Your Guide to Understanding and Mastering Forex Charts!

This section is dedicated to all those wonderful forex charts and the functionalities available. These features are specially important for technical analysis, where past knowledge is used to predict future trends and market movement.

Technical analysis can also be used to trade other instruments such as Stocks.

Please go through each one if you are not already familiar with them, though you do not need to memorise and remember everything. I personally have tried every chart functions with all the bells and whistles when I first started learning, but now I do not use more than a few chart functions.

Note: If you are new to forex do not skim ahead. Take your time now to familiarize yourself with the basics. Visit the Forex Trading Charts introduction page.

Ok...let's get started, here is a list of all the important chart features you need to be familiar with:

Candlestick Basics

Elliot Wave Theory

Bollinger Bands

Fibonacci

Stochastics

MACD

Pivot Point

Parabolic SAR

Andrew's Pitchfork

You should know what type of a trader category you fall under: if you are a superactive trader then you will trading the 5,10 and 15 minute chart intervals. On the other hand, if you are a swing or position trader the 30, 60 and 180 minute intervals are what you will be looking at.

My take: Personally, I recommend the 15 minute and 60 minute, and 1 day charts, as there is less emotion involved and gives you the breathing space needed to think up strategies. Also, it is a choice of lifestyle, you don't want to be glued to your monitor all day, do you?