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London opens the trend, New York extends it, then the New York afternoon hands it back. A real intraday bias, measured as sign-conditioned session returns, but easy to fake with bid/ask bounce.
FX runs on a clock set by who's at their desk and which forced orders fire when. The London-NY overlap is cheapest; the fixes are scheduled traps. Trade the session, not the chart.
Volatility and liquidity run inverse in FX: the moves you want come with the thin books you don't, and liquidity vanishes the instant volatility spikes. Defend with volatility-normalized sizing and a hard default to the liquid majors.
Carry pays you the yield differential and rides crowded appreciation up a smooth escalator, then gives it all back down the elevator in a risk-off panic. The killer detail: inverse-volatility sizing maxes your position right before the crash.
A floating currency is worth whatever the market believes today, with no commodity floor and no short-run fair value. Trade macro as a regime gate, and treat central-bank intervention as a jump risk your volatility estimate never saw.
A currency pair is one ratio with two ways to write it, and the priority order decides which. Get the convention wrong and your backtest silently flips half your signs and converts your PnL into the wrong currency.
Fractal dimension measures choppiness as a number: count price range over interval at two scales. D near 1 is a clean trend, D near 2 is chop, and H = 2 - D hands you the Hurst reading.
The Hurst exponent reads the same persistence axis as the efficiency ratio, linked by H = 1 - alpha/2 and H = 2 - D. But it's estimated, not computed, and drifts with data length, so read it as a profile.
Most indicators tell you which way price went. Fit a line to the window with Legendre polynomials and divide the slope by the within-window scatter, and you get a t-statistic for trend: direction plus how much to trust it.
Currencies cluster into blocs by their drivers: a European cluster anchored to EURUSD, a commodity cluster wired to specific exports, and a yield axis splitting havens from risk currencies. Trade several members of one bloc and you load one factor, not five bets.
Pair price with its quarter-cycle shift to read instantaneous amplitude and phase. The textbook Hilbert transformer lags forever; the modified version is accurate only across the cycle band, which is the band you trade.
A market turn is a reflection in time, so fold price about a candidate bar and correlate the halves. A bright, scale-persistent symmetry stripe marks the reversal, at the cost of honest, unavoidable confirmation lag.