I have been watching this forum for many months and gathering info and tips. I believe the following tools are the best for active traders. Interactive Brokers for brokers eSignal for market data WizeTrade for swing trades LongBull.com for day trades
I am using Interactive Brokers and Longbull. I had eSignal but got rid of it. Indicators work better on daily and weekly charts than hourly ones. Candlesticks patterns work great on a 10 min chart.
They're supposed to work in any time frame. However the 1 min charts will give you false and unreliable signals. 10 and 60 min are good for intraday. Daily and weekly work best.
Candlesticks are like any other tools. They have a high probability of predicting the future price but two people may see two different patterns and draw opposite conclusions..
There's absolutley no predictive value in technical analysis or indicators with the *possible* exception of fibonacci and elliot wave. You can guess at it but that's about all it is - a guess. Candle patterns and TA in general tell you how to react to future price movements based on past ones: if this happens, do that, otherwise do this. A breaking of previous support, trendlines, pivots, MA's etc. But to say because a morning star has formed that prices will go up is nonsense. Every time a pattern works this time, it will fail at some point in the future. I've read Nison's candlestick book and it's mind-boggling all the possible patterns. Then in live trading you'll see what you think is a tower top and the next day the price runs up higher. I've also found that the smaller the timeframe the less value in TA to begin with. 1-minute bars will do anything they want; 5,10,30 have more pattern recognition to them. As for indicators, I don't use them at all. Haven't found a single one that's worth my screen space. Just my 2/100th's of a buck.
It is a question of fortune telling versus decision support. Honestly if you have people that are selling "good" systems you have to ask yourself why would they give away the goose that laid the golden egg? That is my personal opinion of course. On our site we provide what we think is the best decision support resource because it works in any trading environment. We also allow people to plug that data into black box systems. Not once yet did the quant funds that have asked for that data intended to resell it as a system. The reason is that if it is really good the system is typically exploiting an arbitrage wether real arb or information arb. The more people start using that system the more it is prone to failure as it becomes visible and the counter parties to the trade adjust. Every time you buy or short someone is taking the opposite side of your trade ECN Market Maker Specialist it doesn't matter.