Price Action Only

[brownturtle 10]

Are there any traders out the that trade price action alone. ie not MA's or MACD's or Stochastics etc

All the are lagging indiactors and can only be completed once a price bar is fulfilled.

Does anybody out there just trade the bars (or candles ) themselves , maybe only using Pivots ,S/R or predermined levels prior to trading?

Regards

Anthony

[Bearbull 10]

Why don't you look into the Wyckoff forum

[diablo272 10]

Yes, many people trade like that, using only price action and S/R. Just make note of some S/R levels (or pivots like you mentioned) and see what happens when price reaches those levels.

[TraderBG 10]

Yes there are many traders who don't use indicators myself being one of them. Although I do slap an occasional MA or two up, these aren't used for signaling entries. I also heavily depend on S/R levels but not the ones based on calculations. But, aside from price, I rely on volume more than anything else.

[brownsfan019 17]

I recently picked up Suri's book and it has very little indicator talk in it. Highly recommend if looking to trade patterns, price action or whatever you want to call it.

 

http://www.surinotes.com/

[saurabhkurichh 10]

thanks for sharing friends

 

Bump: thanks for sharing friends

[Aikitrader 10]

Suri Duddella's book is a great read! Focuses on trading price patterns and after all, price is the key ingredient in the market :-)

[DbPhoenix 42]

Are there any traders out the that trade price action alone. ie not MA's or MACD's or Stochastics etc

All the are lagging indiactors and can only be completed once a price bar is fulfilled.

Does anybody out there just trade the bars (or candles ) themselves , maybe only using Pivots ,S/R or predermined levels prior to trading?

Regards

Anthony

 

Since you're posting in the Beginner's Forum, I assume you're a beginner. This thread (http://www.traderslaboratory.com/forums/f34/learner-thread-5033.html) may be of interest to you since he is also a beginner and working on much the same thing. Perhaps the two of you could keep each other motivated.

[tblack 10]

Pure price action is the only truth. Unfortunately the best trades are often the trades not taken. I use other indicators simply as a road map of when not to trade. I do however miss some trades.

[jonbig04 10]

Are there any traders out the that trade price action alone. ie not MA's or MACD's or Stochastics etc

All the are lagging indiactors and can only be completed once a price bar is fulfilled.

Does anybody out there just trade the bars (or candles ) themselves , maybe only using Pivots ,S/R or predermined levels prior to trading?

Regards

Anthony

 

PA only for me.

 

Lagging indicators :thumbs down:

 

I posted this in another thread the other day:

 

Sometimes you will hear people say that the market is random, and it seems that way if you aren't paying attention to PA and only PA. The reason is because while the world changes all the time (eg the market isnt the same now as it was 50 years ago) the fundamentals behind PA don't change. Price is our most direct link to supply and demand. Supply and demand are fueled by 2 immutable human behaviors: fear and greed. So in essence, by trading PA you are attempting to read and anticipate the natural reoccurring human behaviors that drive the market every day. Please don't make any mistake, I am no expert...Im just a noob, but when you get into PA the market starts to make sense in so many ways, its nothing short of amazing. The random numbers on your screen start to develop an ebb and flow and I am starting to see how the market really speaks, day in and out. We don't want to be like everyone else who are out there with crystal balls trying to predict the future. We don't predict, we react to what price is telling us (or try lol)

 

If you can learn to read this in price itself, you will be way ahead of all those lagging indicators who, to me, merely tell you what has just happened.:crap:

 

Indicators are based on price a lot of the time. I think PA traders invented indicators simply as as shortcuts. I don't know this for sure, but I would bet traders trading PA (what else was there before indicators?) created indicators not really to show them the trades, but just as shortcuts...shortening the time it took to identify and project a concepts of PA they understood and could identify themselves if they wanted to. But now so many traders looking for the easy buck think they can simply pile on the indicators without any regard to the REAL meaning behind them. I don't think all indicators are evil, I simply think you must understand price before you attempt shortcuts and bundle up and quantify certain elements with indicators.

 

I do, however, know for a fact you don't need them.

[ME2 10]

:)Hello Anthony, I hope that you are very well. I trade Price based on volume, so far this month I am up about 18% on my account as of yesterday Dec 5th 2008. The hardest thing about trading price based on volume is the waiting, that is if you choose to trade in harmony with the trend. I use price, volume, and trendlines. I am too dumb to figure the rest of that stuff out, it is too confusing and will wrap your head in knots. My whole view of this thing after going bust using all of the other stuff is KISS( keep it simple sexy). I hope that helps, if not write to me and I will tell you anything I can.

