Asian session spread markups on EURUSD

[Shadow Trader]

During Tokyo hours, EURUSD isn't dead, but it's no longer the deepest pair on the board. Liquidity providers that make it tight in London can quote wider, and retail brokers sometimes add their own cushion on top because the flow is lower and the risk of being picked off is higher.

The result is a spread that is double the London figure at the very time many scalpers think the pair is calm and therefore easy. Calm doesn't mean cheap.

A quick check: pull a one-minute average spread by hour for the last month. For many brokers, the curve looks like a bowl. Highest at rollover, drops through Asia, bottoms during the London and New York overlap, then climbs again.

If a strategy targets 4 or 5 pips, a spread that doubles may remove a quarter of the edge. In a 1 or 2 pip style, it can remove all of it.

Pairs that belong to the region, like USDJPY and AUDUSD, often have narrower relative spreads in Asia than EURUSD. So the quiet-looking pair may not be the best one for the session.

One more wrinkle: the spread isn't flat across the Asian hours. It tends to be widest right after rollover, narrows once Tokyo is fully active, and widens again as the session winds down toward the London handoff. A single "Asian spread" number blurs that shape.

Which pair offers the most consistent cost during Tokyo hours on your account?

[Amanhasnoname]

This is something I learned the expensive way. When I started out I traded EURUSD in the evening after work because it looked calm and orderly in the Tokyo hours, and I couldn't understand why my small targets kept coming out thinner than expected. When I finally pulled the average spread by hour, it was more than double my London figure for most of that time.

I moved to USDJPY for those hours and the cost dropped noticeably, even though the pip value made the comparison a bit awkward at first. AUDUSD was better than EURUSD too, but less steady, with jumps around the Australian data releases.

The point about the spread not being flat across the session matches what I saw. The first hour after the reset was the worst on every pair I checked, and the last hour before London was also wider than the middle of Tokyo. These days I only trade between roughly 01:00 and 05:00 London time if I'm trading Asia at all.