What are the most important things for Technical Analysis? Appreciating TA is not a forecaster..., rather it a contextual-izer RN
Everything I do I can say is part of TA: I do what most people don't have the stomach to do, seldom any of my trades are going in the direction I am trading. I counter-trend over 90% of the time within the structure of heavily back tested probabilities. Concentrating on risk management first and profits last. I will have defined expression of trend and will take trend trades and more than half of signals are against immediate trend. Ever see Roadrunner cartoon, huge rock is barreling down on top of coyote? I am the coyote. Ever play with YoYo? it only goes down so far? Coyote is at edge of how far YoYo should go is the premise. So trend might be up, I know on average how far the ES should retrace, so I buy it there, why have so many trades buying a breakout, that only extends risk, whereas I can buy something 2-3 points lower, risk much less and trade 5-10 more lots for same risk as someone doing breakout trades. So where many are first getting in on breakouts, I am feeding them their entries. When is shark week, LOL The deeper you study and test price, you find that the retail trader are my friends as they don't have emotional being and need that feel good signals and I need them and they need me to fed them their possible dreams.
Optionalities, Asymmetries & Convexities. Ratios, Order Flow & Liquidity. Find an Advantage. Participants aren't optimal players. Markets aren't always fair. Study, Test, Exploit.
The most important thing in technical analysis as in all other things is to know what you're doing and doing it well.
Technical Analysis will not compensate for poor capitalization, bad risk management, bad trader psychology (e.g. bad discipline, psychological problems), trading the wrong trading instruments, misuse of margins/leverage, poor at home trading environment (e.g. stressful, distractions), underestimating the real costs of trading and many other variables in a trading plan. Any one of the above variables on any given trading day will have more impact on your trading results than TA...good or bad. Simply, TA can not compensate for other areas (variables) that are lacking in a trading plan. TA is equally as important as those other variables in our trading plan.
1. Patience and discipline. 2. Do not turn TA into a gambling 3. Analysis of market and higher timeframes - to avoid trading against the general trend 4. Understanding of indicators and what exactly they show - blind following indicators, lines and numbers is easy but suicidal. 5. Price, volume and volatility - three parameters of a trend. By analyzing only one you see part of a picture only
Technical Analysis is kind of overrated, a bit, in my opinion -- people kind of throw it around like a buzz word or even some Holy Grail answer to market success. Forget about terminologies and systems and whatnot -- and just look at the market, or whatever you trade, from a clean wide neutral viewpoint. ...and it will all kind of start to make sense to you, inevitably -- hopefully.
Have a specific DEFINITIONS of a trend. Then you can decide to use TA to help time trading with the trend or against it as in mean reversion. Make sure to pick ONLY 1 trend indicator , ONLY 1 momentum indicator, ONLY 1 volume indicator!! Newbies tend to pick too many of the same type of indicator that obviously coincide. This leads to poor decisions because only a part of the puzzle is known.