I spent one week trading only USDJPY, mainly to see what happened when I removed my usual pairs. The lessons were mostly about me, not about yen.
Lesson one: I am addicted to frequency. With only one pair, there were long stretches with nothing to do, and I caught myself taking marginal setups just to be active. On EURUSD and cable I normally hide that by switching charts.
Lesson two: fewer pairs meant clearer mistakes. With one chart, every bad trade was obvious in review. No "but GBPUSD was moving" excuses.
Lesson three: USDJPY has its own rhythm. Japanese data and comments from officials matter in ways I am not used to, and the Tokyo session leaves levels that I underestimated.
Results were roughly flat for the week, with fewer trades than usual. What I changed afterwards: EURUSD came back as the main pair, but with a stricter filter on how many setups I take per hour, and GBPUSD is now optional rather than automatic.
I would recommend the exercise to anyone who trades four or five pairs at once. One pair for a week shows you very quickly which trades you take because of a real setup and which you take because you are bored.
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A week trading only USDJPY: lessons
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Shadow Trader
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Re: A week trading only USDJPY: lessons
Lesson one is the one I recognised straight away. When I tried a week on EURJPY alone, I checked my trades against the card afterwards, and 11 of 26 did not meet it.
What helped more than willpower was a written cap of three trades per session, with a ten minute timeout after any loss. The quiet stretches stopped feeling like wasted time once the cap made each trade feel scarce.
On your third lesson, I would add the Tokyo lunch hour to the levels worth marking. Liquidity thins noticeably from about 11:30 to 12:30 Tokyo, and a range from that window often gets tested early in London.
Roughly flat with fewer trades sounds like a decent result to me, since costs drop with frequency. Did your average loser get smaller as well, or was it only the trade count that changed?
I am planning to repeat the exercise on GBPUSD next month. Cable is the pair where I suspect boredom trades hide best, because it always seems to be moving.
What helped more than willpower was a written cap of three trades per session, with a ten minute timeout after any loss. The quiet stretches stopped feeling like wasted time once the cap made each trade feel scarce.
On your third lesson, I would add the Tokyo lunch hour to the levels worth marking. Liquidity thins noticeably from about 11:30 to 12:30 Tokyo, and a range from that window often gets tested early in London.
Roughly flat with fewer trades sounds like a decent result to me, since costs drop with frequency. Did your average loser get smaller as well, or was it only the trade count that changed?
I am planning to repeat the exercise on GBPUSD next month. Cable is the pair where I suspect boredom trades hide best, because it always seems to be moving.