In a quiet moment last weekend I was wondering if you could trade Forex full-time just using one technical indicator.
My conclusion was that it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to make consistent profits, but then I remembered back to when I first started trading Forex a few years ago, and realizing that back then I pretty much only used one indicator – the Exponential Moving Average / EMA (15), and did make consistent profits.
Technically speaking I didn’t use only one indicator as I also displayed the EMA (50) and EMA (100) on the same chart to help me decide on exit strategies, and nowadays I use a lot more indicators to confirm my positions, but nevertheless I still think this basic approach of using an EMA (15) on a 30-minute chart could still generate regular profits.
The trick is to look for currencies that have been trending strongly in one direction for a few days with a rising or falling EMA (15), and wait until this EMA changes direction and signals a reversal.
Furthermore when this EMA does change direction you ideally want to enter into a position when the price is close to or touching this EMA for maximum value. Place your stop loss (SL) orders about 20 or 25 points below this EMA in the rare instances where you get a false reversal, but in most cases the reversal will happen and you can potentially make 30-200 pips depending on the strength and momentum of the reversal.
Also, you ideally want to trade in the direction of the long-term trend, so let’s take a real-life example – the GBP/USD.
The long-term yearly trend has been downwards, so we ideally want to find positions where the EMA (15) has been heading upwards for a few days and watch for a change in direction, so we’re trading in the direction of the long-term trend.
If you look at a 30 minute chart of this pair for this month (October), you can see two obvious instances of this happening.
The first instance was on October 10th when the price fell from 1.2255 to 1.2225 before bouncing back and heading upwards again. The EMA (15) started heading upwards as well between 1.2255 and 1.2225 and there were plenty of opportunities to trade close to this EMA to get maximum value (sometimes the price blasts through the EMA without retracing, making it hard to get any value from the trade).
As you can see, this upwards trend continued until the price reached a peak of 1.2460 so you could potentially have made a profit of 200+ pips!
Similar set-ups occurred on October 11th when there was another 100+ pips movement, so as you can see there are always good opportunities to trade this one indicator alone and make pretty good profits. However, I always combine more tools and make sure they support each other.
Therefore to answer my original question yes I believe you can make regular profits trading just one indicator, because I myself have done so in the past as a part-time Forex trader, but it makes far more sense to use additional indicators as well to confirm your positions, and to find additional positions to take.
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