{"id":13150,"date":"2010-09-18T18:59:18","date_gmt":"2010-09-18T22:59:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/countingpips.com\/fx\/?p=13150"},"modified":"2010-09-18T18:59:18","modified_gmt":"2010-09-18T22:59:18","slug":"forex-trading-the-perils-of-trying-to-find-highs-and-lows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/fx\/2010\/09\/18\/forex-trading-the-perils-of-trying-to-find-highs-and-lows\/","title":{"rendered":"Forex Trading &#8211; The Perils Of Trying To Find Highs And Lows"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>By James Woolley<\/strong> &#8211; One of the most popular methods of trading when it comes to forex is  to identify and trade overbought and oversold positions. However is this  really the best way to trade the forex markets?<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;ve been a trader for any period of time you will know that it is  extremely difficult to catch the top or bottom of a market, and to do  this on a consistent basis is even more difficult.<\/p>\n<p>Even technical analysis experts struggle to pick out tops and bottoms of  trading ranges on a regular basis, and although they may get lucky  occasionally, there will be plenty of other times when they&#8217;ve entered a  position too early or too late.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s important to note that a currency pair, or indeed any financial  instrument can remain overbought or oversold for a very long time, and  may become even more so. Just because certain technical indicators  signal a probable high or low has been reached, does not necessarily  mean that this is the case.<\/p>\n<p>For example, there may be several indicators such as RSI, CCI and  stochastics, for instance, indicating that the GBP\/USD pair is currently  overbought and therefore ripe for shorting, but there&#8217;s still no reason  why it couldn&#8217;t go 200 points higher into even more overbought  territory.<\/p>\n<p>Furthermore this is the case whether you&#8217;re trading short term or long  term. Yes it&#8217;s true that forex pairs do conform fairly well to technical  analysis, but there are always exceptions (otherwise we would all be  millionaires).<\/p>\n<p>The problem with this method of trading is that you are always fighting  the trend, which is why I personally prefer to use methods that follow  the overall trend.<\/p>\n<p>However, if you do want to trade overbought and oversold positions, you  can still go with the trend to some extent by waiting for a solid  confirmation that a reversal is taking place.<\/p>\n<p>This will mean that you don&#8217;t catch all of a move but you will have  added confidence in your trade that a true reversal is about to take  place when you do enter a position.<\/p>\n<p>For example you could use crossover indicators like EMAs, MACD and TRIX for confirmation.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway the main point I want to get across is that trying to  consistently find highs and lows is a difficult way of trading which is  why you&#8217;re better off either using a trend-following method or waiting  for added confirmation if you do want to trade this way.<\/p>\n<h3>About the Author<\/h3>\n<p>James Woolley runs a blog where you can <a href=\"http:\/\/theforexarticles.com\/\">learn forex trading<\/a> and read his <a href=\"http:\/\/theforexarticles.com\/forex-trading-machine-review\">Forex Trading Machine review<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By James Woolley &#8211; One of the most popular methods of trading when it comes to forex is to identify and trade overbought and oversold positions. However is this really the best way to trade the forex markets? If you&#8217;ve been a trader for any period of time you will know that it is extremely &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/fx\/2010\/09\/18\/forex-trading-the-perils-of-trying-to-find-highs-and-lows\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Forex Trading &#8211; The Perils Of Trying To Find Highs And Lows&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/fx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/fx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/fx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/fx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/fx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/fx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13150\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/fx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/fx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/fx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}