The purpose of this thread is to teach you my price action strategy. If implemented properly, this strategy can give you consistent profits in the forex market.
There have been other good price action threads on these forums. But from what I can see there is nothing ongoing at the moment that will provide a new trader with a step by step guide for success.
Please follow along as this thread develops.
Lesson #1
What is a price action strategy?
This trading strategy is a trading technique that allows you to make subjective trading decisions based on price movement. As an example, I look at a candlestick chart and base all trading decisions solely off of that candlestick chart. If I were using a price action technique while trading stocks, in theory I would not even need to know the name of the stock or anything about the company behind the stock in order to decide if I was going to make a trade. The candlestick chart tells me everything I need to know. So when it comes to the forex market, when using this strategy you can ignore news events, interest rates and whatever other fundamental information is out there. Let the charts speak to you ha.
So before we go to our next lesson, I recommend you make an account on trading view (it’s free) and open up some candlestick charts.
Nice thread u av going on here cos I av since recently been taking trades based on price action.Will surely keep up with this thread to broaden my knowledge.
PREPARE YOUR CHARTS
Now that I gave you a little bit of information on what price action is, lets start getting into my strategy. The first step is to prepare your charts. On whatever website or broker you are using, open all of the charts that you want to potentially trade. i have the AUS/USD listed below. As you will see, this is a naked candlestick chart on the DAILY timeframe.
Quick fact for beginners: Being on the daily time frame means that each candlestick correlates to one day. Look at the picture below. Since each candlestick is one day, the chart shows you many months of price movement. You can set the time frame of your chart to any time frame you would like, but I stick to the daily timeframe for setting up my charts. Now I won’t go into details at this time, but when making trades I do look at 4 & 8 hour time frames. It should be noted that price action signals are more reliable when they are seen on longer time frames. For instance, a signal seen on a 1 minute chart is no where close to reliable as the same signal seen on the daily chart. More on all of that later.
So now you have your chart open and you are on the daily time frame. It is time to add support and resistance lines. I’m going to assume anyone reading this knows what a support and resistance line is. If not, a simple google search or the Baby Pips school can explain it. I use both horizontal support/resistance lines as well as diagonal support/resistance lines. From my personal experience, I do believe that diagonal support/resistance lines are more reliable than horizontal lines. The combination of both together is more reliable than either of them by themselves. Below is my AUD/USD with support/resistance lines placed. This ideally should take you only a few minutes to add these lines.
So go ahead and put these lines on all of your charts. We will go to the next step in the next lesson
BEFORE YOU LOOK AT PRICE ACTION
The next step in my trading strategy is to make sure you are following some simple rules.
#1. Trade in the direction of the trend. NEVER EVER trade against the trend. It’s that simple. Looking at the AUD/USD chart from my last post, you are only looking to buy the AUD/USD.
#2. Do not trade when a major news event is coming up. I will do a separate post on this at some point, but for now just understand that major news events cause volatile and unpredictable markets.
Daily FX has a great economic calendar that tells you all of the major news events that are going to be occurring. They rank each news event as having low, medium and high importance. Making a trade involving a currency that has an upcoming news event labeled as high importance is a big no no for me. Just as an example, the US Non-Farm Payrolls is a MAJOR news event that occurs on the first Friday of every month. Large price swings can occur during this event. Therefore, I don’t get into a trade involving the USD before that news event occurs. Also, if I am in the green on a trade but it remains open as the non farm payroll news approaches, I consider cashing out and taking profits. Its never any fun when an unexpected piece of news information causes your winning trade to go shooting in the wrong direction and you get stopped out.
Again, I will write a more detailed post in the future about news events, which ones to avoid and how long in advance you should start planning to avoid them. But for now, just understand that my price action strategy is a strategy that gives accurate signals and major news events cause uncertainty.
#3. Risk/Reward. Again, I will give a more detailed post on this soon, But for now, you should know that the minimum risk:reward you should aim for is 1:2. Meaning if I’m making a trade that is risking $5, the minimum goal for winning that trade is $10. Preferably you find chart setups that allow you to set your take profit at 1:3 or 1:4.
More to come soon.
And this is where you’ll fall short of ever becoming a long-term successful forex trader. The more you learn how the market works the better you’ll become. Ignoring fundamentals is like driving a car with no brakes.
