Hi rtmason7,
With regard to having ‘knee jerk reactions to spikes, etc’, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing if its of benefit your trading system.
Its not a any benifit to me or mine, but thats not to say it wont be to anyone else. I think alot of people believe there is one one or maybe a few ‘secrete’ ways to make money on FX. Basically some holy grail that can never be found.
The reality is that there are probably literally millions of ways to make money on the FX market, unfortunatley [or fortunetly, depending on how your looking at it] theres almost infinate ways to lose money.
Immediate reactions to spikes from news or technicals could be very useful if your type of trading relies on split second execution, so scalpers can have trades that open and close within minutes or even less.
SL and TP based on S & R will always be subjective, like just about everything else in FX. Most things in forex can be interpreted in multiple ways, the important part of the interpretation is that it is relavant to the trade you then place.
There is little use in paying attention the major support and resistance thats hundreds off pips away if your only going to be in the trade for say 40 pips.
I dont discuss the specifics of my trading system but I will say this. Everything I do to find, place and manage a trade I base on validity and therefore I have created a system over the years that involves minimal variables and subjectivity. So simply put, I trade off the daily chart, so my trades are medium to long term, so my stops and limits are the same. ie. a trade that has the possiblity or even probabily of lasting a couple of weeks or even several needs a stop thats is appropriate. A stop like this will be based in a very similair way to the limit, taking in to regard major, long term S & R, so to do this on a Daily chart a trader would need to look at a minimum of about 6 months of price action, all the way up to multiple years.
I hope that helps.