Start practising with a pure price chart. Focusing on Dow Theory (Higher Lows n Higher Highs = bull trend and vice versa, W’s = Up, M’s = down, etc), Horizontal Support and Resistance levels, and then perhaps trendlines.
Then add a few MAs to your chart, say 8MA, 21 MA, 50MA 100MA 200MA. You can consider these as 'Dynamic Support and Resistance levels, and view how prices interacts with these. To place any importance on any given MA, you would want to see price neatly interacting with it in recent chart history.
Then you may want to add an RSI and/or a MACD to your chart. Whatever you do, don’t use them in the retail fashion of fading overbought and oversold extremes. That will get you wrecked. Also don’t use them in the fashion that the standard retail trader who thinks he is educated uses them, by looking for divergences as opportunities to fade trends. That will also get you wrecked, UNLESS, you become very adept at choosing good trade locations to implement divergent trading strategies and that skill takes quite some time to develop. Furthermore, when you do get good at choosing ‘the zone’ in which to fade a move, using divergences can just become frustrating, as half the time, price will not diverge as it puts in a reversal, or if it does, it will do so on an unfeasibly lower timeframe…drop the timeframes down low enough, and you will always find a divergence somewhere, but what does it really mean if you find a divergence on a 5 minute chart when you are looking at a 240m chart to frame your trade idea? (it means sweet fk all). I mostly like to use RSI/MACD to gauge momentum and price momentum consistency, thus using them in the very opposite manner to which most retailers are using them…which makes sense, since most retailers lose. I will also use them in the conventional ‘educated trader’ manner, of fading moves based on divergences, but only in very certain trade locations and circumstances, which just aren’t happening most of the time,
Do all that…in that order…and when you still find that your real time trading ability amounts to net losses, then you can start adding in multiple timeframes, to assist in framing trades.
If you take what I have said onboard, then I have just helped you avoid a great deal of Red Herring bullsh!t out there, spread around and propagated by the blind leading the blind.
I can’t think of any other endeavour where so much of the ‘education’ and ‘advice’ is just plain wrong and counter productive…so do things like the Babypips FX trading course by all means, but realise that it is teaching you how to fail, and whilst you must understand and be familiar with the concepts it is teaching, you are going to have to take all that knowledge to the markets, and build up your own game plan reading in the lines in between it.
Be aware, that to get good at this takes considerable time and commitment.
