Understanding Price Action Forex Trading
Thursday, July 28th, 2011If you want to trade the Forex market, the best way to do so is to learn how to read the price action on a plain vanilla price chart. So, no lagging indicators or trading software systems, or anything else. The very first thing you should do as you learn to trade forex, is obtain a solid understanding of the uninhibited price action on a “naked” price chart.
Why is it so critically important to understand price action trading though? To start with, price action is the “core” of any market. All fundamental and global news events result in the movement of price over periods of time. Since price action provides us with the most important view of a market, when you learn how to read you are learning how to interpret this view.
The price movement of a market is the most important aspect of it. The price of a given stock, commodity, or currency is a reflection of its current supply and demand situation, and the movement of price is the most important analysis tool we have as traders. But, a lot of new traders ignore the clear and obvious power of price action and avoid making price action trading strategies their main trading analysis tool. Many traders instead try to use ineffective analysis tools like indicators, robots, and other silly and ineffective trading “methods”.
This is analogous to going to a dentist to fix your car. When you could just go directly to an auto shop there is no reason to do that? Why then do many traders use overly-complicated price-derived analysis tools when they could just learn to trade off pure price action? The answer is probably too long to get into in this article, but it has to do with human beings being irrational and emotional when it comes to managing their own money. A lot of people think that Forex trading needs to be technically complicated or expensive. What I am telling you is that this is just not true. A lot of very successful traders including me have learned to make money consistently by using effective yet simple forex price action trading strategies.
Price action trading is really on that difficult. You should however learn to trade price action from an experienced price action trader. After you have mastered the art and skill of trading with pure price action however, you will begin to see the market in much simpler and logical terms. When you stop using indicators and other such useless trading “tools”, you will be cleaning up your charts and your mind at the same time. This is one of the first things that drew me to trading Forex with price action; the chance to “untangle” my charts and my mind of all the indicators and over-complicated B.S. that I was using.
So, while you learn forex, be sure you get educated on a high-probability yet simple trading strategy like price action. You will be learning how to trade, not just learning how to interpret a mess of indicators or trading software, so this will pay you back many times over in your Forex trading career.