Trading indicators help you understand the volatile price movements of the Forex market. As a Forex trader, you cannot leave everything on luck. In fact, there is hardly any role luck plays in successful trades. If you want to maximise your profits in the Forex market, you need to make informed decisions that are backed by real facts, figures, and data. This is where trading indicators can help you.
Trading indicators are technical analysis tools that highlight price signals and trends. They depict warnings, reversals, and market situations in the Forex market. Moreover, trading indicators can be used for both bullish and bearish markets.
The biggest advantage of using trading indicators is that they can help predict the market’s direction, which you can refer to for making further trade decisions. They also provide you with specific market information like when the currencies are oversold or overbought, and can even predict a pullback or a complete trend reversal.
Both beginners and experienced traders can use indicators to understand market movements. You can identify ideal market entry and exit points and prepare for unexpected market movements with the help of trading indicators. Several indicators can also be used together to make more informed and accurate predictions. In fact, it is recommended that you use at least two trading indicators for confirmation.
There are heaps of Forex trading indicators that you can use. The following list mentions just some of the most commonly used among beginner and experienced traders. Feel free to take what you can and apply them to your strategy accordingly.
Moving averages represent the average closing price of a currency pair over a specific time period. It gives you the average point where the falling prices stop falling and start raising, and vice versa.
This indicator also identifies support and resistance levels, and filters out random short-term price fluctuations to give you the average price to base your exit or entry strategies on.
Here’s how moving averages work:
The average true range (ATR) is a lagging indicator derived from the currency pair’s average prices in the past 14 days. It shows you how much the currency pair moves and in which direction during the day. This helps traders understand when they should initiate a trade or place the stop-loss order.
Here’s how ATR works:
The ATR is one of the best technical indicators for day trading because it allows you to add or subtract ATR prices from the average closing price of the day. Traders can essentially use it to develop their entire trading system. It also helps them identify key exit and entry signals for their trading strategy.
Exponential moving average (EMA) measures trend directions over a specific period. With EMA, greater weight is placed on recent prices, making the data more responsive and relevant to newer information in the market.
Since it considers recent prices, it works well for Forex traders who enter the market when prices are low and expected to increase. Market moves are confirmed with more precision, and decisions are made based on the latest trends.
The relative strength index (RSI) indicator tells you if currency pairs are being overbought or oversold in the market. It does so by analysing price changes and gives a reading out of
Since it is both a leading and a lagging indicator for possible market reversals, it may provide you with opportunities that you might not be aware of otherwise. It lets you identify market momentum and warning signals for any potential price movements that can be dangerous for you.
Fibonacci retracements are depicted by a certain set of numbers that tell you where support and resistance levels will occur. The resistance level is a point at which the rising prices stop and reverse directions, while the support level is where the falling prices stop and reverse to the upside.
The price levels are determined by the Fibonacci numbers %, %, %, and %, which tell you how much a currency pair’s price retraced in the past. When you think that the market will witness a potential dip or make a forward move, this trading indicator will help you confirm both assumptions.
Through support and resistance levels, you can decide where to apply your stop and limit orders. It also helps you identify where to open and close positions.
The moving average convergence divergence (MACD) indicator shows the relationship between the currency pair’s two moving average prices. It is used to identify the highest high and the lowest low of a currency pair over a certain period.
The MACD can be used to identify ideal entry and exit points because it measures the direction, duration, and strength of a particular trend before giving you ideal entry or exit points. The highest upward trend depicts an ideal exit point and the lowest downward trend showcases an ideal entry point in the Forex market.
Bollinger bands is a lagging indicator used to plot trend lines, which are two standard deviations away from the currency pair’s simple moving average price. It tells you if the currency pair price is high or low on a relative basis. Further, it also tells you when to exit or enter the position accordingly.
Bollinger bands give you a range in which the currency pair usually trades, with the range width depicting the market volatility. The larger the width, the greater the volatility.
The stochastic oscillator is a trading indicator that identifies momentum in the market. It measures momentum by comparing the currency pair’s closing price to its trading range over a specific period. Whenever these two lines intersect, it depicts that the trend will soon make a reversal.
It also helps identify overbought and oversold zones. Whenever the graph steeps excessively low or rises extremely high, it is most likely to witness a market reversal in the following ways:
The standard deviation index (SDI) measures the size of the currency pair’s recent price movement to predict the price volatility.
If you see current prices getting higher, it may be wise to exit the market because the future holds a market reversal. On the contrary, if the current prices are going lower, you may choose to either enter the market or keep holding onto your position because large volatility is expected, which will involve an uptrend.
Since the SDI compares current against historical price movements, it gives you an estimate of the future market direction by analysing the past and present market trends.
Pivot points are trading indicators used to identify overall market trends and reversals, usually in a ranging market. They are calculated to understand the levels in which market sentiments change from bearish to bullish and vice versa.
If the price goes beyond the pivot point, it is a sign that the demand for the currency pair is higher. In such a situation, the prices are predicted to rise. Alternatively, if the currency pair prices dip below the pivot point, it means that the supply of the pair is higher than its demand. This situation predicts falling prices due to excess supply.
