We all know that there is a big difference between trading up trending markets versus range bound markets. Different signals are profitable in different markets. How do you use them and mix in different startegies? I personally use up trends in these cases: buy breakouts, trail winning trades with short term moving averages, and let your winners run. And range bound markets are tu buy weakness, sell strength, fade gaps in price, and take profits while they are available. What are your thoughts?
The big question is how the heck are you suppose to know in advance if the market is trending or merely going through another chop? Unless you are able to solve this question first, ALL indicators are pretty much useless.
Why in advance? If I know a market is trending right now, I can just jump on board and ride that trend to profits. No need for prediction.
That's what i've been trying to do on the FDAX, but often, i'll identify what I believe to be an 'uptrend', i'll get long, and then the damn thing reverses on me! Or i'll identify that we're in a 'range', so it's best to short rallies and buy dips, and that's when it'll start trending again!!
This is what makes trading "fun". There's no guarantee that price won't move against you shortly after you enter a trade. But the best indication that price is going to move a certain way is that it is already moving that way. Hence the value of trend following.
The most enjoyable aspect of trading is developing logical sequences of common sense steps to define concepts which predict the existence of an underlying strategic tactical advantage or reason 'why' a hypothesis should work. The process of locating the telltale signs of intelligent design, persistent logic and the forever repeating but yet evolving, fractal machine lifeforms predicted ...is equally enjoyable but extremely time consuming, tedious and left brained ...but it satisfies the same creative centers, needs or desires as the right brained portion of the thought process.
Oscillators work well showing you are in chop when it stays in the middle like MACD around +.8-.8 and RSI at 60-40, EMAs 18-21 are cutting through bars show chop. You have to visually check like five years worth of dailies to see up/down indicator range to get an idea of what you will define as chop. When looking at price you want to be checking when pivot highs/lows exceeded by small amount and then return into a range, often are nice 2-5 day swing trades.