tradingtechnique

Walk into any trading forum or chat room, and you'll quickly stumble upon one of the most heated debates in the trading world: indicators versus price action. While some traders swear by their favorite oscillators and moving averages, a growing number are stripping their charts clean, trading with nothing but raw price movements. But why are so many traders ditching their technical indicators?
The Simplicity Revolution
Picture this: you open your trading platform, and instead of a chart cluttered with colorful lines, histograms, and oscillators all competing for attention, you see just one thing—price. This is the world of price action trading, where traders make decisions based purely on how price moves, without the distraction of mathematical formulas layered on top.
Justin Bennett, who has been trading since 2002, points out that indicator combinations are essentially infinite, especially with platforms like MetaTrader allowing custom coding. The question becomes overwhelming: if there are unlimited combinations of indicators, how do you find the one that actually works?
The Lagging Problem
Here's something many new traders don't realize at first: indicators are always looking backward. They're calculated using past price data, which means by the time they give you a signal, the market has already moved. Think of it like driving while only looking in the rearview mirror—you're always reacting to what already happened, not what's happening right now.
For example, in a moving average crossover strategy, the averages only cross after the market has already begun reversing. By the time the signal appears, you've potentially missed the best entry point. Price action traders, on the other hand, watch for real-time signals like candlestick patterns, support and resistance breaks, and momentum shifts as they're actually happening.
Market Conditions Change Everything
One of the biggest frustrations with indicator-based strategies is that they're often designed for specific market conditions. A strategy designed for trending markets will likely fail when markets begin to consolidate, and even large hedge funds aren't immune to this problem. Some go out of business after years of profits when market conditions shift and their algorithms can't adapt.
Price action, however, remains constant. Whether the market is trending strongly or moving sideways in a range, the psychological levels of support and resistance, the patterns of rejection and acceptance—these universal truths of market behavior don't change. They work in bull markets, bear markets, and everything in between.
The Universality Factor
For price action traders, a resistance level on a currency pair like EURUSD is universal—there are no variables like indicators to get in the way. When you and I look at the same chart, we see the same price action. But when indicators come into play, every trader might have different settings, different interpretations, and completely different signals coming from the same market.
This creates confusion. Your indicators might be screaming "buy" while another trader's setup is signaling "sell"—and you're both looking at the exact same market movement. Price action eliminates this problem by focusing on what's actually happening, not what a formula says might be happening.
The Learning Curve Reality
Now, let's be honest about something important: price action trading isn't necessarily easier. In fact, it requires more skill and market understanding than simply following indicator signals. A trader with over 11 years of experience admits testing more than 100 indicators during their early trading days, showing that the search for the "perfect" indicator is a common journey for many traders.
The truth is, becoming proficient at reading price action takes time and dedication. You need to understand market structure, recognize trend changes in real time, and develop an intuitive feel for market psychology. But once you master these skills, you have a toolkit that works across all markets and timeframes.
Making Objective Decisions Without Objectivity?
Here's an interesting paradox: some traders prefer indicators because they believe indicators provide objective signals. And that's partially true—an indicator calculation is objective. But the market interpretation? That's still subjective. Meanwhile, price action is often criticized for being subjective, yet many professional traders use price action as their primary method to analyze markets, from intraday scalping to long-term swing trading.
The reality is that all trading involves interpretation. The question is whether you want to interpret price directly or interpret a derivative of price (which is what indicators are).
The Middle Ground
Despite the passionate debates, the trading world isn't black and white. Some successful traders use a hybrid approach, employing price action as their primary analysis tool while using one or two simple indicators for confirmation. The key isn't whether indicators are "good" or "bad"—it's whether they add value to your decision-making process or just create noise.
Some traders choose indicators for less subjectivity, while others prefer price action analysis, and the choice ultimately depends on personal preferences and how traders use their tools.
The Bottom Line
So why do many traders avoid indicators? Because they've discovered that price itself tells the complete story. They've realized that adding layers of calculations on top of price doesn't necessarily provide an edge—it often just creates more variables to manage and more ways to second-guess themselves.
Trading is already challenging enough. When you strip away the complexity and focus on what matters most—how price moves, where it finds support or resistance, and what patterns it creates—you might just find that less truly is more. The market speaks through price action. The question is: are you listening directly to the source, or through layers of mathematical translation?
Whether you choose pure price action, indicator-based trading, or something in between, the most important thing is finding an approach you understand deeply and can execute consistently. Because in trading, consistency and discipline beat complexity every single time.

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