News & Economic Data
The hour of the US payroll release moves the euro twice as far as an ordinary hour. But half of those releases barely move it at all — and that unpredictability, not the size, is what makes holding through one a different bet from the one you thought you were taking.
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A scheduled release is a moment, known weeks in advance, at which a large number of people act on the same new information at the same time. This paper does not teach you to trade it — it teaches you to decide, before the day starts, what your position will be doing when the number lands.
One day is an anecdote, so here are the last ten releases in the five-minute history, sorted by what the release bar actually did.
So holding a position through a release is not taking on "more volatility". It is swapping a trade whose behaviour you have measured for a coin flip whose two outcomes are nothing at all and five times your normal bar, in a direction nobody can predict. Over forty-two releases the 15:00 hour on the euro averaged 46.5 pips against 22.5 on every other day — twice the range, and still no way to tell in advance which kind of Friday this one is.
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