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Technical Indicators – Do they really work?

In this Video:
00:16 An email from Arthur
01:11 Technical Indicators do not help make Money?
03:25 Combining Indicators for Greater Accuracy

Technical Indicators – Do they really work? Well, let’s talk about that and lot’s more, right now.

Hi Forex traders, it’s Andrew Mitchem here. I’m the owner of The Forex Trading Coach and today is Friday, the 27th of November and I’ve had an email here from Arthur, and Arthur said, “Andrew, on your next webinar, can you tell us about what indicators you use. Do you use lagging indicators like MACD and RSI or more support and resistant and pivot point indicators?”

So let me, first of all, share with you my story about technical trading because as you probably know, I am a technical trader but when I started trading, about eleven years ago, I was fascinated by technical indicators. I had never seen, really, much, you know, about them in the past. I was just amazed by how many there were, how good they looked; how varied they looked; how colourful they looked; you know they were a really exciting way of trading. And so, what I did is I studied them, I printed out information about them; I was looking online about them, trying to find out about all the different ways of using technical indicators.

The Truth About Technical Indicators

But what I then discovered over time and to my detriment is that I really didn’t make money by trading using technical indicators, the standard technical indicators that all charting packages have. I didn’t make anything. And then, over time, as things developed, I then realised there must be a way of using a certain combination of indicators to make money – has to be! So I had to find it. And I ended up using a great piece of software actually – I don’t use it today but I really did like it – it was called trade station, which I’m sure you’ve probably heard of, and trade station had the ability to have people write code for you and optimize different indicators and go back and back-test to some really good, accurate detail in various combinations. I was making an absolute fortune in my back-testing. I was, you know, making millions and millions of dollars every year through a certain combination and I was optimizing and tweaking and I’m sure you’ve done it. I’m sure you know exactly what I mean.

But anyway, the net result was, even though I had sort of, like, robots and bits of script and things written to automate the trades for me, using the optimized strategy, I still didn’t make money in real time. And so, the thing I realised then is that I needed to do something different so I started again with a blank chart and then got to study price action and added a few certain indicators onto that. But what I realised is that almost all indicators including candlestick patterns, which I absolutely love candlestick patterns, they’re a big part of my trading but even candlesticks are, really, lagging indicators. Because, if you, let’s say, have a one-hour chart on, all its doing is showing you what’s happened in the last one hour. And so, although they are the most, probably, up to date type of indicator, I use price action not just the, you know, “what’s happened” but I use the actual price itself. You know, when was the last time it bounced at that level? I use support and resistance levels, and round numbers and pivot points, which are kind of what I call leading indicators because they are there in advance of the market moving towards those levels.

Making Technical Indicators More Effective

So, to me it’s about using a combination of understanding price action, where the price has been, where it’s likely to move to and when and why. And when you have that combination put together, not only can it help you with your entry point but also, really, aid you in great detail with your stop loss and your profit target. And of course the best thing about this is not only does it work on any time frame and really any market but any currency pair – It’s not restricted to just a 15-minute chart or just the U.S./Japanese Yen (USD/JPY) for instance, and so really, I like those horizontal levels. Price respects horizontal levels, support and resistance, pivot points, etc. and using candle patterns, in combination with that. You can’t just use one indicator just by itself!

So really to answer Arthur’s question, almost all of their standard indicators I don’t use. I’ve tried them, I’ve been there in the past and done all that – don’t want to ever go back there because to me, almost all of them do not work, certainly not by themselves anyway! So, I hope that helps! One thing that I like to encourage people to do is when you understand price action, what you’re basically doing is learning an art form. It’s an art form of reading a technical chart. Just because we happen to be trading the Forex market doesn’t really matter. It’s understanding what the chart is telling us, looking at some historical data and then figuring out where the price is likely to move to and when and also potentially why. So, getting that combination is really important.

So, I hope that answers that question for you, Arthur!

One final thing I’ve got to let you know is that between the 15th and the 19th of December, I’m going to be holding a Christmas sale. It’s going to be a Christmas sale like nothing else I’ve ever held. It’s going to give a lot of people a really great opportunity to jump on board with my course.

I am not going to say too much more on this video but if you would like to be sent the link of knowing more about that, just drop me an email:andrew@theforextradingcoach.com. Send that through to me and I’ll send it straight back to you with a link of how you can find out more about this fantastic offer. It’s only going to be available between the 15th and 19th of December and it’s going to be something I’ve never done before, which is really going to help you out leading into Christmas, New Year and on to 2015, to make it such a great year for you as a Forex Trader.

So, once again this is Andrew Mitchem, from The Forex Trading Coach. Talk to you this time, next week!