Forex indicators are essential trading tools that are proven to be useful for all types of Forex traders. Mixing up a few indicators together can help cross-check and confirm initial assumptions. They also provide you with more accurate exit and entry points in the market.
Blueberry Markets makes it easy for you to understand Forex trading indicators through our streamlined interface, powerful trading platforms, and free digital library of trading resources. Open a live account with us to start trading.
Tim Maunsell is Blueberry Markets senior member of the Customer Experience team, with over a decade of experience in the global forex market. Tim has honed his skills in developing trading strategies and analyzing financial instruments from both technical and fundamental perspectives. He regularly contributes articles on trading and financial markets. Tim is dedicated to sharing his insights to provide readers with compelling, well-researched content that keeps them informed.
Expertise: Financial markets and Forex trading
Market Profile MetaTrader indicator — is a classic Market Profile implementation that can show the price density over time, outlining the most important price levels, value area, and control value of a given trading session. This indicator can be attached to timeframes between M1 and D1 and will show the Market Profile for daily, weekly, monthly, or even intraday sessions. Lower timeframes offer higher precision. Higher timeframes are recommended for better visibility. It is also possible to use a free-draw rectangle session to create a custom market profile on any timeframe. Six different color schemes are available to draw the profile's blocks. Drawing profiles as a plain color histogram is also possible. Alternatively, you may choose to color the profile based on bullish/bearish bars. This indicator is based on bare price action and does not use any standard indicators. It is available for MetaTrader 4, MetaTrader 5, and cTrader platforms.
A system of alerts is available for price crossing the levels of Value Area high and low, Median, and Single Print zones.
The chart screenshot shows market profiles calculated and displayed for two daily Forex trading sessions. The timeframe is M30 and the right-hand daily session is still in progress. The earliest prices are blue and the latest prices are red. The medians and the value areas are marked with the white lines and display the most important price areas. Traders tend to return to those areas if the volume of the breakout movement is not too high. High-volume breakout out of these areas signifies a real breakout. You can read more about Market Profile in this short e-book: Book on Market Profile.
The example below demonstrates how the Market Profile can be colored according to the direction of each bar in the session rather than its age. This is done when ColorBullBear is set to true.
This example demonstrates how the indicator can display a market profile based on the rectangle chart objects freely drawn by a trader. For this to work, a rectangle object's name has to start with MPR and the Session input parameter has to be set to Rectangle. You can press 'r' on your keyboard to add such a rectangle to the chart automatically.
Market Profile indicator can also draw histogram from right to left. Unlike the traditional left-to-right display, it can be helpful to focus on the current trading session, without obscuring its chart. You can see how this works on the chart screenshot below.
Market Profile indicator is also available as a free cTrader indicator. It is very similar to its MetaTrader siblings, but cannot work with push notification alerts.
MarketProfile indicator is being developed via a dedicated GitHub repository. You are encouraged to actively participate in the improvement of this indicator by submitting your own features via pull-requests and reviewing existing suggestions, changes, fixes, and so on.
Market Profile indicator is a powerful tool developed by a CBOT trader. Its original purpose was to graphically organize price and time information obtained during a trading session in a manner useful to traders. Today's Forex market is quite different from what commodity futures trading was back in when Peter Steidlmayer introduced his charting instrument to the public. Can Market Profile be a useful tool to Forex traders?
The main difference between today's currency market and the futures market of 80's is the lack of daily trading sessions. Fortunately, it does not produce any real problems. The lack of strict daily close and daily open can be compensated by one of the following methods:
Apparently, it is still possible to apply Market Profile to modern foreign exchange market. The most consistent approach seems to be the third one, which is based on weekly sessions.
Another important issue to solve when using this indicator in analysis is whether to apply it to the current session — and suffer from the lack of data during the early hours — or to the previous session, which could be based on stale data. In reality, this is no issue at all. As outlined in the CBOT's A Six-Part Guide to Market Profile, the most important profile is based on the current session, but the profile built during the previous one is also relevant and should be analyzed by a trader.
Moreover, it is possible (and useful) to look at several previous profiles at once, analyzing how the trend developed across more than one value area. The multi-session Market Profile analysis is also a key to detecting long-term areas of balance and states of imbalance. In fact, long-term traders should be looking at Market Profiles of many sessions to determine possible points of entry and exits.
The following example shows Market Profile calculated for six weekly sessions of the EUR/USD currency pair:
As the indicator's author stated, the Market Profile should not be used as a buy/sell signal generator. It is a tool for analyzing the market and getting information that isn't evident from a bare chart. Here is how the main parts of the Market Profile can be used in Forex trading:
Value area — the area of market acceptance. The price spent a hefty amount of time at those levels — the market likes it. The edges of the value area form strong support and resistance levels.
Median — the middle of the value area offers a strong pivot point. It serves both as the attractor for the price and as the bounce level. The median is also called a fair price. If market is below the level, it is considered undervalued. If it is above the median, it is overvalued.
