The only indicator I use is the Stochastic Oscillator and I’ve found two ways to utilize it.
The first being as confirmation that the price is now trading in a certain direction and it’s now safe to enter in that direction too, this is for HTFs like your daily to montlhy charts.
The second being as an indicator that gives a clue/sentiment that a trend reversal is about to occur, I use the oscillator like this only on the 1H-D1 charts.
So, for me indicators are not crap at all, its all about how you use them.
Yup. There’s not much to say after this…
I stopped using MAs, but maybe it was too soon to stop using them. Who knows?
There are people who use them, and those who don’t. It’s about the person, not the tool.
Perhaps, all indicators are crap, but Moving Averages still work. I would cancel all indicators but leave MAs instead. The market always rebounds from them.
i think the people we see hating on indicators comprise six main groups (with quite some overlap between them, admittedly):
people trying to use for forex indicators that were designed for other kinds of trading, such as stocks, which of course behave very differently (Ichimoku is a good example of this)
people trying to use on much faster charts indicators that were designed for daily charts (Ichimoku is an example of this, too, but arguably it actually applies to most indicators)
people trying to use indicators to decide when to enter trades rather than for more obvious and productive purposes (like identifying trends and directional biases)
people who believe that if they use multiple indicators, they’ll necessarily have a higher probability of a successful outcome if some of them appear to “confirm” others (they might, and then again they might not, and it’s a complex subject!)
people who try to use indicators for purposes very different from the purposes for which they were created (PSAR is perhaps the classic example of this)
people who don’t do their own research and backtesting, but rely on what people on Youtube and other online sources are telling them
people who subscribe strongly to most of those six perspectives are mostly pretty unlikely to be using indicators in a way which will make them profitable, in my opinion, and some of them end up “hating”, as you mentioned
for myself, i find moving averages useful as a quick/easy/lazy way of identifying trends, and i sometimes find ATR useful to give me a quick estimate of volatility
“always” is quite a dangerous word, in this context, but even if that’s true, it’s a very long way indeed from that observation to using it to trade profitably
prices “always” eventually revert to a moving average, too (the “mean reversion theory” or “mean reversion fallacy,” depending on your perspective!) but of course the catch is that by the time it does so, the moving average itself may have moved so much that the trade is still a big loser when the price eventually crosses it
There’s a kind of unconditioned hate toward indicators, because majority of traders think that they are useless and oftentimes lag behind the price changes.
But the main, in my opinion, is to be more far-sighted and don’t use them as standalone instruments.
Variety of indicators are perfectly mingled among each other and the main is to define which combination will be the most useful.
Use mix of indicators combined with some other variables like macroeconomic data, economic calendars, even though they aren’t usually takein into account for short-term purposes.
That’s a good question, because indeed tons of traders treat indicators biasedly, meaning that they believe they should indicate the future price movements and when then find out that the majority of them appeals to past prices - they get disappointed.
Supply and demand zones showcase not only the demand and supply on the particular asset in the past, but also in current situation as well. If the price gets several times too close to the support or resistance level and always pulls back, then there’ll be a breakthrough, and either bears or bulls eventually win. Analyze volumes, too.
One of the myths of trading is that indicators are future predictions of the market that allow traders make fool-proof trades. But indicators are only depiction of previous performance statistics and trends so when there isn’t much success in using indicators, people tend to feel somewhat betrayed by it. Indicators only give people insight into all that is available to a price - its performance over time. A less painful way of using indicators which would end in reduced hate towards them is for starters understanding that they are not a 100% way of predicting the way the market goes. People can however study insight from multiple indicators to make more informed decisions when making trades.