Whether you trade part time because you have another job or other activities in your life, long-term trend strategies are not ideal. You want to take the limited time that you have and focus to make it a productive time. Trading binary options on Nadex may be the perfect answer for you as they are available 23 hours a day and have capped, limited risk, where your margin is your risk amount. You can trade with a smaller account and binaries offer short-term expirations.
To get the best return on your investment of time and if you are trading at night, you need to know which markets are open and moving at that time. You may have heard that the US Indices are the markets to trade, but you heard it from a friend who is able to trade in the morning when those markets are actively trading on the East Coast. At night, the US Indices are quiet with little movement. You want to focus your energy on markets with movement.
Because of the time difference, the markets that move during the evening hours are on the other side of the world from the US, namely Australia and Japan. It is morning there, so you can look for Forex pairs that involve AUD and JPY like AUD/USD, USD/JPY, EUR/JPY, GBP/JPY and AUD/JPY.
Nadex offers binary options with several expiration times. It comes down to personal preference. If you are looking for fast-paced trading, you can trade five-minute binaries. Two Forex pairs are offered in the evenings that fill the above recommendations. They are AUD/USD and USD/JPY both with five-minute, as well as intraday and daily expirations. Twenty-minute binary options are not available during the evening hours.
There are many strategies you can use when trading part time. Maybe you can only trade a couple of hours before work or on your lunch break. During a one-hour lunch break, there are almost 80 options available on binaries alone! If time is tight, you may want to consider using a directional scalp trade on five-minute binaries. Because each strike is only three ticks apart, a small movement can mean a quick $20-30. It’s in and out, really fast.
If the market is experiencing a choppy, volatile condition, you could trade a strangle strategy. That’s where you sell a lower OTM binary and buy a higher OTM binary. This strategy expects one side to lose and one side to profit, although both could profit if there is a retracement.
With slow, range-bound market conditions, you could try using a binary butterfly strategy. This employs selling an upper ITM binary and buying a lower ITM binary. Profit is achieved as long as the market expires anywhere in between the bought and sold strikes.
Always be aware of any news events as a tenth of a tick can mean the difference between you winning or losing your trade.
You don’t have to have hours to trade. You can trade with a limited amount of time.