dmedin

I liked the clear, straightfoward explanation on the IG.com article. It did however leave me asking the question, what's the downside of HA candles vs regular ones?

Broken out of a rising wedge - to the upside

@Mercury That all sounds very true and reasonable however gold seems to be in a definite uptrend to me, so I would be buying dips. I tried to short a couple of times recently thinking it must surely be due for a pullback but lost out. If the underlying trend is up, I don't see any reason to short but rather instead to buy dips. Unless there is evidence that the trend is turning, and there's no evidence of that for gold yet is there?

@Mercury I don't understand what you mean about gold losing juice. It looks like it's rising relentlessly. What am I missing?

Hmm ... most retail traders are losers, so much so that any rational person would surely have to say that it's a mug's game if your goal is to actually make money.

It found support at 1124 and is forming a bullish candle, let's wait it out and see if it registers a lower high!

Cripes!

Uh oh ... not a good sign ...

I wonder how much further it has to fall. The spread is still unusually (?) large (buy is 14 points more than sell)

Moving down to a 50% retracement?

I'm amazed at how different your perspective is based on the time frame of the charts you're looking at. What looks like a down trend on a 15 minute chart can actually cause you to short into an uptrend, which you will easily see when you switch to 4 hours or daily. That's why I think it's safer to take a position than trade on short-term movements. Safer, but not necessarily more likely to win.

Cannabis stocks were swinging up and low like crazy last year. Does that mean the cannabis index will display similar 'bipolar disorder'?

A lot of advice out there flat out contradicts other advice. But unless people can demonstrate effectiveness with their system (and the only way to do that is to demonstrate consistent or net profits over a given time frame) then they are full of hot air. (Or in other words, a professional technical analyst.) For example, it seems reasonable to let profits run and cut losses short. But some people will tell you to aggressively take profit at a certain level. And there is all the nonsense of whether to have a stop loss or not. I always remind myself that 74% of people doing this lose money. That puts a lot of what you hear into perspective.

In limbo.

It's sticking by its long-term uptrend very well.

Where to from here? I got caught out with a long when it broke out of the supposed triangle and then fell back down again, if I had used volume as a filter that wouldn't have happened.

Still got a bit further to drop, until it realizes its 'fundamental value'? Notice my extremely poor timing here.

Here?

Well it failed to hold above 650 and now seems headed for just under 580! High time Veronica, high time!

So getting a diploma in TA is for a respectable suit-wearing job at a big company, but minute-by-minute charts and scraping are for the stay-at-home trader. Got it 😎😋

A wee bit of simplification and/or clarification on those charts would help the rest of us out a lot.

Not sure how recent or how true PIA First's claims are in that respect.

Is trading indices better than trading individual stocks? Trading individual stocks is potentially more diverse, but then again the same factors that work on the index as a whole tend to work on companies too (interest rates, state of economy/sector etc). It almost seems to me that it's not the instrument you trade but the time frame that is the biggest differentiator. For example almost everyone here uses short-term charts, but the IG analysts never use anything less than hourly charts. The other day IG live-streamed on Youtube, advertising it as 'how to trade the FOMC decision'. But all the two panellists did was discuss fundamentals and long-term charts, and CB didn't make any effort to trade on the minute charts. Maybe he has better sense? Or is that part of the 'game' - using longer-term charts to appear respectable but 'real' trading involves scraping and scalping on minute-by-minute charts? For me personally I see the value in both, although I'm starting to go off trading long-term on stocks as they seem to be influenced by the same kind of things as FX and indices are, making it pointless. The escalation of the trade war sent the likes of MSFT and Apple into reverse, and when all the big U.S. stocks are falling at the same time because of a Trump tweet you might as well give up and speculate on short-term movements on Wall Street or S&P 500 instead. Any thoughts, my wee bairns? 😊

Would be nice to be long on FTSE 100 at 16:30 on the 7th then? Or ... to make sure you'd not short

What do you mean?