Best Indicator for gauging strength of any current trend?

hiya, may please kindly tell me what is three indicators name and its setting/parameters in this picture please? :slight_smile: Even if the owner of the post donā€™t reply, anyone else will know what are these three indicators name in picture please?

ā€œmarcof91
I use ADX with speeds 7 , 21 , 42 , 89 and 144. (without dmi)
I enter a trade when 89 and 144 powers on and exit when 89 or 144 power off.
While 89 and 144 are on you can add positions when adx 7 powers on.
Simple!ā€

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May Please anyone suggest on my previous post about these three indicators that can analysis in this way, also in what parameters?

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Personally, and this is my own opinion, it looks like the chart is on steroids.

There really is no need to complicate trading more than necessary, without a doubt that chart and set of indicators certainly does. Then again, iā€™m a trader who uses no indicators apart from a single moving average on a single time frame.

Iā€™m not suggesting that the above doesnā€™t work, but itā€™s highly unlikely that it does - in the long term (which is what really matters). On a separate thread here on BP someone asked the question ā€œdoes a trading approach without indicators have a limited shelf lifeā€? - the opposite is true actually. Basing entry and exit signals off of a set of indicators (even a single indicator) has a shelf life. Indicators are designed to ā€˜fitā€™ certain market conditions. This is not sustainable and certainly not an approach that you want to be taking when considering sustained profitability :slight_smile:

Best of luck @campione

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There is always the trend line, in multiple time frames. The angle might suggest the strength.

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Hiya, Thnk for reply. What is parameters for your ā€œsingle moving averageā€?
what do you mean by ā€œBasing entry and exit signals off of a set of indicators (even a single indicator) has a shelf lifeā€?
May I ask what strategy do you suggest without indicator that is sustain-ably profitable?
xoxo @RISKonFX

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ā€œThere is always the trend line, in multiple time frames. The angle might suggest the strength.ā€ Could you please explain me more in details? plz?

thnx @bobart

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Another way to gauge trend strength is to measure how far the current price is above/below its moving average (50, 100, 200 MA) in percentage terms. In general, the further price can pull away from a moving average, the stronger the current trend is.

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So, most new traders come to this ā€˜gameā€™ with the assumption that trading indicators, such as RSI, MACD and Bollinger Bands [similar to Keltner channels], to name the most popular are to be used as a primary function of entering and exiting a trade. Itā€™s no surprise either, indicators tend to provide some comfort with their predefined ā€˜over boughtā€™ & ā€˜over soldā€™ levels. Traders look at these indicators and wait for these extreme levels to be reached and use this as their reason for entering a trade - regardless of what the actual price chart is showing.

Take this a step further and an experienced trader will tell you to do the opposite. They will base trading decisions off of price charts as a primary function, and then ā€˜maybeā€™ look at an indicator as a secondary level of confirmation.

To put this simply:

New Trader: 90% of focus on indicators - 10% focus on price chart
Experienced Trader: 10% focus on indicators - 90% focus on price chart

See the big difference here, of course the percentages will fluctuate and the above is just an example.

Indicators have a shelf-life because they donā€™t always work, or rather their signals donā€™t always provide a high degree of accuracy.Indicators are derived from price charts, this is where all the data comes from that feeds into an indicator. Indicators just manipulate this data to display it in a different format. So when an indicator shows a ā€˜signalā€™ of over bought; there is no reason why price might not continue to move higher, for example in a bull market.

To be honest, the question you have asked is rather ambiguous and really captures a whole area of debate. There really is no discrete answer: iā€™m realising this whilst typing! I suppose it all comes down to experience!

Personally, as guidance, I would tell you to open a price chart up of a certain currency pair - remove all indicators, moving averages, grid lines and anything else. All you want is daily dividers showing you the day of the week. This is the best starting point anyone could have told me. Itā€™s from here that you will learn to focus on price. So take a look at why price reacts at certain levels. What was the high and the low of the previous day, how did price react at these same levels the following day, did it even react at these levels?

