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 →
Only price pays. In trading, emotions and egos are expensive collaborators. Our goal as traders is to capture price moves inside our time frame, while limiting our drawdowns in capital.
The longer I have traded, the more I have become an advocate of price action. Moving away from the perils of opinions and predictions has improved my mental well-being, and my bottom line. It also makes it easier to create and adapt to trading rules.
“WE LEARNED JUST TO GO WITH THE CHART. WHY WORK WHEN MR. MARKET CAN DO IT FOR YOU?” – PAUL TUDOR JONES
In developing a trading system of your own, you must begin with the big picture. First, look at the price action and then work your way down into your own time frame. You need to create a systematic and specific approach to entering and exiting trades, executing your signals with the right trailing stops, setting realistic price targets and position sizing, and limiting your risk exposure. Relying on fact, rather than being tossed around by your own subjective feelings, will insure your long term profitability.
Continue Reading →
Successful trading is 90% waiting and 10% execution and that’s the exact reason why trading is so challenging. When people think about trading, they imagine a well-dressed Wall Street guy who angrily shouts at his monitors while being on the phone with London, Hong Kong and Tokyo simultaneously to place the next big killer trade which will make him a lot of money. Dead wrong!
In this article, I will show you my approach to trading and explain how you must trade calmly and in a relaxed state of mind if you want to be successful in this business.
I call myself a reversal or early trend trader which means that I look for established and mature trends that show signs of exhaustion. The general trading literature suggests that new traders start with the trend following approach but from my experience I have seen that the reversal approach does make more sense to most traders.
Reversal trading has a bad reputation because people believe that it’s all about trying to predict the next market turn before it happens which couldn’t be further from the truth. Reversal trading is often nothing but early trend following trading as we will see.
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 →
