To succeed, jump as quickly at opportunities as you do at conclusions. -Benjamin Franklin
Jump trades occur on the first trading day of the week. They are quite rare, but they do offer a good trade setup with solid rules for finding profits. Here is how they work: This is a 1 hour chart. The first 1 hour bar of the new trading week is circled. Notice how the bar jumped down when the market opened. The bar opened and closed much lower than the last bar of the previous week. The bar jumped lower and created a market gap.
Here we see the gap between the jump bar and the last bar of the previous week. This gap will become very important. It will serve as a support/resistance zone in the immediate future. The jump trade is simple. Once you see a lower gap appear, place a buy stop a few pips (5-7 pips) inside of the gap.
The Stoploss The gap, in this case, is 35 pips. So the stoploss is placed 35 pips from the buy stop, to maintain a 1:1 reward to risk ratio. Feel free to backtest in ForexTester different stop losses to determine what works for you. The Profit Target The profit target is the other side of the gap. You are basically waiting for the market to show that it is going to close the gap that was created by the jump bar.
Notice a few things on this chart. 1. The gap serves as resistance, as price approaches and retreats from the gap twice before breaking through and triggering the buy stop. 2. The trade was triggered two days after the jump bar appeared. This happens often because the gap serves as a support/resistance zone. 3. Placing the buy stop a few pips (5-7 pips) inside of the gap ensures that the trade is not triggered when price simply approaches the gap.
Let us look at another example, this jump bar opens above last weeks last bar, so this jump bar sets up a sell stop order.
Here we see that price approaches the gap, finds support (and our sell stop is triggered), then price comes back down to cash out our profit target for +88 pips. A few things are interesting about this trade: 1. Notice that the stoploss is set 88 pips above our sell stop. 2. The first time the market approaches the gap we see the gap provide support and the market trades higher. 3. Even though our sell stop was triggered on the first approach to the gap, our stoploss was not triggered because we set it at 88 pips, equal to the size of the gap. Jump bars can be great trade setups, I would encourage you to go and test these in ForexTester if you believe jump bars are a setup that you may enjoy trading.
www.fxjake.com