Are technical indicators useful? Measuring market trends, momentum, and volatility.

There are currently hundreds of technical indicators, and dozens of technical indicators are built into general trading software. However, some novice traders always feel that they are sometimes effective and sometimes not. Some trading experts say that they can trade without looking at indicators. I can't help but ask whether technical indicators are useful? Let's discuss this issue today.


In the face of a complex and changing market, the first thing we need to do before formulating specific operating strategies is to judge the market status. If the market has experienced a period of consolidation, the current price is higher than the average price for a period of time, and the price is still rising at an accelerated rate, we can guess that the price is likely to rise rapidly. In this guess, consolidation refers to low volatility, higher than the average price refers to an upward trend, and faster rising speed refers to increasing momentum. Most of the technical indicators we see now belong to the three categories of trend, momentum, and volatility.


Can you trade without technical indicators? The answer is yes. At present, some naked K traders can get good returns by directly observing the K-line patterns and key price behaviors without using indicators, because technical indicators are also calculated using data such as price, volume, time, etc., and the original K-line already fully contains this information. Compared with directly observing the K-line, technical indicators have condensed the long-term wisdom of the trader group and are more convenient in expressing the current state of the market. Technical indicators are indeed an important tool in financial analysis, but why do some people think they are useless? This is usually due to several reasons:


First, technical indicators are not omnipotent. They are often calculated based on historical data, while the market is complex and changeable, affected by many factors, so they cannot fully predict future market trends.


Second, there are many types of technical indicators, each of which has its own characteristics and scope of application. Different indicators may give contradictory information, which increases the difficulty of analysis. If the principle and scope of application of the indicator are not deeply understood, blindly using the indicator for analysis may lead to misjudgment.


Third, the effectiveness of technical indicators is also affected by the behavior of market participants. If most market participants use a certain technical indicator, the effectiveness of this indicator may decrease because market behavior will be affected and changed.


In addition, technical indicators are used to analyze the current market status. Even if traders use these indicators correctly, it does not necessarily predict the future trend of the market. Different traders will have different understandings of the same market status, and thus give different trend judgments. Even if they all judge the trend and the time when the trend starts, they will also increase their positions in the middle due to improper stop-profit or position management problems, resulting in the final loss.


Therefore, we cannot always correctly judge the trend and the time when the trend occurs when we trade directly with indicators, not to mention that the final profit is related to many factors. Trading itself is a probability. Controlling a certain winning rate and profit-loss ratio to form a positive expectation value, and realizing the accumulation of profits through long-term trading.

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