You really need to use any indicator?

My short answer might be no. But here below my longer answer.

As everybody I did start the trading with many indicators too. My hypothesis was that if I use properly my indicators and my whole system, I could be solvent and profitable. After a while - it took me four years - I abandoned all of my indicators. Why? Because simply they didn't deliver the numbers at all. In most cases, the same indicators with the same settings delivered different signals if I used different time frames. The H4 chart argued with the H1 chart or with the daily chart. It basically gave me huge frustration which I know understand well was a Cognitive Dissonance in my mind (about CD a bit lower)

So the signals argued with each other's and I was absolutely confused. I started to analyse the indicators because I could not believe no existing the holy grail, the accomplished indicator. I have a mathematician friend who prepared to me many statistics in principle about the most popular indicators, like MACD, RSI, Bollinger, CCI, MA's...etc. And you know what happened? He demonstrated that any of the indicators are not able to do better performance than if flip the coin or throw the dice. Anyone them couldn't do more than 50% hit rate in long term. If I would say in one sentence what was the lesson, I would say doesn't matter when and in which direction you open your position, sell or buy. What only matters? Only the money management - Cut the loss immediately and confess to yourself you made a wrong decision. On the other hand let the win ride. It's that simple. All in all I am totally against all the indicators, they are only lagging, they don't add any more information about the market. I am sure many of you still believe that once finding the holy grail or find the magic indicator. I don't know too many things about the market, but what I know for 100% sure is that the perfect indicator never existed and never will.

We can’t predict the future. The market is a dynamic random system. So quite often we need to random as well. I have a favourite example. You know what do if two statisticians were to lose each other in a forest, the first thing they would do is get drunk. That way, they would walk more or less randomly, which would give them the best chance of finding each other. Such considerations belong to the statistical theory of “random walk” or “drunkard’s walk,” in which the future depends only on the present and not the past, which means indicators doesn’t hold anything about the future.

The mental side of traders and the Cognitive Dissonance

I had a friend who once told me. „When I decided I am going sit on the whole day and just trading and stay focused and doing nothing else, basically those days were my worst days in terms of profitability. When I left the market and let it work itself and didn't care about the running position I made nice profits."

I started to think about his story because plenty of times I had the same experiment. Why happens this? I guess the reason is when he was at the computer in the whole day he was much more scared and he cut the winning position earlier than needed to be. Why he was so scared? Because it is part of our mental side of traders. We are human beings with many mental weaknesses. The Psychology call this Cognitive Dissonance. When simultaneously holding two or more conflicting cognitions: ideas, beliefs, values or emotional reactions. As traders we feel very often this "disequilibrium": frustration, hunger, dread, guilt, anger. A key assumption the traders want their expectations to meet reality, creating a sense of equilibrium so they want to make profit, but if not happens or simply the markets goes against us we started to be anger, frustrated...etc.

Try to ignore those bad feelings and skip them all as much as possible. I really know it is hard, but try to close out all the mental, emotional actions out of your trading. LESS EMOTION MORE PROFIT. How can we reduce our Cognitive Dissonance? Easily. If you are disciplined and sitting in a losing position take the loss and don't hope anymore. In this case, you will reduce the mental stress of the trading significantly. In bigger picture if you really want to be profitable trader the first step you have to do in this long way that ACCEPTTHE FACT THAT YOU CAN LOSE. YOU CAN NOT ALWAYS WIN. If you understand that you are going to be more patience and much more profitable. If you don't hold for too long time your losing positions you don't need to wasting your energy anymore on losing positions. You are going to have more energy to focus on the winning profitable positions and your frustration will disappear.

Have a good mental progress

The BFM Assets Team

Take a look into our fully regulated Swiss fund and and invest with us.