Sentiment Indicators and Forex Trading - How to Use Retail Trader Consensus

You can find a Free Sentiment Indicator here Sentiment Indicator | ForexSwingTrading.com

A sentiment indicator is useful tool in forex trading that is uncorrelated to the price. It looks at the overall consensus of retail forex traders. Since the majority of retail traders lose money, when there is a consensus about what direction a pair is headed, it makes sense to trade in the opposite direction.

I generally look for a consensus of 60% or over. In other words if 60% of retail traders are long the Euro/US Dollar, based off of the sentiment indicator I would be looking for opportunities to go short. It’s important to remember that this is not a timing tool, so you would need to look at your technical and volume spread analysis to enter the trade.

In addition it’s important to get data from large broker. Since there is no central exchange in forex trading, there’s no real way to tell what most traders are doing. However if you use a large broker such as FXCM or Oanda, in theory they should provide a big enough sample size so that you can extrapolate what everyone is doing. Both brokers do provide such a tool however I provide Oanda’s as they also provide historical data on their tool, while FXCM does not.

As always it’s important to remember not to use sentiment indicators alone, but in conjunction with other useful forex trading tools such as time, volume spread analysis, and technical analysis.

Great info! Just to clarify though, FXCM does provide historical sentiment data to our live clients.