 billion). Beyond the earnings schedule, the economic calendar also has a few points of order to contribute. The September CPI figures are set to hit the newswires on Wednesday, giving the latest reading on US inflation, while the producer price index follows a day later on Thursday, as do the latest retail sales numbers. On Friday, market participants will lock on to Chairman Kevin Warsh’s speech, which is expected to focus heavily on the Federal Reserve’s future interest rate path. Although the US bond market will be closed today, the NYSE and Nasdaq will remain open as usual; Canadian and Japanese stock markets will however be closed. #Q3 #EARNINGS #OIL About the Author Lawrence J. came from a strong technical and engineering background before pivoting into a more financial role later on in his career. Always interested in international finance, Lawrence is experienced in both traditional markets as well as the emerging crypto markets. He now serves as the financial writer for RADEX MARKETS. Reviewed by RADEX MARKETS Risk Warning: Trading derivatives and leveraged products carries a high level of risk, including the risk of losing substantially more than your initial investment.