Greetings, I am new to trading and sitting in front of the screen has been very nerve racking for me and I made plenty of mistakes. I am currently trying to focus on learning and then intend to automate my trades using algo trading (using python programming language). I have started looking at these technical indicators to begin my learning. I would like to learn more of technical analysis so I would be very grateful if you advise what topics I should learn next, any dos and dont's or any other advise you have, any rules you follow. -- I had posted this same question on Quora but sadly received no answers. I have tried to implement the barebones SMA 5, 15 crossover strategy with bracket orders. 9/10 trades ended up losing money due to continuously hitting my stop loss (). Thank you in advance.
I have been studying TA since 1986 when I became a stockbroker (later a commodities broker). Warning! TA is not a gospel only a pattern that if you recognize can lead you to win trades. The myriads of indicators always confused me and now I only use the MACD RSI combo with trendlines to show me oversold overbought events along with the patterns (see pics) that can show buy or sell signals. Either way is you keep a good ratio of win/loss i.e. risk $1 to win$2 (or $3) you likely be successful using TA. Recently, I have been studying Price action trading with Al Brooks and that added to my "edge" a great deal.
It's like you are trying to be a Michelin star chef. It takes time, experience, effort, research, etc.
You have a long journey ahead of you, and if you think just programming something and the bucks will roll in, you are mistaken. Figure on putting in 10,000 hours of screen time and if you can't manually trade and be profitable, won't make it. There are the ones who will say they did it be programming but extremely few. Indicators should be used after becoming an expert in charting, so many incredible pasterns exist in charting that never been written, so they need to be discovered by you. I never found any system on the net that I could withstand the losing percentages. Learn charting, patterns with trend, leave counter trend for after three of solid trend trading. Concentrate on keeping losing pertages under 10% and no worse than 1 to 1 reward to risk. Most losing traders take 1.5 trades they should not take a day, so study when not to take viable signals. What is left of the present to disqualify taking that trade. Always study risk management, for me that is 99% of the trade, managing to trade. Truly it is a long road for a beginner.
This is the post every new trader should sticky. BUT, it only represents the "know your enemy" part. Sun Tzu once wrote, "Know your enemy but not yourself, wallow in defeat every time. Know yourself and know your enemy, 100 battles 100 victories. Know yourself but not your enemy, find levels of loss and victory."
% % Best money i traded/invested was in trading/INVESTING BOOKS. [2] A close second is paying for printed paper charts. A one year chart is about 777% better than 5 day chart; not that anyone would want to limit themselves to those 2 timeframes. Paper charts are easy to correct when you find an error; screen errors can be real confusing if one doesn't know that ETF or whatever...............................
Best of luck going forward. If you are interested in automatic trading, I would recommend, manually implementing the trading tactics using strict automaton steps. It should be easy enough to follow a set of algorithmic steps manually. You will find that most of the obvious and easy automation methods only provide a base to refine or straight out reject. Don't confuse code development and trading development as to which you want to optimize. Beware though, there are a lot more steps than technical analysis and implementing it. The cooking analogy would be opening a vertically integrated farm to restaurant corporation versus cooking a few fine meals for friends at home.
Trading is like wallpapering a house with one arm tied up. Trading is really a minimum of 5 people being involved. But that's not gonna happen as it's rare for even 2 people to agree with each other. But it's impossible to answer your question: You'll learn the hard way, we all do, this is an expensive hobby.
Computer Hardware expert Software expert Coding expert Trading expert Psychologist Admin / taxation dogsbody / making coffee expert Interactive Brokers expert. Ahhh sorry, impossible!