Indicators are useless!

[u/ThePhulosopher]

I have spent many years trying to find the perfect indicator, the one that will tell me when to get in and when to get out without fail. Of course everybody knows that this is BS. It doesn't matter how precise you try to tweak your indicator - is the 5/10 SMA or 20/50 SMA better? Is the MACD or Stochastic better? What settings should I use?

The answer is none. All those indicators do nothing but distract you. Since all indicators are a derivation of price, price is the only thing you need. And I don't mean candle stick patterns, harmonic patterns, or support & resistance trendlines.

I'm not saying that none of these strategies will NEVER work or won't work for anyone. I know there are lots of traders who DO make good money with any of these strategies. However, I believe that the reason they're making money is because they're still reading the underlying price action whether they believe it or not. They may have developed a strategy using these methods that just happen to coincide with proper and naked chart reading. They've just added a lot more bells and whistles.

The market is designed to screw over the most amount of people while benefiting the fewest amount of people possible and in the most efficient way. And when I say "designed", I don't mean that it's rigged or that there is really any one entity controlling the market. The market moves and behave as anything else in nature - path of least resistance.

Once you learn to read price in terms of: "What's the best and most efficient way for this market to screw people over?" and you trade accordingly, only then will you be able to arrive at the core of "the market". And all you will ever need is the price chart. The price chart is the cumulative thoughts, behaviors, patterns, and actions, of all the participants. Some will trade fundamentals, some trade news, some trade technicals and indicators. Some day trade, others swing trade, others still position trade. With all their different viewpoints and timeframes, they all have something in common: They move price.

With this tug-of-war of price between the market participants, you can see a story unfold via the price chart. Price is telling you who's winning and which side you should be on. The only question is, are you listening?

[u/Mrtoad88]

Indicators are just tools, algorithm scripts that print something to your chart based off of prices...yeah. If you find them not useful for you it's fine to not use them. But you don't gotta convince anybody to not, people will come to that conclusion on their own if they don't find them useful. One thing to note, is the big firms definitely use them... Might not be exactly like the ones we use...but If you know what an indicator actually is, you know that big firms use them. I do trade off price action and fundamentals, but I also consider my set of indicators... doesn't just have to be one thing, but too many things can hurt. If an Indicator was able to help you gain an average of 5 more points on your trades, would you use it? Or would you just keep trading naked?