Hi Rick, there are a couple of reasons why I settled on...

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    Hi Rick, there are a couple of reasons why I settled on H12:

    1. Firstly I started on shorter timeframes (M30, H1) and there were 2 reasons I moved away from them - 1 is that the average "gross profit margin" per trade could be increased by moving to a higher timeframe since slippage/spread becomes a smaller % of average bar size (which I base risk on) and 2 was that the shorter timeframes have a high dependence on the time of day (regional session times) and I wanted to take this complexity out of my setup analysis
    2. Secondly, I started out before my EA journey using Ctrader where H12 is available, and so when I was looking at higher timeframes I looked mainly H12 & Daily and out of those 2 timeframes I found what I think is an important difference in favour of H12, and that is typically in most markets there is a statistically significant difference in many characteristics and performance between the AM bar and PM bar. It is often chalk and cheese between those 2 times of day so much so that I think it provides a statistical advantage to exploit (to the extent that except for the AJ and NJ I am really only trading the AM bar as a setup bar, i.e. taking trades during the PM bar, while the AJ and NJ appear unique because they are purely Asian focused pairs that they are the opposite). Also, when I was trading manually, I felt that checking for setups 2x per day was not a much bigger time burden that checking 1x per day for Daily setups.
    3. Since I moved to EA trading on MT4 and was disappointed to find that it doesn't offer H12, I had to "construct" my H12 bars using groupings of 3 x H4 bars, which works just fine. And the added benefit is that since I have been watching my EA's (which while they are based on H12 charts for highs & lows, they actually run on M1 to execute a range of functions) I have been able to watch how price interacts with the H12 highs & lows and recognise those kind of patterns that I mentioned earlier.

    So while I have started with H12 I do plan to expand to other timeframes including multi-timeframe strategies (1 of my 4 live EA's is actually a H4 strategy related to 1 of the 3 H12 strategies) - in a way where they sort of work together in a complementary way.

    Cheers, Sharks
 
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