I don't use %R--I'm talking about other indicators. When they are used in combination with price, they are better than price alone. I use them to help me "see" the movements of price.
"Oh, faithless generation that seeks a sign!" You are far better off learning how to interpret price and volume action. But that requires constant attentiveness and continuous interpretive thought. An indicator is sooooo much less trouble. And they are all sooooo up to date, the most recent one of them having been invented at least forty years ago.
You may be wasting your time... Two things work in today's markets: 1) fading (bait 'n' reverse), although this seems to become noisy as well and you may end-up where you started (minus commissions) 2) momentum strategy WITHOUT STOPS (if you have the guts).
Trading without indicators is tying one hand behind your back. I've been successful for 25 years and will continue to use them.
From an information theory point of view, you are wrong. You can't create information out of nothing. There is nothing more in the price than what a sharp eye can see.
"There is nothing more in the price than what a sharp eye can see." Dunno 'bout that. These old eyes aren't so good at creating smoothed first and second derivatives of price.
You have a point in this. Indicators can be helpful to bad eyes. But still, you will only "see" the things that the indicator's parameters allow you to see, while with a naked eye your brain will try to match a fit dozens of parameters in a split second. In any case, you won't create magically any new information.
Well, since you are an information theorist, and just to keep the banter going, those of us who haven't quite convinced ourselves that the market is all signal, and may just be a mite noisy, like to think that various estimation and decision theories might have some value, like Kalman filtering. So I run filters on price and volume. A mere superstition, no doubt. Just as I am prone to mistake noise for signal, I am also prone to miss signal in noise.