Tuesday 7 June 2011

Trying Hard To Identify The Direction Of The Market

By Bernard Odissey


If you know the pitfalls of trading, you can easily avoid them. Small mistakes are inevitable, such as entering the wrong stock symbol or incorrectly setting a buy level. But these are forgivable, and, with luck, even profitable. What you have to avoid, however, are the mistakes due to bad judgment rather than simple errors. These are the "deadly" mistakes which ruin entire trading careers instead of just one or two trades. To avoid these pitfalls, you have to watch yourself closely and stay diligent.

Think about trading mistakes like driving an auto on icy roads : if you know that driving on ice is threatening, you can avoid traveling in a snow typhoon. But if you do not know about the hazards of ice, you might drive as though there were no threat, only realizing your mistake once you are already off the road.

One of the first mistakes new traders make is sinking plenty of wasted effort and time into envisioning legit trends. Traders can use really difficult formulas, indictors, and systems to spot possible trends. They will finish up plotting so many signals on a single screen that they cannot even see the costs any more. The difficulty is that they lose sight of easy choices about when to buy and when to sell.

The error here is attempting to understand too much immediately. Some of the people think the more difficult their system is, the better it is going to be at foretelling trends. This is nearly always an illusion. Relying too much on complex systems makes you totally lose sight of the base principle of trading : buy when the market is going up and sell when it's going down. Since you would like to sell and buy early in a trend, the most vital thing to discover is when a trend starts. Difficult signals only obscure this info.

Remember to keep it simple: one of the easiest ways to identify a trend is to use trendlines. Trendlines are straightforward ways to let you know when you are seeing an uptrend (when prices make a series of higher highs and higher lows) and downtrends (when prices show lower highs and lower lows). Trendlines show you the lower limits of an uptrend or the upper limits of a downtrend and, most importantly, can help you see when a trend is starting to change.

After you get cosy plotting trendlines, you may use them to choose when to start to take action. Only after using these early signals should you start to use more certain systems to establish your actual sell or buy point. Moving averages, turtle trading, and the Relative Strength Index ( RSI ) are a few illustrations of more complicated indicators and systems that are accessible. But only use them after you have determined if the market is trending or not.




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