USDJPY on intervention-watch days: why staying flat makes sense

[FXS London Scalper]

When the yen nears levels where Japanese officials start talking, there's a good case for stopping USDJPY and the yen crosses entirely. Not reducing, stopping.

The reasons:

• Actual intervention has produced moves of several hundred pips in a short time, as in 2022 and 2024. No scalping stop survives that cleanly; the slippage alone can be several times the planned loss.
• Rumours and verbal warnings can cause sharp spikes with spreads blowing out.
• Technical levels stop working, because one very large participant isn't trading off the chart.

A practical trigger: when the Japanese finance ministry starts using stronger language in public comments, such as "excessive" moves or readiness to take "decisive action", yen pairs come off the list until things calm down, and EURUSD and GBPUSD take their place.

A worked example of the risk: a 0.5% risk trade with a 6 pip stop. A 200-pip move through the stop, even with only partial slippage, can turn that into a loss many times the plan. One such event can erase months of scalping.

Does anyone keep trading the yen in those weeks? If so, how do you size it?