Tuesday 31 January 2012

Two most popular Forex indicators

Variety of Forex indicators available on advanced Forex trading platforms can sometimes create a challenge even for an experienced Forex trader. To control the situation traders need to choose only useful primary tools in order to avoid information overflow.

Especially if you are a novice trader, we'd like to suggest you two most popular and widely used indicators to start planning your trades with.



These are: Moving Averages and Stochastic indicator. The third place goes to MACD.
While you experiment with those indicators you will discover that they can have various settings and change their accuracy and behavior depending on the time frame and currency pair you try to use them for.
Don't be afraid to experiment until you find the best combination.
Let us also suggest you some initial settings to start your experiments with.
For EMA try next:
200 EMA - famous one, is respected by price on any time frame.
50 EMA - good one,
20 EMA - again on the favorite list

For Stochastic you will find that there are Fast Stochastic, Slow Stochastic, Full Stochastic and even Stochastic RSI (the last one is a different story). Chose either Full or Slow Stochastic and try next settings:
14, 3, 3 - standard settings
5, 3, 3 - popular settings


There you go - you now have basic tools and a base to start developing your Forex trading skills and building own Forex trading system.

As you knowledge and experience grow, EMA and Stochastic indicators could eventually yield their primary posts to your new favorite tools, but even then they won't lose their importance as they never do for many experienced Forex traders.








Monday 30 January 2012

How to choose the best combination of Forex indicators

The goal is to pick the best indicators set. The challenge is to combine indicators in a smart way. This means that indicators should deliver different type of information about the market and confirm each other rather than duplicate signals.

When two or more indicators provide identical information about prices, it hardly ever helps trading better; and while Forex traders call it "signal confirmation", it is in reality could be the same type of data, and should be called "duplication", rather than "confirmation". When money is at stake, the problem becomes serious…

If you are randomly choosing indicators for technical analysis, chances are you’ll pick some with similar studies. How to avoid this? First of all traders should know what type of indicator they use. There are general categories of indicators: 
Trend indicators
Volume indicators

Momentum indicators
- Volatility indicators
- Cycle indicators


Traders should avoid using too many indicators from the same category. There is also a simple method of identifying similar indicators. By setting up chosen indicators on a chart, you will be able to basically see a similar pattern  of indicators behavior. If they rise and fall in almost similar intervals, they are most likely identical in the type of data they provide.

These simple rules of choosing the best set of indicators are used by experienced Forex traders for quality market research and trading.