[samhollander 10]

Can someone give me a discription of price action & how it predicts change of market direction without using indicators.

 

Thanks

[Bearbull 10]

Can someone give me a discription of price action & how it predicts change of market direction without using indicators.

 

Thanks

 

Start with this link:

http://www.traderslaboratory.com/forums/f131/riding-the-wyckoff-wave-3739.html

 

Study that, then go to the wyckoff forum and study all the threads, blogs etc, you should have enough info. to understand something about price action via price/volume relationships.

[atto 20]

Can someone give me a discription of price action & how it predicts change of market direction without using indicators.

 

Thanks

You can learn quite a lot here. (Tip: Start at the beginning)

[ME2 10]

Hey Sam, I hope that you are very well. Price action is just the way that price moves, either up or down. When you first start your trading day off, it helps to draw a trendline, so that you know the direction of the market. Please look up trendlines if you are unfamiliar with them. Now if you trade intraday, your trend will change, so be aware of that, but you want to trade with your dominate trend. You can find your dominate trend on your daily chart. If your bars/candles are slanting down you are in a downtrend, if you are in a downtrend you want to wait until price climbs to a really good high (this part comes with lots of patience and practice), then when volume supports it, sell too. I am sorry because I know this sounds very confusing. What I do is look to yesterday's high insuring that I have identified my downtrend, then wait until price get near that price, then I sell, but you only want to do that if volume is high enough on the sell(the volume is going up as price is falling down). Now you will have retacements all day long(price is going to bounce up and down, try not to let that unnerve you, you will get use to it)In other words you may be on the side of the trade where you are making profit, then you look and you are out of profit again). Price does that and confuses and scares poor traders to death, it still frustrates me at times, because I want to hit my TP(take profit) and be done .

 

With all of the planning and patience in the world, there are no 100%, but as a trader, you want to put as many odds in your favor as possible. I mentioned a downtrend here, but the opposite is true in an uptrend. In an uptrend on your daily/weekly chart, you want to buy the lows. It makes no sense I know, but this is market logic at work. You also have range bound markets and the way to trade them is to get the high and lows of yesterday, or of that morning, then buy at support(the bottom) and sell near resistance(the top of your daily price range). With proper volume and your confirmation bar/candle. I hope i haven't confused you more, the more I type, the more I realize I might need to explain if you are totally new to this game. If I can make this any clearer, you are welcome to write to me, and I will try:) Oh, also they have some good beginning videos on youtube. Yourtradingcoach.com is good and he is also availiable on yourtube as well. Lance is a great guy and pretty straight forward, then of course there are the tradeguider videos which are DA BOMB. I think these visuals will help you out a lot more than this attempt at an explaination by me. Good trading to you

[jonbig04 10]

Can someone give me a discription of price action & how it predicts change of market direction without using indicators.

 

Thanks

 

I know this may seem pointless now, but try to get in the mindset of listening to what the market is telling you, then making your move...as opposed to "predicting", and then being angry when you prediction is wrong. It may seem like the same thing, but to me this mindset engenders a kind of calm, indifference that keeps a lot of emotions in check.

[DbPhoenix 42]

Trading by price -- and "volume" -- requires a perceptual and conceptual readjustment that many people just can't make, and many of those who can make it don't want to. But making that adjustment is somewhat like parting a veil in that doing so enables one to look at the market in a very different way, one might say on a different level.

 

One must first accept the continuous nature of the market, the continuity of price, of transactions, of the trading activity that results in those transactions. The market exists independently of you and of whatever you're using to impose a conceptual structure. It exists independently of your charts and your indicators and your bars. It couldn't care less if you use candles or bars or plot this or that line or select a 5m bar interval or 8 or 23 or weekly or monthly or even use charts at all.

 

Therefore, trading by price and volume, or at least doing it well, requires getting past all that and perceiving price movement and the balance between buying pressure and selling pressure independently of the medium used to manifest or illlustrate or reveal the activity.

 

For example, the volume bar is a record of transactions, nothing more. The volume bar does not "mean" anything. It does not predict. It is not an indicator. Arriving at this particular destination seems to require travelling a tortuous route since so few are able to do it. But it's a large part of the perceptual and conceptual readjustment that I referred to earlier, i.e., one must see differently and one must create a different sense of what he sees, he must perceive differently and create a different structure based on those perceptions. As long as one believes, for example, that "big" volume must or at least should accompany "breakouts" and clings to this belief as ardently as he clings to his rosary beads or rabbit's foot or whatever, he will be unable to make this perceptual and conceptual shift.

