ForexGen | Using Technical Analysis To Profit In Forex Trading

There are two basic ways to approach the analysis of the fx markets: Technical analysis and Fundamental Analysis. Someone who is using a fundamental analytical approach will look at the current economic climate, political events, a variety of economic indicators, and so on to try to predict currency moves. What we will examine is technical analysis, or the use of historical price patterns in economic data to predict future moves in the FOREX. We will also look at the tools used for technical analysis.

The three major assumptions underlying technical analysis are:
1 - All market forces are taken into account in price movement. Many things can affect the price of a currency. Some of these factors would be economic conditions, political happenings, natural disasters, seasonal supply and demand and even the weather. Technical analysis, however, does not attempt to take these into account because the market has already done that. Rather, a technical analyst is concerned with the actual movements of the market, not with the reasons for the movement.
2 - There are observable trends in currency prices movements. There are known market patterns that follow predictable paths.
3 - There are historical trends in price movements. Over a century of forex data collection has shown that human nature interacts with events in predictable ways. Thus, when circumstances are similar in the market, the same patterns will show up.

Technical Analysis: Is It Necessary?
Day traders in the FOREX usually use technical analysis most heavily, though they may supplement it with fundamental analysis. Technical analysis has the huge advantage of being applicable to a wide range of currencies and markets simultaneously. To properly do fundamental analysis requires a good knowledge of events and conditions in a certain country so the number of markets any particular trader can analyze by the fundamental approach is necessarily limited.
Technical analysis can seem so complicated to the beginner that they may be tempted to wonder if it is really needed. The truth is that all investing requires a strategy and technical analysis is a proven way to set strategy by predicting FOREX movements. Of course, no strategy or method is always successful, which is one reason many technical traders also do some fundamental analysis as a supplement.
Using Price Charts In Technical Analysis
Charts lie at the heart of technical analysis and you will find a good selection available from any online FOREX broker. Not only are the charts updated constantly, real time, but they can be viewed in a variety of ways. You can see movement over various periods of time, broken down into different time scales, and with various analytical overlays applied. With the software provided you can see the broad picture over a long period or zoom into the most minute detail. The basic software is free from most online Forex brokers but there may be a fee for the more professional, in-depth, information.

Sometimes the charts are a built-in part of the broker's software package. Alternately, they may be available on the broker's website.
Practice, or demo, accounts are available from most brokers on their website. These allow you to use the charts and tools of that particular software to learn the techniques of following charts, noticing and learning about trends and studying market movements. Nothing can substitute for this valuable period of becoming intimately familiar with charts and market behavior.

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ForexGen | Explaining The Term Technical Analysis

The study of a security's price action for the purpose of forecasting profitable price trends and movement is known as Technical Analysis. The price action is defined as movement in a security's price, volume, and open interest.
Technical Analysis is primarily, maybe not exclusively, conducted by studying charts of the recent past price action. Many different methods and tools are new in Technical Analysis, but they all rely on the superlative assumption that price patterns and trends exist in markets, and thus, that they can be identified and exploited too.

Technical Analysis does not try to analyze the financial data of a company, can say
, dividends and projection of future dividends, an area of analysis which is also known as the fundamental analysis. However, some speculators try to combine Technical Analysis as the elements from both technical and fundamental analysis.
Like any predictive method, Technical Analysis is not 100% accurate, but it surely attempts to give the presumable outcome. Some forms of Technical Analysis, like charting, are viewed by many of its practitioners as more art than science.
Some scholastic studies conclude that Technical Analysis has little predictive power while other studies show that the practice can produce excess returns too. For an instance, measurable forms of Technical Analysis non-linear prediction using neural networks have been shown to occasionally produce statistically significant prediction results.

Lets take an example to understand the debate regarding the efficacy of Technical Analysis, a very well-known and successful fundamental analyst, once commented that, "Charts are wonderful for predicting the past."
A Federal Reserve working paper has shown that the statistical properties of intraday FX MARKET prices change near the "support and resistance" lines, without showing that this result would be new in a profitable trading approach.

History Of Technical Analysts
The Technical Analysis premises were derived from observation of financial markets over a long period of time say hundreds of years. Perhaps the oldest branch of Technical Analysis is the use of candlestick techniques by Japanese traders at least as early as the 18th century, and are yet still very popular today.
Another theory based resting on the collected writings of Dow Jones, the co-founder and editor Charles Dow, inspired the use and progress of Technical Analysis from the end of the 19th century. Modern research considers Dow theory its foundation stone.
For Technical Analysis the technical tools and theories have been developed and enhanced in recent decades, with a raising emphasis on computer-assisted techniques.
Common Beliefs Regarding Technical Analysis
The Technical Analysis is not at all concerned with why a price is moving but rather whether it is moving in a particular direction or in a particular chart pattern. For example, poor earnings, difficult business environment, poor management, or other fundamentals.
The analysts of Technical Analysis believe that profits can be made by the concept of "Trend following." What is tried to pronounce here is that if a particular stock price is steadily rising, that is, trending upward then a technical analyst will look for opportunities to buy this Stock.
Until the technical analyst is convinced this up trend has reversed or ended, all else equal, he will maintain to own this security.

Additionally, technical analysts during the Technical Analysis look for various price patterns to form on a price chart and will take positions in anticipation of the expected move following that pattern. The tools of the analysts are believed to assist the technician in determining when trends have formed, ended, and so on till particular patterns are unfolding.
Technical Analysis can be at odds with fundamental analysis. Fundamental analysis maintains that the markets can miswrite a security and, through various methods of fundamental analysis, the "correct" price can be calculated too.
Profits can be made by trading the mispriced security and then waiting for the market to distinguish its "mistake" and reprice the security. In contrast, a technical analyst during the process of Technical Analysis is not interested in a security's "correct" price, but is only in the price movement.

While Technical Analysis is done there are two well-known sayings among technical analysts that are, "The trend is your friend," and "Forget the fundamentals and follow the money." An example of the different views of technical and fundamental analysis follows.
Suppose a stock was trading at 124.25 pence, and that the accord fundamental analysis view of the stock was that it was worth 120.00 pence. If the share price rose to 125.00 pence, then to 126.00 pence, and then to 127.00 pence, a technical analyst during his Technical Analysis would likely be a buyer of this stock in order to profit from the perceived trend.
In contrast, a fundamental analyst would possibly look to sell the stock as it is moving away from what the fundamental analyst believes is the "correct" price

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