A setup by pair grid: which of your setups work on which pairs

[Fairman]

A setup by pair grid: which of your setups work on which pairs

If you trade more than one setup across more than one pair, it helps knowing which combinations actually work. Results often vary a lot. A setup that's good on EURUSD might be mediocre on GBPUSD and bad on gold.

The grid is simple. Setups down the side, pairs across the top. In each cell, the number of trades and the average R. A pivot table in a spreadsheet does it in a minute if your journal has columns for setup and pair.

What usually shows up: some cells are clearly positive, some clearly negative, and many have too few trades to say anything. The clear negatives are the useful part. If a setup consistently loses on a particular pair over a decent number of trades, you can stop trading that combination and lose nothing.

The thin cells need patience. With only a handful of trades, a cell can look great or terrible by chance. I'd wait for at least twenty or thirty trades in a cell before acting on it, and even then treat it as a lean rather than a certainty.

It's also a good check on your strategy assumptions. If you thought a setup worked across all pairs, the grid might show it's really carried by one or two of them.

[Fairman]

Session can be a third dimension. Some setup and pair combinations might work in London and not in New York. Adding session as a filter on the pivot table shows that, but it splits the data further and the cells get thin quickly. I'd look at setup by pair first, then check the strongest and weakest combinations by session if there are enough trades. Splitting everything by everything at once usually just produces noise. Start simple, and only add more splits if the main grid shows something worth investigating. Keep it readable.

[Fairman]

Removing a weak combination is easy to decide on paper and harder in practice, because the setup still looks valid on that pair in the moment. Writing the decision into the trading plan, like 'no fades on GBPJPY', makes it easier to stick to. It also helps to note the date of the decision and keep tracking those skipped setups for a while as missed trades, so you can check later whether the decision was right. Sometimes a dropped combination turns out to have been fine, and the tracking shows it.

[FXS Prop Desk]

The grid often shows that a few combinations produce most of the profit. Dropping the weakest combinations can improve results quickly without changing the setups themselves.

It needs enough trades in each cell to be meaningful. If a combination has only five trades, the result is mostly noise. Waiting until each cell has at least 20 or 30 trades before drawing conclusions avoids dropping a good combination too early.

[Shadow Trader]

Take a month of spread logs, group them by hour of the day and day of the week, and plot the average as a grid of colours. Cool colours mean tight spreads, warm colours mean wide.

A typical grid for a major pair shows a broad cool region from the London open through the New York afternoon, a hot stripe at the rollover hour, warm patches around the Asian open, and a gradual warming on Friday afternoons.

Look for the small features. A narrow hot line at the top of certain hours points to scheduled releases or bar-close activity. A hot square at one specific time and day might mean the broker adjusts spreads then.

Compare pairs. A strategy that trades EURUSD and GBPUSD together may find that one cools earlier than the other, which shapes the session window.

The grid also gives a direct way to compare brokers. Two heatmaps side by side show where each is strong or weak.

A strategy can then be scheduled around the cool region with confidence, and the rest of the grid becomes a list of times to avoid.

What patterns showed up in the first heatmap, and did any surprise?

[Fairman]

Spread and volatility differences between pairs can explain a lot of what the grid shows. A setup with a small target might work on EURUSD, where the spread is tight, and fail on GBPJPY, where the spread is wider but the target is the same in pips. Adjusting targets and stops to each pair's ATR before filling the grid gives a fairer comparison. Otherwise you might drop a setup on a pair where it would work fine with sensible sizing, just because it was tested with settings that suited a different pair.

[Fairman]

How many trades do you need per cell before trusting the grid? With five setups and eight pairs, that's forty cells, and spreading a few hundred trades across them leaves some cells nearly empty. I'd only draw conclusions from cells with at least twenty or thirty trades, and treat the rest as unknown rather than bad. Grouping similar pairs, like the dollar majors or the yen crosses, can give enough trades per group to say something useful. The grid is a guide for where to look, not a final verdict on every combination.