These are the basic building blocks - read the charts first, add the indicators second (if you really must). You will be miles ahead of the game if you can stick to this @campione

:slight_smile:

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Hiya,

It is excellent explanation. Do you mean price action trading by this explanation? Could you explain how can I professionally sharpen my skills on this? Could you please send me some website link or .pdf file of books or their names, so I can read and learn also sharpen my skills. Consider me a newbie but fast learning one :wink:

Thnx @RISKonFX

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Hello,

The following reply was from a member called Lexy - This will point you in the right direction :slight_smile:

These are the books that most helped me, and enabled me to trade profitably ā€¦

Profitability & Systematic Trading (Michael Harris)

Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom (Van K. Tharp) - an outstanding starting-point

Beyond Technical Analysis (Tushar S. Chande)

Understanding Price Action (Bob Volman)

Naked Forex: High-Probability Techniques for Trading Without Indicators (Alex Nekritin & Walter Peters)

Daytrading (Joe Ross) (this is an updated re-issue of an earlier book - ā€œTrading by the Minuteā€, I think it was called)

Trading The Ross Hook (Joe Ross) (I keep coming back to this one again and again, because itā€™s simple and logical and helpful, and the whole concept is based on one of the soundest principles of price action trading, namely ā€œbuy the dips in an uptrend and sell the rallies in a downtrendā€)

A Mathematician Plays The Market (John Allen Paulos)

Fooled By Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb - very worthwhile!)

Why People Believe Weird Things (Michael Shermer) - this book and Talebā€™s, just above, are hugely helpful - albeit indirectly - for ā€œunderstanding whatā€™s going on in forumsā€!

Trading Price Action Trends - Technical Analysis of Price Charts Bar by Bar for the Serious Trader (Al Brooks)

Trading Price Action Trading Ranges - Technical Analysis of Price Charts Bar by Bar for the Serious Trader (Al Brooks)

Trading Price Action Reversals - Technical Analysis of Price Charts Bar by Bar for the Serious Trader (Al Brooks)

ā€œWarningā€!: Al Brooksā€™ set of three textbooks is kind of badly written and very badly edited (especially considering who the publisher is), and pretty difficult to plough through, but their contentā€™s excellent, so those are a kind of ā€œmixed recommendationā€: I think his online video course is much, much better and more helpful and more approachable, but itā€™s also more expensive ($250, I think - but thatā€™s still very good value, though, in my opinion, for about 37 hours of instructional videos): https://brookstradingcourse.com/

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Thnx @RISKonFX But are these the best ones or I should read some of them and there could be some other books that can be better and can be replaced in the list?

These should be at the top of your list - without questionā€¦ only you can find what suits you - there are as many different trading styles as there are tradersā€¦

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Hiya,

Iā€™m looking for 1H or less time-frames and day trading mostly. I want to monitor position as much as I can while Iā€™m newbie.

Thnx @RISKonFX

USDJPY is in a weekly -5 year- up trend, a triangle on the daily chart for a few months, a slow, wide down trend on an hourly chart, but a pretty fast up trend on a 15 minute chart.
That just tells where itā€™s been and how it looks, Wish it told me where it is going.

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The more fools are trying to use these methods the more is fish for market whales which manipulate on this wrong perceptions easily.

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Hiya,

May I ask do you drew this lines yourself or its Technical Analysis auto detection stuff? I mean the colorful lines in the charts.

Thnx

Just drew them on Metatrader 4 chart.

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Thereā€™s something that just occurred to me about this question that you should also consider OP. I know you want to try and enter strong trends, which is a great idea, but one thing to also consider is that by the time the trend is very strong, the move is likely over. The weaker the trend is the earlier it is in the move and the more likely it will last for a while. Again, I am not saying that trying to enter a strong trend is a bad idea, but I just food for thought.

The menu of the food for thought in these discussions sometimes involves a little talking at cross purposes because the items on it tend not to be precisely defined.

Thereā€™s a danger, in this specific conversation, of confusing two slightly different points.

The first is that in general, entering a trend earlier rather than later is a better overall prospect.

The second is that in general, entering a strong trend rather than a weak one is a better overall prospect.

These two principles, each independently true and valid, can sometimes conflict.

The very best offering from the market, in this context, is to enter a strong trend after an early retracement. Not necessarily the contradiction in terms it appears, because duration is far from the only way of assessing the ā€œstrengthā€ of a trend.

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I use a couple of measures apart from the usual (i.e. price rise in %, price above MA, short MA above long MA, MA direction etc.) to confirm the strength of a trend.

I am a long-term trader off the daily and weekly charts only so adjust this as necessary to your own time-frame. These guides are for uptrends -
Strength - count the number of highs, lows and closes off the last X weekly bars which are above/below the 50EMA. This gives a numerical points total so you can rank different trends by this measure. Convert to score out of 100 if you wish.
Momentum - Look at the bar for the last completed week. See how many adjacent and preceding bars are intersected by horizontal price lines drawn from the last weekā€™s high and low. The lower the total, the greater the recent momentum.

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