Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Price Action vs. Indicators

Hi All,I started out trading blindly like many other traders. I did not know what to buy, what to sell. All i understood was to buy pairs which went up and sell pairs which went down. This worked for sometime but later on the law of averages caught up with me and i started losing. Then slowly i started learning system trading. I went around forums and other parts of the net and tried to find trading systems which worked for me and which made money for me.
I found many systems, some which worked, some which did not. But there was something wrong in all the systems that i tried out. They refused to work under some circumstances. There was no system which said that if this happens, price would rise or if this happens, price would fall.There was something in there which led to whipsaws, wrong calls etc. which made me lose money and also which made implementation of the system difficult as well as subjective.
Also, many trading systems looked very complicated to me. There are systems which ask to use 10 ema, 15 ema, 39 ema, wait till one crosses another, wait till red becomes blue and black becomes yellow or whatever. But does a country's economy (on which currency is based on) depend on indicators? Do they depend on a indicator turning blue from red? Does Bernanke say 'ok 10 ema has crossed 15 ema, lets make a statement to make it cross back again'. No...So things cannot be so complex or cumbersome. There must be something straightforward.
And that straightforward stuff is price action. Everything that happens in the market is based on price action. Indicators are based on price action. All the indicators, colors etc. are merely a reflection of the price action.
And price action is a reflection of history. It is based on history. Why do trading systems stop working under some situations? Its because of the price action. Once we understand price action and how it relates to history and how to interpret all these, then we should be able to make money consistently. Indicators tell you what has happened. No indicator will tell you what is going to happen. Indicators tell you that when lot of people buy something and the price goes up, it tells you that it is overbought. It does not tell you why it is overbought nor does it tell you where and when it will stop.
If EURJPY goes from 165 to 170 without any rectracement, its obvious that its overbought. You dont need an indicator to tell you that. What concerns you at that point is whether the rise will stop, if yes, when and where. Not that the price has risen very much which is something that you can see from the chart itself and is common sense.
Where and when it will stop will be given by price action. The speed of rise will slow down, price action and history will tell you probable points of resistance and support which in turn give points where price will reverse. These tell you when and where the rise will stop. No indicator or systems based on indicators can tell you that. They always tell you what has happened and not what is going to happen. Only price action and history can tell you those. Fibos and elliot are based on price action and history and that is why they succeed so much. They are simple and straightforward. They are based on price action and that is why they are so effective.

So learn to analyse price action. This is the best way to make money in trading.

Happy Trading!!

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Hello Karthik!
First of all my congratulations to your blog. very interesting and I'm reading it everyday.
And also good comments like today about Fibs and Elliot.
But the big question is for traders: what does Fibs and Mr Elliot telling me for the next 24 hours or for the next trading week.
to be honest: to me they appear to me as very general tools. Sometimes they are right and sometimes wrong (as so many others).
Perhaps you could give us in your daily blog your Fib figures + Elliot wave calculations.
these wave caculations are often very "subjective". unfortnately and everybody gets different figures.
They didn't help me in the past.

Karthik said...

Hey R,
nice comment. just give me time to give such things a thought and i will write something on that soon. Probably then it would help you better.

Thanks.

Unknown said...

Hello karthik,
Infact I really appreciated your contribution because it changed my way of reason since I stated three weeks ago.
Please kindly assist me on how to know when to buy or sell and the duration of leaving the transaction.I will be very happy to have your mail address.My mail is adetaye@gmail.com