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• Chapter A02
• Chapter A03
• Chapter A04
• Practice A

4. Measuring the movement ahead

The following lesson is another building block on how to quantify demand and supply levels on a chart and find conditions of a big imbalance between those forces. Before you can move into rule-based strategy lessons in the next units it's important that you understand that to be a consistently profitable trader you don't have to collect tons of information about the market and search for that magic indicator to analyze it. It should suffice to focus on a few clear and objective price action patterns and start to think about applying rules to capitalize on them.

The most common mistakes

The novice trader usually follows the price movement and ends up buying at resistance and selling at support. Selling into an objective supply level or buying into an objective demand levels ensures a consistently losing outcome. It's like trying to cross a wall by running against it.
The image below illustrates this unhappy outcome for someone who probably trades without the knowledge of market dynamics.

The above chart shows the EUR/CHF in 30M around July 2008. Clear trading opportunities can be seen here: just do the opposite the novice trader is doing. The first pullback on the right side of the chart shows a clear opportunity to enter short the market and target the support zone on the bottom of the chart.
The second pullback after the crossing of the supply zone, now converted into demand, is another low risk entry for a long trade.

Define your edge

The concept of support/resistance is undoubtedly among the most important and most followed aspects of chart analysis and trading in general. Whether you are shaping a technical or fundamental profile, or mixing both approaches, chances are that you follow support/resistance principles at least to some degree in your trading.

There are many different methods of denoting support and resistance levels besides the horizontal levels, diagonal trendlines and trend channels, like pivot points, Fibonacci levels, moving averages, among others. Which one is best is a question of personal preference. But the fact is that the same principles apply to all of them. This common principles, if well understood, will give you an excellent ground on which to build your trading knowledge and will represent an ever accompanying edge for your trading. To attain an edge in a trading career constitutes the difference between success and failure.

To own an edge is to know objectively that there are likely more chances to win than to lose. But watch out, because having the odds in your favor is not the same as knowing or believing that you will win. Let the market do what it wants, knowing that it can do anything. And when the market does what you expected then you have an edge because you know you have a statistical advantage in your favor.

An edge can therefore be a favorable pattern in market behavior that you've seen multiple times and from which you can quantify the outcome. This means that you can try out a particular set-up repeated times and witness a certain outcome in the majority of the occurrences. This testing of ideas is of utmost importance for the development of your trading because it provides objectivity based on historical evidence.

If at this stage of your training you don't have any edge, then consider it to be your next target while developing your personal trading system. Perhaps you don't see the importance of having an edge for the moment, but without this element it will be impossible to win consistently.

In this chapter, the ideas that you can take as an edge are based on the concept of S&R, being the most basic aspect of price action. Although an edge can be constructed based on any idea or concept, if you adopt the S&R principles, you gain a logical analysis which is applicable to any instrument and at any market conditions.

This logical analysis also supports the contrary attitude that leads to successful trading. In the chart below, for instance, while the crowd sees a selling opportunity when price drops heavily, the astute trader sees buying power increasing due to the proximity of new crowd of buyers at a demand level (green zone). This type of counterintuitive logic, generated by recognition of the underlying forces in market dynamics, is what will make the difference in your trading.

Locate these great opportunities in the convergence of specific imbalances in supply and demand by using recurring price action patterns such as the pullbacks. By interpreting these market footprints correctly, you will find realistic trading opportunities with a measurable outcome and book consistent profits as a trader.

Measuring S&R levels

Many aspiring traders have great difficulty organizing price action into a manageable execution system. Too often they ignore important chart data because it doesn't fit into a convenient technical system. This obsession with simple-minded pattern recognition or pure technical signal trading prevents the trader from grasping the most powerful mechanics of price prediction.

Concentrating on a narrow execution strategy is like using broken watch- it will be right two times per day but still useless the rest of the day. This explains the frustrating path many novice traders experience in their search for the holy grail. Despite their vast knowledge on complicated technical analysis, they are unable to grasp the underlying mechanics.

Expand your trading knowledge through the observation and application of the herewith mentioned principles. By integrating S&R analysis in your charting you will expand your ability to profit from subtle aspects of crowd behavior. Keep in mind that market forces of supply and demand rely upon mechanics that many traders will overlook. This lets you gain an important edge on the path to successful trading. It might take a lifetime to explore the most fine nuances and complex interactions between evolving price and the emotional crowd. But rest assured, the pieces you are learning in this chapter might bring a new insight to your trading performance.

For a fine understanding of price action and an accurate trading method with breakouts please watch the different webinar recordings with Phil Newton.
You can also download Phil Newton's presentation from the ITC 2008 about “Breakout Trading”. Here you have some quick tips to assess the significance or validity of support and resistance levels, whether it be in the form of drawn lines or zones:

1. Number of contact points

A level that has been touched or tested more times is considered to be stronger than one that has been tested less times. The more times the exchange rate has been halted by a support or resistance level, the bigger is the expectation on the eventual breakout movement.

2. Length of time

It’s common interpretation that the higher the time frame (days, weeks, months), the more powerful the level becomes.

Trendlines that develop on a monthly, weekly or daily chart are far more likely to hold than those that develop on intraday charts. Far more market participants are aware and will likely react to a longer time-frame trendline because fewer people watch a line drawn on a 15 minute chart, for example.

This doesn't mean smaller time frames don't have support or resistance levels which can be used to trade. The below EUR/USD chart could be easily tagged as a 60 minute chart, but in fact it is a 1 minute chart! Recall that this pair is the most liquid one in the Forex market, which makes smaller time frames technically very accurate.

3. Shape of the rebounds at the contact points

You should not be guided solely by the number of times the level acts, but also by the quality of the reaction. A level of support or resistance indicates strength depending on the magnitude of the bounce. Clearly visible reversals in price action establishing new highs or lows on a chart are valid as support or resistance levels and can thus be used to draw trendlines or horizontal lines.

4. Angle of the trendline

The sharper inclined the line is, the easier it will be for price to cross it- it only has to move sideways to break the line.
As a rule, every trendline will be broken at some point in the future, and as such, trendlines with steeper angles are more likely to be crossed than the ones with angles inferior to 45 degrees. This happens because trends with gradual price increases or decreases are more likely to last than those rapid price movements which usually call for a correction. The penetration of a steep trendline does not necessarily indicate the reversal of a trend, it can just be a retracement to a more gradual price movement.

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