Price Action: Art or Science?

From your experience with price action, what would you say price action really is - art or science?

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It seems to be an art which I am trying to convert to a science.

It helps to start with simple rules. As in art composition, nothing appears completely randomly, but you can’t jump straight in with the whole encyclopaedia of rules on Day 1.

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It can’t be purely a science, or it would automatically be "sussed out " .

Maybe you could replace, a trading philosophy instead of art form

I think if purely science, with clear rules, more traders would gravitate to it, because rules should make it easy to understand and act on it, no?

I suppose you could say it’s like reading the form/statistics of a sports competition to try and pick the outcome.

The Tec/ maths guys on here seeking a system are either

Unprofitable
Not making enough or
Just like trying to solve puzzles .

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That’s interesting. Now that you mention it, I guess they can be both… I always thought of it as art since it seems so subjective.

haha, impossible you mean?

Well it’s a subjective choice,that why lots of experience is an advantage

Maybe some of the self-fulfilling prophecy type stuff too? If you get good at understanding price action and how other traders will react to it, I think you’re definitely in a better position to make a trade.

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Yes, this is important. Trading FX is a zero sum game, which means that for every winner there is a loser somewhere on the planet.

The market contains humans disagreeing with one another, and trade order flows determine the rise and fall of the price. In a bullish trend, it’s up to us to identify when the order flow is likely to change, either by more traders adding to the trend which increases the price, or these traders closing their trades, taking profits, followed by selling traders, thus making the price fall.
A range forms when there are near equal numbers of order flow traders on both sides.

Our job is being able to identify a positive probability of being on the right side of a trade which is, in my opinion, an art, never a science.

If it was art, it might be a Picasso…

image

Science…

image

I hope that clears things up.

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Price action trading is the purest artful science there is, practiced eyes can find trades in any market, at any time.

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Tough question as I think it blurs the line of both. Any good strategy requires testing and in that vein we attempt to control certain parameters or controls in order to increase our probability of success. That process is quite scientific in nature. Having said that there is an element of intuition with trading that falls outside the realm of science and more into art.

haha , nice.

I can concur with this having come from a horseracing background :racehorse: :racehorse:

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It’s art with scientific principles (trendlines, S&R, supply & demand zones, etc) providing guidelines.

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Now, that’s a spoiler mate. :face_with_peeking_eye:

If you’re able to do somethign without being able to write down your rules for what you’re doing and predict what you will do tomorrow explain your whole system to a blind person, then it’s an art. Maybe you’re a very good artist, but it’s still art.

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As answered by ChatGPT

“Science provides a knowledge base of ideas that are helpful, perhaps necessary, evident in price action; however, trading price action is a performance art that also requires experience, intuition, creativity, and a host of other artistic elements. In fact, great price action traders often seek balance between the trading virtues.”

it’s just statistics