going pure price action with zero indicators - what the transition actually looks like
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been thinking about removing all indicators from my charts. currently using ema 20 and 50 plus rsi. they feel like a crutch and i suspect they're just lagging price. everyone talks about pure price action being the final form but i don't see much discussion about how the transition actually goes.
what does the learning curve of moving from indicator-based to pure price action look like, and what do you miss vs gain?
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went through this transition about 3 years ago. the first month is genuinely uncomfortable - you feel like you've removed your safety net. the second month you start seeing the chart differently. by month three you wonder why you ever needed the indicators. the main gain is seeing price structure clearly without anchoring to indicator values. the main thing you lose is a false sense of certainty that you discover you didn't actually need.
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the emas you're using aren't entirely useless though. they're a representation of the average price over time which is genuinely informative. the question is whether seeing the ema line on the chart adds information beyond what the price structure itself shows. most experienced price action traders who use emas use them as context (above/below 200 ema for trend direction) not as signals.
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what do you actually use to define trend direction in pure price action? i feel like higher highs and higher lows in theory but in practice it's not always obvious.
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higher highs and higher lows on your trading timeframe, confirmed by the same structure on the timeframe above. the ambiguity you're describing often means there's no clear trend and you shouldn't be trading with-trend anyway. unclear structure is information - it tells you to reduce size or wait for clarity. treating ambiguous structure as a problem to solve with indicators is what leads to overtrading.
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the transition i'd recommend: start by keeping the indicators but adding a clean chart alongside. look at the clean chart first, form your read, then look at the indicator chart. over 4-6 weeks you'll find your clean chart read is usually the same or better. at that point the indicators have become redundant and removing them feels natural rather than scary.
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pure price action is a religion for some traders. indicators encode price information in a different visual form. neither is fundamentally superior, they're just different representations of the same underlying data. the real question is which representation helps you make better decisions, not which one sounds more 'advanced'.
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run clean chart alongside indicator chart for 4-6 weeks. indicators become redundant naturally. don't force the switch.
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