Do Indicators Show The Entire Story In Trading?
All right guys welcome back to another episode of at the table by Urban Forex I have here with me on the panel here Armand tuning in from Bangkok. Hello. All right we also have Lucas all the way from Malaysia Kuala Lumpur. Hey guys how's it going? And Ian all the way from where in Australia, is it the Melbourne sunshine coast Australia sunshine coast Australia there you go there you go all right everybody Brisbane right or is that the airport north north of Brisbane yeah northumbria that word is always it's hard well yeah well welcome guys welcome today we have a fun topic we got a lot of people tuning in live so those of you guys who are tuning in from your Spofity or Google Plays or anything like that just to let you guys know that right after we do these Live podcasts which are recorded and you're listening to them we also do a webinar following up on this topic where i go onto the screen and i display certain things that we talked about so if you want more information or want to see the webinar that was followed by this podcast the link will be below the podcast all right guys so today we have a topic about indicators actually this topic was brought to us by one of the students saying i know in the past Navin you have mentioned that indicators are bad and indicators won't help you but are there any indicators that are good and more importantly sometimes when i see your screen i do see some indicators on there so what's the significance of that why are you using them right so let's talk about indicators today what are indicators how important are they to your trading success and what indicators are actually effective or is there even any strategies that you can you can use around a particular indicator to see if you can make some profitable trades so Armand let's start off with you and let's find out what you have to say about this well indicators um it's it's something in my journey that i kind of skipped because i was immediately with with urban forex but i do know a lot of people are really attracted to indicators and i suppose what attracts people to it is that it's an indication or an indicator is an indication of when to take a trading action so it's it's almost like a shortcut or maybe it is like a shortcut and yeah i i understand why people are attracted to it but i i know from first first-hand experience or you know from i still saw indicators on the charts that that's not the entire story you cannot just look at an indicator and think okay that's my entry or that's my exit or that is the trend i want to trade because what does an indicator say about that trend you still have to do the research you have to put in the leg work and to do the analysis right and then then you can maybe use an indicator right so yeah that's that's my short summary of how i see indicators okay okay Lucas what has been your experience with indicators and do you have a favorite one that you used to like perhaps let's say um or one that you actually felt like oh yeah that's the one yeah i think i've tried multiple indicators before but to just piggyback on what ammo was just saying um you know he was saying that um it's an indication to do something on the charts i think i'm well speaking from my own personal experience when everyone starts off trading at least for me it's really hard to define what actually looks good what you actually want to do on the charts so having an indicator to you know indicate or you know guide you towards a certain action um makes a lot of sense for someone who's new coming into the markets for me i think in the beginning i've tried fibonacci um yeah that was pretty interesting because it's a lot of mumbo jumbo behind it you know some traders swear by it some traders you know say it's [ __ ] but um yeah is that that's something i used before ATRs volumes all kind of stuff you gotta be careful man yeah they're fibonacci people throw eggs on you man you gotta be careful you just you just offended a cult you know i didn't say it's not good i've tried it before so yeah okay cool cool Ian what's what's your experience been and well what do you like in terms of indicators in fact do you have a positive side of indicators that you can shed light on are they actually even useful yeah i think they can they can be useful i mean i i don't want to just you know say the same thing over and over again in the right context they they're definitely useful and i think similar to Lucas i started out on the on the indicator front and and that is actually a good thing because in some ways that it it got me into it if you know what i mean like it made something that is maybe perceived to be overly complex or maybe a bit confusing to begin with um i don't mean to make it say it dumbs it down but it just it simplifies it enough that like hey i can do this you know i had you know plenty of winning trades when i first started just using indicators it just i found my consistency wasn't you know where it was what where it needed to be using my indicators that's why i steered away i guess eventually so okay so from from the sounds of it all of you guys are are basically saying that's where your journey began um so let me talk about that like if that's where the journey began should a new person well and and the opposite side of it you're saying that's where the journey began but that's not where you are anymore so you're no longer perhaps using indicator anyone using indicators anymore any of you guys oh if volume is considered indicator okay yeah okay so probably not in the sorry volumes M.A.s ATR yeah okay okay so probably not in the sense of how you used to use them for entries and exits and all that i think it's not the focal point of how we trade anymore i think is more what it is they're there and they're there to be used in circuits but we just they're not the main focus okay so so actually that's a very interesting so let's talk about how effective are indicators for for example a new person coming into the industry you know should they use indicator trading strategies would that work for them or should they avoid it all together or are they doomed and they have to go down that route I think