 

If you can work your imagination and use it to travel in time, you will have a far easier time of this than most. Imagine, for example, a brokerage office at the turn of the 20th century. All you have to go by is transaction results -- prices paid -- on a tape. No charts. No price bars. No volume bars. You are then in a position wherein you must decide whether to buy or sell based on price action and your judgment of whether buying or selling pressures are dominant. You have to judge this balance by what's happening with price, e.g., how long it stays at a particular level, how often price pokes higher, how long it stays there, the frequency of these pokes, at what point they take hold and signal a climb, the extent of the pokes, whether or not they fail and when and where, etc., all of which is the result of the balance between buying and selling pressures and the continuous changes in dominance and degree of dominance.

 

One way of doing this using modern toys and tricks is to watch a Time and Sales window and nothing else after having turned off the bid and ask and volume. But this wouldn't do you any good unless you spent several hours at it and no one is going to do that. Another would be to plot a single bar for the day and watch it go up and down, but nobody's going to do that, either. Perhaps the least onerous exercise would be to follow a tick chart, set at one tick. Then follow it in real time. Not later, but real time. Granted this means a lot of screen time and only a handful of people are going to do it. But those few people are going to part that veil and understand the machinery at a very different level than most traders.

 

Once this is understood, the idea of wondering -- much less worrying -- about what a particular volume bar "means" is clearly ludicrous, as is the "meaning" of a particular price bar or "candle". If it is not understood, then the trader spends and wastes a great deal of time over "okay so this volume bar is higher than that volume bar but lower than this other volume bar, and price is going up (or down or nowhere), so...".

[BlowFish 10]

Using price action as a basis to make trading decisions is possibly one of the most straight forward and simple ways to trade. Understanding how and why these things are as they are takes a bit more work and the perceptual shifts that DB talks so eloquently about. There are few (if any) better places to help you understand why (and the how for that matter) than the Wyckoff area here.

 

Just as it is not necessary to understand Newtons universal theory of gravitation to collect apples from the foot of a tree, it is not necessary to understand why markets move as they do to capitalise on those movements. There are numerous good resources that demonstrate different possible 'hows' without paying to much attention to 'why'. If you are anything like me you'll want to know why though to some that is not important.

 

A short comment on prediction. It is not necessary to predict to trade successfully, in fact the emotional attachment you are likely to get through trying to predict can be detrimental to trading without bias. The way most people apply price action is they see how it has behaved in certain areas in the past (finding potential areas of support and resistance if you like). They then monitor (in real time) what price does when it reaches that area again. There is a degree of anticipation but it is more about what is happening now than what might happen.

 

In a nutshell 1) use historical price action to give potential trade areas. 2) Use 'real time' price behaviour to determine if you have a trade in those areas. Pretty simple if not easy

[Flojomojo 10]

Besides the Wyckoff thread, that I highly recommend, I have two threads saved in my favorites:

 

All you need is a chart

and

Trading with PA "No Indicators"

 

You might also consider getting the ebook of DBPhoenix where he sums up his years of forum activity. Its a nice structured way to get you started and absolutely packed with information!

 

Have a great time reading!

Flojo

[samhollander 10]

Flojomo, best example of PA that i could understand.Problem with new traders [like me], jumping around & spending time learning a new system[ which I am currently doing] & poor results. So i revert back to 3 MA, Stoch. MACD, & volume.Its seems everyones system has winners.Contrary to the 90% losers. Just read all the testimonials.But from what I have seen over the past 2 years is it seems PA is the answer.

[Flojomojo 10]

Flojomo, best example of PA that i could understand.Problem with new traders [like me], jumping around & spending time learning a new system[ which I am currently doing] & poor results. So i revert back to 3 MA, Stoch. MACD, & volume.Its seems everyones system has winners.Contrary to the 90% losers. Just read all the testimonials.But from what I have seen over the past 2 years is it seems PA is the answer.

 

http://www.traderslaboratory.com/forums/f30/five-levels-of-becoming-a-good-4253.html

 

I too find myself falling back into stage two from time to time when frustration is creeping in...but that only reminds me that I shouldn't be there and work to shake it off and look foreward once again.

 

“Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.” --Winston Churchill

[ZOSO 10]

I think consistently trading profitably with PA is one of the toughest undertakings for a trader. Even if you have your eyes on a level of SR, you still have to analyze the PA trade-by-trade as price approaches those levels before you can make a decision and that requires a skill set that few can master. The alternative is to simply place your order where price SHOULD behave based on prior patterns, but you are taking a leap of faith. It is much harder to trade this way than using a systematic set of rules with indicators.

 

Although I'm not enamored with indicators, I find they have value. What all traders need to get over is the desire to pick the top and bottom of a move and be happy getting a decent slice in between. Indicators in the proper configuration can work in this regard despite the inherent lag.