Areas of low volume — the long tails below and above the value area show the price areas rejected by the market. The bottom tail is telling us of long-term buyers outperforming long-term sellers at those price levels. The top tail is telling us about the long-term sellers doing better than buyers at the respective price levels.
Even if you aren't a regular user of Market Profile indicator and your main trading strategy is based on a different concept or if your strategies are either automated with expert advisors or use fundamental indicators, you can still consult the long-term market profiles in times of doubt when lacking accurate information on where to put an entry order, take-profit, or stop-loss.
Do you have any suggestions or questions regarding this indicator? You can always discuss Market Profile with the other traders and MQL programmers on the indicators forums.
The analysis of real price patterns and actions of large players make a basis of successful trade without indicators.
Various events and indicators can be catalysts of the market movement, but the trader sees and analyses only the end result as all of them are already considered in dynamics of the price. Today Price Action indicators Forex use the shift of balance of market demand/offer and also market psychology – the conflicts of interests between small participants of the market and market makers.
Price Action patterns are special schemes of trade bars (the Japanese candles) which characterize key market situations not only for the purpose of definition of the current direction, but also for assessment of the most probable reaction – a turn or continuation of a trend.
Indicators Price Action are developed for all trading platforms, are installed by a standard way, analyse the price chart and designate models by standard names, which have to be included in the analysis mechanism.
There are a lot of PA models are described, it is difficult to reveal everything on graphics especially as sometimes they appear nearby and contradict each other. It is especially dangerous if to consider that Price Action indicators shall specify to the trader the most profitable direction of an entrance to the market.
There are no universal tools for recognition, and popular options show the strongest combinations, such as PIN-Bar, Internal Bar and Model of Engulfing − graphic schemes of these patterns are shown below.
After emergence of model it is enough to open the schedule of an asset, to check a trend and presence of strong price levels then to make the trade decision.
On the periods below H1 the use of any RA patterns is ineffective!
The name and structure of parameters differ, but any Price Action indicator has to include without fail the following settings:
Irrespective of the visual form − graphic, signal or oscillator − indicators Price Action are not redrawn!
The system consists of three MTF_IB_SCAN indicators («Internal bar»); MTF_OB_SCAN («Engulfing model»); MTF_PB_SCAN («PIN-bar»).
In case of appearance of a PA set up on currency pair (or any other asset − raw materials, stocks) on the periods from M5 to W1 the indicator will signal about it. Arrows of the appropriate direction for determination of entry point appear on a graphics.
It allows to do not pass the strong signal and at the same time not to look for PA patterns where the models are too feeble or they are absent.For MetaTrader 4(5) there are versions of Price Action trading indicators which output information in the lower window, have no information panel and work only at the current period. The analysis of set ups is in that case we carried out on indicator columns.
The red column indicating a negative tendency, green − the growing trend. The analysis is carried out from the first column from the zero line.
We specify several trade assets in the Symbols parameter, for example, with EURUSD, GBPUSD, USDJPY, we choose a way and type of sorting of the table.
Further we adjust the PIN bar in which the main MaxBodyTailRatio parameter – the maximum ratio of a body to a tail.
After the adjusting of DoubleBar and Model of Engulfing we receive on the price schedule the table of the relevant PA models in which the asset symbol, time frame, the directions (bull/bear), names of a pattern, «age» of bar, the closing price after a setup is visible.
The unique expert who automatically distinguishes more than 30 patterns of the PA system, at least, such number of them are contained in an indicator algorithm.
It is required a real experience of the trader on PA technique, because the CPI indicator shows not only the most productive models, but also weaker which demand obligatory confirmation of trade signals. At detection of a pattern there is a color arrow with the name of the formed formation, and the indicator gives a sound signal.
The CPI indicator has well proved on small time frames from M15 to H1, including on the weak volatility assets. It is desirable that there were not less than bars between patterns of one direction.
Only patterns in a turn zone is considered a trade signal therefore search of the PA models should be begun with determination of strong price levels.
Signals of PA indicators can't be trusted during the periods of the speculative or thin market.
It is necessary to place StopLoss on three-four sizes of the average created candle from a pattern, including a body and a shadow, and to expose TakeProfit at the following operating level. An example of effective system on the basis of Price Action − the strategy of Jarroo.
The PA technique has no effect of delay, but it is impossible to construct full strategy only on Price Action Forex indicators. Use of Price Action is allowed only in a set with ordinary trend tools, for example, in moving averages and options of turning levels.
The RSI is another forex indicator that belongs to the oscillator category. It is known to be the most commonly used forex indicator and showcases an oversold or overbought condition in the market that is temporary.
If the price trades are above the moving average, it means buyers are controlling the price, and If the price trades are below the moving average, it means sellers are controlling the price.
Fibonacci is another excellent forex indicator that indicates the exact direction of the market, and it is the golden ratio called
Several forex traders use this tool to identify areas and reversals where profit can be taken easily. Fibonacci levels are computed once the market has made a big move up or down and looks like it has flattened out at some specific price level.
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