Ian brought up something really interesting up there where where he said you you come into the market and what you see on the screen might be very confusing or you know at least not not clear on when you have to do something with it so when do you have to trade and indicators can be a nice entry point into discovering um how the market operates but it's it's only as an initial stepping stone i'd say so i think it's a good question to ask whether it it's necessary for a beginner or not because it's just part of the journey and it's it's yeah i don't know if it's a necessity in the journey i'm not sure as well but based on what Ian was saying um someone who starts off using indicators you know they may try things here and there and then if let's say they find that things are not consistent you know if they're able to take it one more step further and think about why things aren't consistent then the next journey begins but if if that person let's say just stops there and say oh no this indicator doesn't work let me just move on to another indicator um then you know it's going to be they're going to be going in circles for quite some time absolutely absolutely yeah absolutely i think i think the best example that i can give around this is indicators are like a bully you can get rid of the bully and be like all right no big deal or you can experience having that bully standing up to that bully and then saying i am now stronger because of the presence of the bully was there you know what i mean it's it's sort of like you learn to be better because he was there so you're look you're finding a good positive light from the darkness kind of thing so it's not necessarily a 100 bad bad thing i don't know what do you guys have to say about that would you guys agree with something like that so like all the ma's 100 ms 50ms 20ms all pointing down stand up to the bully and then just i think you misread the analogy you need a better indicator for that analogy you know it's like it's like how how we need bacteria to learn how to fight it kind of thing rather than get rid of all sort of bacterias and make sure that we never deal with it ever again it's one of those things it's like you you need it to be better so let's talk about needing an indicator what indicators have made you better in your journey what indicators were so effective initially and was so profitable that using that indicator and you were like i think i can build a career off of this this is a wonderful guide for me to just step in and lift off from here what indicators did you actually like for me i i remember i think the first one that really worked for me was just the simple moving average crossover i i think i was one of the first ones i traded where you know you wait for the moving average to either cross above or below yeah and it worked really well in the right market like i didn't know the different market states or anything like that at point in time but like you know when a market was hardcore trending down or up you know it worked really well and i had a lot of consistent wins in a row yeah but as soon as that that trend at the time i turned around or started to slow down then all of a sudden you know that's where the consistency went out the window so it was a simple easy one to use but again at the time i didn't know that had to also be used in a in the right perspective so yeah i think i think we've all used moving average crossovers at one point would you guys say so yeah and all of you guys in the room here who are listening in live have you guys used moving average crossovers as a sort of a trading technique yeah okay tons of yeses coming out yeah what about you guys here and on the panel have the rest of you guys use it and Lucas and Armand yeah yeah even i did yeah it's it seems like it's a nice way to get started with the market and saying all right that that sounds about right you know if it crosses over i'll do a buy but at no point did we all stop and question ourselves like really is it that easy to make money you know yeah it sounds it sounds so logical like if the moving averages crossover means you know it's turning around or if the RSI is over so overbought means and the chart is over seems like it's overbought then you know it's going to go down seems so logical on the surface that sometimes it's difficult to just question it if it continues to make money yeah okay so let's let's take it further and saying through your evolutions you go through that moving average crossovers and we use have any of you guys use MACDs MACD yeah right yeah divergence yeah moving average conversion diversions there's that one have you guys used RSI relative strength index yeah pivot points pivot points was big for us it was huge pro trading strategy and urban forex pivot points we dominated that industry for a long long time when it comes to pivot points and then fibonacci comes along and i i went deep in fibonacci i went hardcore to a point where as i started studying fibonacci and then i started looking at like it's on pineapples it's in the universe it's on the cone and then i'm like well then it's in my markets i just can't bloody pinpoint it but it was a wonderful journey i absolutely loved it it's like oh look at the accuracy of that 50 pullback 61.8 was it 61.8 61.8 and then 38.6 it was beautiful it was beautiful i i thought fibonacci that mathematician is the golden key how many of you guys have felt that before yeah for sure and i think that's that's how many indicators actually operate or work for us where they work very often like pinpoint like whether it's that crossover moving average or divergence or fibonacci or any any of those things right they work like pinpoint but then sometimes they don't work or they stop working for a while and then it's like you've just given the call the golden key back and now you're there with no skills that you learned from any of that because you are relying on that indicator and you're like okay so i wait until it works again and how long do i have to wait and when can i trust it so yeah it's uncomfortable to put your your faith so to speak in in indicators in an indicator yeah and that's absolutely true right it's not just the