Trading with the trend is trading with the flow. When the prevailing trend is up, why would you want to look for short entries when buying might result in much smoother trades? Many amateur traders, even when facing a long lasting trend that has been going on for months, can’t stop trying to predict reversals, whereas they could have made so much more money by simply joining the trend.

But even if you are not a trend-following trader, you can combine the concept of trading with the higher timeframe trend with your regular trading approach: you start on the Daily timeframe and see if the trend its up, down or sideways and you use that information on your lower, execution timeframe to time your trades (read here: how to perform a multi-timeframe analysis). To be able to correctly read price action, trends and trend direction, we will now introduce the most effective ways to analyze a chart.

Intro: The different market phases

Before we start going over how to identify the trend, we should be first clear what we are looking for. Markets can do one of three things: go up, go down, or move sideways.

The picture above shows you the three possible scenarios and how markets keep alternating between the phases. But knowing what has happened after the fact is always the easy part. The hard part is finding out what is currently happening when markets are moving in real time and the space on the right is empty – that’s where this article comes in. To be clear, the article is not meant to show you how to identify trading entries, but to understand price and trends in a more efficient way.

Continue Reading →