When people ask me for “the best currency trading strategy,” they usually mean a setup. Buy here, sell there, put your stop under this candle. I understand the question. But the strategies that actually hold up for Toronto traders have less to do with a specific pattern and more to do with how you prepare, when you act, and how much you risk when you do.
So this isn’t a list of ten setups. It’s how I’d approach strategy if I were starting again in this city, with a real schedule, a real job or business, and the market hours we actually live with.
Strategy starts with a plan, not a prediction
The first thing I tell students is to stop trading opinions. A lot of what passes for strategy is really prediction: “I think the euro is going up this week.” Maybe it does. But an opinion isn’t a plan, and the market doesn’t care what you think.
The best traders I know don’t try to predict. They build high-probability plans and leave room for everything they can’t control: surprise news, their own mistakes, and the simple fact that nobody knows what happens next. A plan says: if price does this, I’ll do that. If it does something else, I’ll do nothing, or I’ll do something different. You’re not guessing the outcome. You’re deciding your response ahead of time.
That sounds simple. It’s the hardest habit to build, and it’s the one that separates people who last from people who don’t. If you’ve never written one out, our guide to building a trading plan is the place to start.
You can plan from anywhere
Here’s something that surprises people. Most of my planning doesn’t happen in front of a trading desk.
Planning can happen any time you have a few spare minutes. On the subway. On a lunch break. At the gym between sets, on my phone. I’ll open a chart, look at where price is relative to the levels that matter, and decide what I’d want to see before I take a trade.
Then I set price alerts at those levels, usually at key support and resistance, and I get on with my day.
This matters more in Toronto than people realize. Look at the clock. The London session opens around 3 a.m. Eastern. The busiest stretch, when London and New York overlap, runs from roughly 8 a.m. to noon, right when most people are commuting or at work. If your strategy depends on staring at a chart through those hours, it only works for a small group of people. A strategy built on planning and alerts works around your life.
When the alert goes off, you decide again
An alert isn’t an order to trade. It’s a prompt to look.
When price reaches a level I planned around, I check whether the trade still makes sense right now:
- Time of day. An alert at 2 p.m. on a Friday is a different situation from one at 9:45 a.m. on a Tuesday. Liquidity and follow-through change through the day. Our guide to the best time to trade forex in Toronto covers which hours tend to deliver.
- Momentum. Is price arriving at the level slowly and losing energy, or slamming into it?
- Volatility. Is the market calm, or is a data release about to hit?
- Whether I still want it. Plans are made with information from earlier. Sometimes that information has changed.
Sometimes I take the trade. Often I don’t. Both are fine. The point is that the decision was prepared calmly, and the final call is made with fresh eyes instead of in a rush.
Trade with the bigger picture, enter on the small one
Here’s how I actually trade. I mostly trade EUR/USD and gold (XAU/USD). I look at the higher timeframes to decide direction, then I drop down to the 1-minute or 5-minute chart to time my entry, in the same direction as the higher-timeframe trend.
The logic is simple. The higher timeframe tells you which way the bigger money is leaning. The lower timeframe lets you get in with a tighter stop, so the trade risks less if you’re wrong. Fighting the higher-timeframe trend on a 1-minute chart is one of the fastest ways to give money back.
If you’re not sure how the timeframes fit together, our article on top-down analysis walks through it step by step.
One caution: low timeframes are fast. They’re not where beginners should start. They demand a clear plan, quick execution, and very strict risk limits.
When there’s no trend, trade the levels
In a lot of cases, the higher-timeframe trend is simply sideways. Price is bouncing inside a range, and there’s no clean direction to follow.
That’s when I switch approach. Instead of trend entries, I wait for price to reach pivot points or well-defined support and resistance, and I scalp off those levels. The idea is to take small, quick moves away from a level where price has reacted before, rather than hoping for a big breakout that may never come.
Pivot points are calculated from the previous session’s high, low and close, and many traders watch them, which is part of why price often reacts near them. Support and resistance come from where price has turned before. Neither is magic. They’re simply places where a reaction is more likely, which gives you a reasonable spot to plan a trade and a clear place to be wrong.
The key is recognizing which kind of market you’re in. Trend strategies lose money in ranges. Range strategies lose money in trends. Much of the skill is just being honest about which one is in front of you.
What YouTube strategies leave out
Most students arrive wanting to learn a strategy they saw from a content creator. And I get it. Those strategies look clean:
- Wait for support and buy, wait for resistance and sell
- Buy low, sell high
- Buy the breakout
- Buy the pullback
- Buy the fair value gap or the break of structure
These ideas sometimes work. The problem is that the video ends right where trading begins. It rarely explains why the setup should work in that particular spot, how often it fails, how much you should risk, or how to calculate your lot size and exposure.
That missing part is the strategy. Two traders can take the exact same setup and get opposite results, purely because one risked 1% and the other risked 10%. If you don’t know how to size a position in Canadian dollars, our guide to position sizing for Canadian traders is the most important thing you can read before trying any setup. And our piece on how much to risk per trade explains why there’s no single right number.
Putting it together: a simple weekly routine
If you trade around a job in Toronto, here’s a structure that works:
- Weekend: look at the higher timeframes for the pairs you trade. Decide whether each is trending or ranging, and mark the key levels.
- Set alerts at those levels. Write a line or two about what you’d want to see at each one.
- During the week: live your life. Plan in spare moments, adjust alerts if the picture changes.
- When an alert hits: check time of day, momentum, volatility and the calendar. Take the trade only if it still fits your plan.
- Size every trade from your stop distance and your risk limit, every time.
- Friday or Sunday: review the week’s trades against your plan. What did you follow? What did you break?
Notice that only one of those steps is about the entry itself. That’s not an accident.
The bottom line
The strategy that works for most Toronto traders isn’t a secret setup. It’s a plan made calmly, alerts that bring you to the chart at the right moments, entries aligned with the bigger trend, a different approach for sideways markets, and risk calculated before every trade. Get that structure right, and almost any reasonable setup becomes workable. Skip it, and even a good setup won’t save you.
Disclosure: The author, Mike Harding, teaches the mentorship program at Academy of Financial Markets in Toronto. This article is educational and is not financial advice. Trading foreign exchange and gold on margin carries a high level of risk and may not be suitable for all investors.