fibonacci it's in my personal journey also any indicator i use i felt that's the one that's the one it's like finding a girl and then you're like oh she's the one and then like three months later like no she's definitely not the one i'd like to see how this analogy works when we start talking about using multiple indicators at the same time yeah that's that's never the answer you can get a lot of trouble like that but okay one of the guys in it in the chat room here um let me get the name right Harvey in in the live chat is actually saying bollinger bands like what about bollinger bands, have you guys used bollinger bands? I haven't used them beautiful beautiful thing also it's a it's a way to understand if things are going out of balance and they bring it back to balance it's basically if you want to put in a nutshell without going into all of the standard deviations and all that stuff of course by me even using that word many people like ah university close that close this podcast it's like i don't want to hear those words ah this reminds me of calculus like no way i'm listening to that but to keep it simplified it's a band that looks like a sandwich right where there is the upper bun the lower bun and then the lettuce in between so that's all it is and then prices as they go up to the upper bands prices come back to normal if they go down to the lower bands prices come back to normal so it's sort of like a thing saying you're too far out get back to normal you're too far out get back to normal that actually gave me one of my edges where i trade parabolic moves so it's not all bad it's not all bad through the use of bollinger bands time and time and time against now i don't use them i don't even look at them but it gave me an edge an extra edge that i use in my you know everyday trading when i when i do parabolic mean reversals okay you know one of those edges that you know i i you guys know about this Ian and Lucas at the prop firm when we do these parabolic moves what what are we actually doing we're bringing price back to normal and there's a certain way we trade those and so i learned that from trading bollinger bands over and over again until some golden key came out of it for me and then i'm like all right well time to move on from bollinger bands but it was very useful for me so again you know it's not all bad right indicators no i think for market observation they can actually be really useful yeah especially especially until your eye like is has viewed the charts long enough that because over time even just without the indicators you can just okay that thing's outside the bollinger bands you know you don't need the actual bollinger bands on there anymore but to begin with it's really helpful right just to kind of give you that perspective you know until your eye just naturally sees it without the indicator on there so correct correct now let me ask all of you guys this one thing forget the indicators let's say you're coming onto a chart right you come onto your computer screen and you're looking at a chart and there is a movement that goes up 100 pips right when the green candles that you see that are going up 100 pips how many of you guys have ever done this in the past where you're like imagine i bought at the bottom and i closed at the top that 100 pips would have made a lot of money right we've all done this in the past right at least a billion times a day we've all done this every time so since we've all done that now but here's the interesting part though an indicator cannot tell you that in advance it can only tell you that after the fact so then our dream that we're looking to oh i wish i bought it from the bottom and sold it at the top an indicator can never get you that information which is kind of weird which is kind of weird so if we come to a realization much later into our careers of like the indicator cannot tell us the future you know i see Siva saying this in the live chat indicator shows the past i can't see the future that's very very true that's very very true and it's very important to really take that in and understand that logic that an indicator cannot show that path another one from Leroy he's saying is news also an indicator now have you guys seen news channels where there's a word on the top it has L-I-V-E not live live right what is news a news is genetically not genetically a news is technically reporting the past you cannot report anything live the moment you have to process it the reporter has to process it speak it out of his mouth it is already the past the moment it reaches your ears it is the past you can only report the past you can't report the future okay an indicator is the same thing it can only talk about the past so our whole point is well then do i need the past to understand the future now it's like are indicators philosophical it's like is that what's going on are our indicators telling us the meaning of life the more and more the more and more this conversation continues it feels there it's we're sort of writing a plot for a movie it's like indicators of forex coming to your home screen soon it's the past what you need to know what the future covers yeah oh that's a very good one Casey is saying what about the weatherman yeah that's very interesting a weatherman is the only person that is using the indicators to actually predict the future that's a very good analogy actually a weatherman is the only indicator that we like to use however when i say the word weatherman it's also a dark spot for many people because when they listen to it i'm sure anyone tuning into this podcast is probably swearing at their weatherman saying my weatherman is horrible he can never predict rain or sunshine i live in London they can never predict when it's going to happen so some people really hate their weather man in their own cities and they're like no my weather man is horrible he's not good but now if you you know many places they'll go down to it's going to rain down to the minute some weather some weather stuff is actually very very good they can actually predict it to a certain level of accuracy like that so there there it goes like not all indicators are bad can you use indicators to sort of