Whether you are a price action, a pattern, an indicator or whatever trader, if you are able to identify strong price levels on your charts, it can greatly improve the quality of your trading.
Instead of taking signals and trades all over the place, the better trades usually happen at key price levels. Those strong areas of interest show that buyers and sellers are concentrating at those levels and they can be the starting or turning points for new price moves and mark new trends as well.
If you are a breakout trader, you need to find areas that can lead to strong breakouts, if you are a trend-following trader you must identify pullback areas or trend continuation points, a reversal trader looks for key turning points and a range trader should focus on well-developed ranges with clearly defined price levels.
Continue Reading →
Bullish engulfing, as well as, bearish engulfing are two of the most powerful price action candlestick patterns. I have mentioned them briefly in my Candlesticks article, but now I want to put more emphasis on those two. More than that- bullish engulfing and bearish engulfing patterns are deeply ingrained in my trading strategy. Let’s explore what those two candlestick price action patterns can help us achieve.
INTRODUCTION– Bullish Engulfing and Bearish Engulfing- Probably The Best Price Action Candlestick Patterns
This article will be divided into two parts- first part will deal with the bullish engulfing pattern; the second part will go over the bearish engulfing candlestick pattern. History repeats itself, so I believe that the best way to read the market is to know what happened in the past. Bullish engulfing patterns are a confirmation that more buyers want to join the uptrend. On the other side, a bearish engulfing pattern gives confirmation for more sellers joining the short side. Let’s move to the first part- the bullish engulfing candlestick pattern.
PART 1– Bullish Engulfing Candlestick and Price Action
What is a candlestick?
Before I move to the real part, I would like to remind you once again what is a candlestick.
A candlestick contains an instrument’s value at open, high, low and close of a specific time interval.
Let’s say we are looking at a daily candlestick. It does contain the value at open, high, low and close on any particular day.
Continue Reading →
Price action is among the most popular trading concepts. A trader who knows how to use price action the right way can often improve his performance and his way of looking at charts significantly. However, there are still a lot of misunderstandings and half-truths circulating that confuse traders and set them up for failure. In this article, we explore the 8 most important price action secrets and share the best price action tips.
#1 Support and resistance zones are better than levels
Support and resistance is probably the most popular price action concept, but only very few traders can actually make money with it. The reason is often very simple, although it’s not as obvious at first glance.
Most traders just use single, horizontal levels when it comes to trading support and resistance which look great in hindsight but fail during live trading. The reason is that singles lines are no effective way of looking at price movements. Creating support and resistance zones is much more effective when it comes to understanding price.
The screenshot below shows that the trader who just uses a single line either misses trading opportunities when the price does not reach his lines. Or he gets thrown out during volatility spikes; the trader who uses zones instead can filter out the noise that exists in the zones.
I hope that this concept doesn’t have to stay one of the price action secrets much longer and more traders will start using this technique.
Continue Reading →
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 →
