my father used them when he traded in the pits at the Cme and Cbot. He had a successful career. It showed him important price points/magnets that prices tended to gravitate to. Could it be something that you could use to help guide your trading, maybe. Is it going to be some holy grail all of a sudden if you start using them, no. many of the traders referenced those numbers back then, so I imagine that’s why it “worked” for him. Not sure how useful it is today. It might be useful but i guess that would depend on your trading strategy. So maybe...
Watch what happens at pivot points/S&R. Many reversals occur at pivots. An open that pierces a pivot may confirm that pivot as support. I never traded based on pivot points, but considered them a confirmation of what else was going on, i.e. I considered a reversal off a pivot to be more confident. Maybe it was all crapola, but I always had pivots on my intraday charts, one of the few things. Do they work or was it a self-fulfilling prophecy?
%% ME 2; but I wound up with too much junk on my charts/psar/ptp, ma, ma, weekly pivots, daily pivots, alligator ,Williams, slo sto, ma envelope,50 dma on volume,turtle channels, grids,200 dma, 50 dma,rsi,macd. So glad to get rid of most of that junk. RSI seemed to be the most worth less , especially in trends; but an above average fund manager likes it for finding bottoms-- to each his own/no rsi for me...…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...
These days, traders use pivot points like they did in the old days Markets change but not pivot points. I like your question: I think if something worked in the old days and still work now, we should definitely focus on it.
%% Mostly 50/200/20 moving averages + 50ma on volume, weekly pivots sometimes; + parabolic stop + reverse when i daytrade=====which is not real often.[I tried a 444 day ma this year, but 200 dma seems to work better],
I backtested these famous pivot points (R1, S1, R2, S2 etc...) a long time ago, on an intraday basis, they have almost zero predictive power.
It seemed, in the old days, early 2000, they sort of a minor factor. Places where things paused. They needed to be combined with other S/R, the more the better. Also a lot of retail platforms did not calculate them for you. So it was sort of a "edge thing". It was pretty rare on the Index Futures market to see a mysterious reversal that was at a pivot because some big player made a move there, without additional S/R and other supporting factors. It was also a sort of after the fact type justification for people who preached them. I used them for years, but found they were more noise than signal, and more to the point, not really actionable information in the heat of trading.