 

Trading PA only has become sort of a club among its proponents who raise their noses and snub those "inferior" traders who haven't dropped their indicators and stepped up to the "superior" PA methods. There are many ways to trade profitably, don't lose sight of that, and don't let anyone tell you their method is better than yours if you are successful. Trading is like putting on a glove, it's not one size fits all.

[Kiwi 16]

Although I'm not enamored with indicators, I find they have value. What all traders need to get over is the desire to pick the top and bottom of a move and be happy getting a decent slice in between. Indicators in the proper configuration can work in this regard despite the inherent lag.

 

Trading PA only has become sort of a club among its proponents who raise their noses and snub those "inferior" traders who haven't dropped their indicators and stepped up to the "superior" PA methods. There are many ways to trade profitably, don't lose sight of that, and don't let anyone tell you their method is better than yours if you are successful. Trading is like putting on a glove, it's not one size fits all.

 

As I read this I liked the tone of your post but found my face screwing up. A little like the pain some seemed to feel when the CarCo bailout failed (I went short spi and stw to my immense pleasure). But now the momentum has eased and posting time is here again.

 

What you're saying has elements of right (hence my agreement) but critical elements of wrong (hence my uncontrolled facial spasm).

 

Lets agree that picking tops and bottoms is not the easiest way to take money - so I don't do it either. Its an unfortunate ego driven habit that most pickers would be better of abandoning.

 

Lets agree that indicators can work. But here came the first facial spasm. You see its not just about lag. Lag puts one in late and out late which is a problem. But it can be overcome. The other bigger problem is that there is a reason for the lag - its the smoothing. And smoothing removes good learning opportunities. You see, when I watch the price bars I am looking for length, which ones get more or less volume than in the last push, the time between bar breaks and the general form of the retracement. In these subtleties lie the difference between 50% win rates and 80% win rates. So when your stoch or rsi or dblestoch or whatever presents a clear clean actionable signal - it does it at the expense of smoothing out valuable information.

 

In the next paragraph you talk about raising of the old nose. And it does happen a lot. But do you know why? Often its because the more experienced trader who has long since moved thru the indicator zone goes "oh god, another newbie passionately extolling the virtues of <subst indicator here>; I wonder how long it will take for them to get past it? Will they ever? Is it worth pointing things out? Or even trying?" And up goes the nose.

 

The trouble with indicators is this:

- it takes you away from observing how price behaves at or near or on the way to support and resistance

- it takes you away from observing how volume might or might not give you clues

- it takes you away from noticing the subtle nature of retracements, their progression thru a trend, and the little differences between, say, SPI and STW.

- it removes information

- it adds lag.

 

Now, I've fueled indicatoritis and still do sometimes when I get bored and write a little code. I've written 1000s of lines of indicator code for Sierra Chart and even added a new one in a moment of boredom earlier this week. But. I don't use them. The day my trading really started to improve was the day I started removing them one by one. The finer improvements have included better and better observation plus gradually honing my key trading tool - me!

 

It ain't easy. But it can be done. And there don't need to be any indicators involved.

 

 

 

Confession: I still have one ema, because I'm too lazy to draw trendlines and channels and I just love to take that ema bounce that follows a larger consolidation in a trend.

[Guest MRC & Co]

 

Trading PA only has become sort of a club among its proponents who raise their noses and snub those "inferior" traders who haven't dropped their indicators and stepped up to the "superior" PA methods. There are many ways to trade profitably, don't lose sight of that, and don't let anyone tell you their method is better than yours if you are successful. Trading is like putting on a glove, it's not one size fits all.

 

It's because the guys who trade off price action are the ones who are LOADED!

 

Yet to meet anybody close to them yet!

[jasont 10]

When considering PA, in my opinion it is important to make PA in relation to something. By that I mean I have only found price action to be valuable in relation to volume, support and resistance areas, trend lines, moving averages, vwap's, market profile... the list goes on. Price action is like your driving your car and everything else is the street signs.

 

If you use support and resistance areas, you are looking to see how price reacts at those areas and inbetween those areas. They are your reference points and once you have those, price action becomes a little easier. The same can go for Market Profile, I am a relative noob with the MP but from what I understand, one might use the yesterday's value area, should we be trading within it today, for their range based trading. When the market moves out of that Value Area they might utilize their trend based trading.

 

In past experience, looking at price action without looking at it in relation to something else leads to a lot of confusion. I found myself driving around in the car without looking for street signs to tell me where I was and was lost. It has only been since I have looked for directions with the street signs that I have understood price action.