What is Price Action Trading ?
Basic Definition: Price Action Trading (P.A.T.) is the discipline of making all of your trading decisions from a stripped down or “naked” price chart. This means no lagging indicators outside of maybe a couple moving averages to help identify dynamic support and resistance areas and trend. All financial markets generate data about the movement of the price of a market over varying periods of time; this data is displayed on price charts. Price charts reflect the beliefs and actions of all participants (human or computer) trading a market during a specified period of time and these beliefs are portrayed on a market’s price chart in the form of “price action” (P.A.).
Whilst economic data and other global news events are the catalysts for price movement in a market, we don’t need to analyze them to trade the market successfully. The reason is pretty simple; all economic data and world news that causes price movement within a market is ultimately reflected via P.A. on a market’s price chart.
Since a market’s P.A. reflects all variables affecting that market for any given period of time, using lagging price indictors like stochastics, MACD, RSI, and others is just a flat waste of time. Price movement provides all the signals you will ever need to develop a profitable and high-probability trading system. These signals collectively are called price action trading strategies and they provide a way to make sense of a market’s price movement and help predict its future movement with a high enough degree of accuracy to give you a high-probability trading strategy.
“Clean” Charts vs. “Messy” Indicator-laden Charts
Next, to demonstrate the stark contrast between a pure P.A. chart and one with some of the most popular forex indicators on it, I have shown two charts in the examples below. The chart on the top has no indicators on it, there’s nothing but the raw P.A. of the market on that chart. The bottom chart has MACD, Stochastics, ADX and Bollinger Bands on it; four of the most widely used indicators AKA “secondary” analysis tools as they are sometimes called:
