The only time you use a straddle is to protect a position, and particularly margin, during volatility so that you can ride it out without realising a stoploss or margin call and subsequent dilution of margin. The com is 3 pips and cheap when you work on a 100 pip stop. I seldom use it but it has saved my bum on a couple of stupid trades where I locked in the loss and rode out the whipsaw until I could exit the straddle without realising a margin call and a big loss. Thing about a straddle is you can ride it indefinitely without risking further margin. The only other time I use it is to hedge against the big players. Since they have serious margin they are able to set very wide stops of easily 500 to 1000 pips while small players like moi cannot risk more than 100 pips unless I want to destroy my risk/reward strategy. FX is straight forward: You have a pivot point and support and resistance levels around the pivot. Usually you will find long and short stopps around these support/resistance levels and it is a given that big players will squeeze these stops because the smaller you are the closer your stops are to the trading price. Here I sometimes use a straddle to ride out the stop squeezes when my entry point is too early. A straddle is not for profit, it's a defensive strategy only.
