There's an entire forum at t2w devoted to PV (a sub-forum under TA): http://www.trade2win.com/boards/forumdisplay.php?f=158
People have different strengths and weaknesses. Some people are natural traders, just like some people are natural athletes, some people are natural musicians, etc. If you have the talent to read a chart and see the patterns beyond the noise, with no or relatively little effort in training, then more power to you. But most people don't have that talent, just like most people can't sit down at a piano and make themselves experts in a matter of days or weeks. The value of indicators is that they have the potential to enhance the separation of price information from price noise in a timely fashion. The bad news is that very few technical indicators come close to doing this, although all of their creators and fans claim that they do.
Between your comment and the one just above, there is a profound demonstration of what goes on in most people's heads. There was a guy here a while back that played around with misunderstanding the markets in a similar vein. It is hard for me to imagine how a person goes about dealing with the market from an entry and exit viewpoint such as both of you demonstrate. How does the thread starter get to the place of dealing with the content and references given here in this thread? It is all oriented to entries and exits. What would happen if a person were to sit down and think for a moment about the daily use of their time. just how many total minutes deal with entry? Does an equal time get devoted to exits? This sum is nothing compared to the time that is between entires and exits. Consider for a moment, getting outside of the bun. and looking about. Just suppose you knew that what makes money is change and you decided to view the market from a money making viewpoint. That is, as long as price is changing, you are making money. The null moment when money making based upon price change comes to an end, is when yopu pick up chips and then resume more money making as price change again appears. This is the setting for hold and reversal type thinking that is orthagonal to the entry/exit purview where you are both sitting. What do indicators look like to people who use hold and reverse as their modus? Well read about it in the narratives written by the people who invent high quality excellent indicators. Read the texts on how indicators are itiertively refined for various applications. Read about how derivatives of indicators are used to have leading indicators of price. When you are reading stuff written by a person who says indicators are useless, he is looking in the mirror at something that appears to be useless, as well. You can also bet that he is an entry/exit oriented person. When a person falls into the "edge trading" trap, he is a person who stands the risk where all entries do not have any planned axit whatsoever that is based upon market action. the onlt way it could be otherwise is if that person switched, upon entry, from an entry/ exist approach to a hold and reverse strategy. Indicators invariably provide information about the market's preformance and activity. They are primarily useful for telling the viewer whether or not he is making money, how fast he is making money and when he has come to the point of not making money. Run a tab on how many minutes of the day these conditions prevail. You will find, that expressed as a percentage, it is almost all of the time. Compare that to the entry and exit percentages which border on being nill in comparison. At some point everyone has to step up to the line and decide to get over just using nominal and lazy thoughts about things. A person has to learn to make money by learning to read when the market is continuing making money for him and when the moment comes to collect profits, bank them and begin to make more money. Indicators give you leading signals of price to handle all of these matters. That is why their respective originators invented them. Start with Welles Wilder to be able to learn to differentiate between applied arithematic warblers and real thoughtful tools and inventions to extent the reach and judgement of human enterprise. The guy who invented moving averages was not Dr. Average, PhD. He was a guy who could have invented lazyboy furniture.
What part confuses you? The part that you have to get into the market to make money, or the part that you have get out of the market to avoid losing money? How can anyone expect to make money trading if he doesn't consider TIMING (when to get in, when to get out, i.e., entries and exits) of utmost importance? People have different methods (TA; FA; both TA and FA; intuition) but they all are aimed at timing (entries and exits). Money management is necessary as well but it means nothing without good timing. You talk about "edge trading" as if it was some sort of silly hocus pocus. Try using money management on roulette or casino craps or any other endeavor where you demonstrably don't have an edge, and see how long it takes you to go broke. If you have a successful trading strategy that doesn't boil down to dumb luck, you have an edge. It's not a dirty word. My equity curve tells me whether or not I'm making money, how fast, etc. I somehow don't confuse my equity curve with any of my indicators and still do just fine.
I think it's a question of the person using the charts, while one might prefer price/volume, I personally prefer things like moving averages, bollinger bands and stochastics. It depends on what you feel best aids your trading and what you think is the easiest to interpret.
To all those discussing indicators (their merits)... I believe this thread is about price action only trading (your experiences with such) and not another thread out of the dozens already here at ET about Price Action Only versus Indicators debates. Aren't these debates getting old ??? Geesh...this thread set a record in starting another debate... The second reply said indicators are useless. Then again...the topic Look Ma, No indicators wasn't exactly asking for the price action only traders to show up and share their experiences. It was also an open invitation to debate the issue again. It's a shame because there are some good price action only traders here at ET that would probably enjoy discussing only price action only instead of participating in threads about indicators versus price action only. NihabaAshi
Think I get the point here Grob - I was using just price and stochastic, but a couple of experiences made me realise that referring to MAs is useful for clarifiying trend (in addition to the HL, LH price action discerning of trend). Many other people are using MAs and MACDs, so to not refer to them makes one ignorant of what many others are basing their decisions upon. Being ignorant of this is being ignorant of where some of the supply and demand for a security is coming from. Rod
You might have a point if everyone were using the same MAs and the same MA settings and the same MACD settings and understood what all of it was measuring. Otherwise, demonstrating that any of this has anything to do with supply and demand would be a difficult task.