Monday, November 2, 2009

Chop & Not- A Different Take On Support/Resistance.



During my time spent studying Technical Analysis, I've been taught/learned about many forms of S/R- Pivot, Congestion, Whole number, Moving Average, Gaps (or windows in Candlestick jargon)....but there's one type that I haven't seen much of, if at all, in any of the learning material I've gone through.

It's what I've called "chop & not"- when price changes structure at a given point. It may be from trend to chop or vice versa.

I've just randomly picked out a chart that demonstrates this type of S/R. You can see how price went from longer bars with little overlap to the reverse. It also decreased drastically in pace- it took 9 bars to travel 78 pips compared to the 150 pips travelled by the previous 4 bars. You can see further confirmation of the pivot point by the activity in the third blue circle, which is seperated from another period of chop created by the three small waves of downside out of that high.

There are many ways in which this technique can be incorporated into a trading approach.

The other chart, shows how one of today's trades played out. You can see how my exit was the beginning of a trending market after the chop. Confirmation of the support I had used as a target.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Show a dozen people a chart and get a dozen different opinions on S/R :-)

Yes, I am reading blogs to avoid trading NFPs.

James Edwards-Marche said...

I guess that's the fun part about trading- the artistic approach each trader can have on a situation ending but ultimately end up with the same bias :D.

I'm getting to like those Economic announcements (except yesterday's of course!!)