The concept of support and resistance is a key component of technical analysis and, for many, especially fundamentals-based traders, the concept is the primary aspect of technical analysis. Its assistance with risk management can be enormous while its ability to predict, like anything else, is questionable because the future shall always remain uncertain.

Many traders eschew that lack of predictability to instead focus on probabilities, which can be helped by a multitude of technical tools. There are many ways of doing this.

A number of experienced traders employ price action and related methods, which involve using no technical indicators on the chart and instead focuses on patterns or formations. This is certainly available to you but, as a warning, it is usually considered ‘advanced’ and may not make much sense to traders new to charts.

In place of price action, many traders look to indicators and, again, this is a very wide field of analysis. To get started, we suggest learning about probably the simplest and most utilitarian indicator: The Moving Average.

Moving Average (MA) Explained for Traders

After gaining an understanding of the moving average, traders interested in learning more can discover the many indicator tools available to traders to help them customize their strategy or approach.

Technical Indicators Defined and Explained

To take this to the next step, we’re going to get more involved with a popular indicator that may be a little more advanced. It is based off of the same moving average that we looked at above, but this includes a few additional moving parts to create the MACD (Moving Average Convergence Divergence) indicator.

What the MACD Indicator is and How it Works

Real World Application

To put this to use while incorporating prior lessons, from a demo account - attempt to find a trend on the daily chart using the 200 day moving average, with a corresponding MACD signal on the four-hour chart. If the daily chart is showing a topside trend, look for a bullish MACD signal in order to set a buy order. Alternatively, if the daily chart is showing a bearish trend, look for a short signal via MACD on the four-hour chart.

Check progress every 24 hours, managing/closing trades from prior days while also initiating new ones as opportunities present themselves.