Is price action the holy grail?

You’ve rid yourself of all indicators in search of something that holds.

In forex, you’re probably not looking at volume either.

What you’re left looking at is the behaviour of price.

Price patterns, expressed in the form of candles, contain a psychology.

You are trying to understand this psychology in order to put on a winning trade.

However, everyone else is also watching the same patterns too, including the big boys.

Who are the big boys?

Institutions, banks et al.

Why are we talking about them?

They are the one’s capable of creating enough buying or selling pressure to determine the direction of price. Retail people, like you and I, are not.

That’s why.

And these same big boys know the patterns that you are looking out for, and are going to react to.

What do they do?

They tweak the patterns.

Think about it.

It’s the obvious thing to do. Stopping the public out will give them a smooth run later.

Is tweaking the patterns a biggie for them?

No.

Determining the direction of price is like winning a war.

What’s it going to take to win a small battle, like tweaking a pattern?

A fraction of one’s resources.

Where does that leave you?

If you’re looking at pure price action, you probably might not fare too well.

You have no choice but to look beyond.

What is beyond?

Truth is truth.

If the market wants to go somewhere, because of actual demand and supply dynamics, well, then it wants to go there.

It will reveal that with price action.

You won’t miss the message.

How can one overlook a very large-tailed candle, or an obvious support or resistance, for example?

As you are getting ready to act, based upon the obvious pattern you are seeing, you also observe, that most of the time, price is not behaving like the pattern is saying.

If the pattern is just too obvious, you need to go one step further and put on the trade, taking tweaked conditions into account.

Look at the chart for obvious points that the big boys might be targeting. Go beyond these points and set the levels for your entry, stop, and if it’s part of your strategy, your limit.

What have you basically done?

You have believed in the obvious price action that you have seen.

You have tried to factor in tweaking.

You have implemented your trade in a manner such that the negative effect of tweaking will just about give you entry, but the big boys will probably not be too bothered about going right up to the level of your stop, because its positioning is such.

This will fail.

Sometimes.

This will succeed…

…at other times.

Whether you make money or not will depend upon how you manage your winners.