predict the future so how about that what do you guys have to say about that well to an extent they're like you can forecast which is the same what the weather man does you can forecast okay but isn't trading all trading forecasting technically yeah you're trying to position yourself right with a risk assessment and you know you do the whole analysis absolutely absolutely so then fast forward down later into the journeys we got indicators on top of indicators on top of indicators to filter and extra filter and extra filter it out to make sure there must be one golden combination there must be a setting i'm not using right i should be using 30 moving average not 29. ah you yeah and it might work once yeah if i show you guys a i don't have it right now but if i would have shown you guys a picture of my basement where i was living in when i first started trading i have papers and papers and papers all across my rooms like a mad scientist going through all right i'm going to do this i'm going to use an indicator and i'm going to use this indicator to filter it and i'm going to do it only between this time of the day scratch throw it away that doesn't work okay i'm gonna do it all day long but i'm gonna filter it with the MACDs that doesn't work i'm gonna do this and this and then i sometimes i see something actually works and i'm running around the rooms like there i did this somewhere where is it i'm looking for that paper like i'm sure i i made a strategy around this where is it it just goes on and on it's an endless loop it's an endless loop i got stuck in that cycle for like a couple of years of years how long how long were you guys stuck in the indicator rat race well luckily for me not too long because shortly after that um i came on board with urban forex and started to learn from there okay so you went straight to price action after that okay some of the guys in the chat are saying Alberto is saying three years Cavall is saying long long time okay Ian what were you saying yeah i was probably a year or so at least i remember spending weekends just back testing on on software like you'd find this strategy you back test all weekend long you know oh i found it and then it you know like you say it works for a while and then it doesn't so then you get discouraged and you go at it again yeah back testing so yeah and then and then and then the next piece happened you remove all the indicators like all right i'm clutter free i'm just going to read prices and then when you're looking at the trial like hmm this candlestick must be a pattern maybe it tells me something then your candlestick charts become an indicator technically you're like all right i'm not using an indicator technique but it is an indicator the candlestick pattern so it becomes if it becomes a fun game that where you evolve but it's a fascinating journey and i think it's this journey i personally believe if there's someone new starting off go through it experience it if you're looking to avoid it you should experience how an indicator works at least to a certain extent you should know how you feel around it you should get an idea of i bought because my indicator said set to buy but then i bought very late as soon as i bought markets went against me why is that happening why is that happening time and time again what does that even mean that sort of experience is something it's like indicators like a little mini teacher they can teach you a lesson part of the journey i think you learn from your mistakes more so than you learned from yeah good thing yeah i think i think it's it's good where you know the the trader will be able to understand what the majority are doing at certain point in time on the charts so once they're able they are able to learn what the majority are doing and if you know the majority are wrong footed at one point they can take advantage of that on the other side so yeah yeah well i see that sense i see i see Roshan in the chat typing indicators are a lazy man's tools period well that sums it up and if that's the case man i was lazy for like two plus years non-stop it was a very very tough journey and yeah and that is a sum up of indicators in in one sentence so you know it's nicely said Russian that it does happen that way and we don't realize it until either someone tells us or we come to an own realization that what am i doing what am i doing we're just going in circles but it's completely understandable that it's attractive to people because you know why would you put in the work if you don't have to that's that would be stupid absolutely absolutely i mean is it isn't don't we do that with family as well if we did so much hard work to let's say build an empire make some money and then your child grows up and he's like i want to go out with my friends i want to travel you wouldn't say no go make your own money and then travel like you'd like okay do it because i don't want you to struggle and suffer the way i did to get to this point you know so it's understandable that if there is a shortcut why not you know it's not wrong like it's understandable why people are attracted to it um so it's only natural yeah so having that said having that said shall we move this into a webinar and talk about what indicators do i currently use um and the same things that i currently use are the same ones used by Lucas and Ian also in the prop firm how we use it why is it useful and at to what extent is it used is it used to make an entry is it used to make an exit or is it used to just understand the markets i can go over that all in the upcoming webinar so we're going to end the podcast part right here for those of you who are listening to the podcast again the link to the webinar will be below this video those of you guys who are here live and listening in um you can just stay on board we're gonna switch over from a podcast directly into a webinar or i will share my screen and we'll go deeper into all right let's take a look at a deeper look at indicators all right guys thank you so much for you guys here on the panel Armand, Lucas and Ian it's always a pleasure to have you guys speak to you guys in a little bit cool enjoy everyone enjoy enjoy cheers
2021-10-18 07:46