And BTW - price action is a lagging indicator. The market sentiment is already in place.
You see Steve, you lose all credibility when your first comment is “you’ll fall short of ever becoming a long term successful forex trader”. That implies many things that you actually know nothing about.
You are correct about one thing. The more you know, the better you’ll be. But my trades I’ll be teaching are based solely on the candlestick chart. The candlesticks are telling me when and where to enter.
Let’s ignore this guy and continue on with the thread
You should av at the very least read through the whole topic before u jump on the criticism wagon.
Pls refer to his Fourth post on BEFORE U LOOK AT PRICE ACTION, LESSON#2 for further clarification.
Ps-Price action is not a lagging indicator.
What you should call lagging are the indicators depending on it…Cheers.
I’ve been thinking of the best way to explain my trading strategy. I think the best way will be to post example trade setups as they arise.
There was a recent setup on the NZD/USD a few days ago that looked like a good entry point. So lets go through it. I will say that the first few weeks of the year I haven’t been trading so I did miss this entry.
Here is the chart
This is the Daily chart for NZD/USD.
#1. As you will see it has been in an uptrend since the beginning of November. Therefore we would only be entering a BUY order. I ABSOLUTELY DO NOT trade against the trend.
#2. I placed my support and resistance lines on the chart. I have 3 horizontal support/resistance lines and 1 diagonal support/resistance line. The support/resistance lines are a key component of this strategy. I only enter a trade when price action setups occur at a support/resistance line. And from my experience, I have had a better win percentage when the trade is performed on a diagonal support/resistance line rather than a horizontal.
#3. Once I have my support and resistance lines drawn, I am waiting for price action to occur at those lines.
So what happened on the chart above. Focus on the last 8 candles. Price got to a high and then it started coming down. It just so happened that the 3rd red candle down approached not only the horizontal support line but also the diagonal support line. I really like when this happens as I have had good success when I end up entering a trade in this situation. Now I just need a signal from a candle to enter a buy position.
When looking for that candlestick signal, I will look at the DAILY, 8hr and 4hr time frames. By looking at time frames as low as 4hrs, it can allow me to catch the trade at the absolute best price, allowing me to make WAY MORE MONEY on the trade than if I waited for the signal to occur on a daily chart. But beware, price action signals on a 4hr chart will have a higher loss rate than when taking the signals on the DAILY chart.
So on this specific trade, a signal appeared on the 4hr chart as shown below. Look at the candle with the “X” below it.
This is called a “hammer”. And it occurs exactly where it needs to occur in order to be considered a valid signal. Now if you want more information about a “hammer” candle you can read about it in the baby pips school as they describe all the different candles. But basically this candle is a BUY signal. I always like to see that the filled in portion of the candle is above the support line with the tail extending through the support line. That is exactly what occurred here.
So to recap, we have an uptrend with a price action candle (the hammer) that gives a BUY signal and it occurred at both a horizontal and a diagonal support line. This would be an entry for me. But wait, there is more…
I am not big on using indicators. But the one indicator that I do use is the Fib Retracement indicator. Let’s add that in to the daily chart.
Look at that. The .5 Fib retracement occurs basically at the same place as the horizontal resistance line. This is just another piece of information that says to enter at this position. The Fib retracement levels that I like to see are the .38, the .5 and the .61 levels.
I like to use a point system, just to track if my higher point trades actually are more profitable or not. This trade gets scored as the following
WITH THE TREND: Yes
At Horizontal Support Line: Yes = 1 point
At Diagonal Support Line: Yes = 1 point
At Fibonacci Retracement Support Line: Yes = 1 point
Price Action Candlestick: Hammer = 1 point
Volume: will discuss this later. Can get 1 point from this as well
Since I didn’t discuss volume, we won’t count that point here. So this gets 4 points out of a possible 5 points. I do think this trade has a high probability of success.
I guess we will see how this trade would have played out. Currently it is up a little bit. In my next post I am going to explain the entry/exit strategy on this trade. There are multiple ways to do it on this trade and each way has their own risk:reward. I’ll have to do the math, but just eye balling this trade, if I took the most aggressive trade strategy it could end up giving you returns of 20x your risk. I will explain all of this in my next post.
Thanks for sharing the information. I have also been using price action strategy in my trades. In comparison to other strategies, I find it easy to judge price movements.
