There are some very bright successful traders who've contributed to this thread, but I'm going to disagree with a few knowing that they're grown ups and their stable mind-sets means there'll be no silly flaming war..
OK, indicators and chart patterns do *work* in as much as, at you level of development, they can give you a reason to get into a trade and a reason to get out and one of the inherent benefits that can instill in you and your trader discipline is money management/capital preservation.
I swing trade multi FX pairs, I cannot possibly watch up to 9 pairs concurrently and look for price action, therefore I have my alerts set to scream when a combination of indicators trigger, or certain levels are reached (S+R, 200MA etc) either on a 2HR+ chart of a lower time-frame tick adjusted chart; they align I pull the trigger at any time of the day I've made myself available, if I'm too late I may pass unless I'm convinced price has reverted (temporarily) but the trend is still *right* in terms of my judgement.
90% of the trades I take go into profit (that doesn't mean I have a 90% success rate, some are in profit for a miserly few pips) 65% of trades are winners...actually last week it was closer to 50% out of 14 trades taken, but I was still profitable..Now I could change, I could trade a single pair by staring at the Euro chart all hours, looking for 20 pip+ PA opps. to flag up, tried that, it's just not me even when still swinging in the background.
As for entries, you mention MA x-overs, well there are legendary traders and trainers out there who've used 2 MAs and nothing much else on their charts for years, hasn't harmed their development..
So don't simply dismiss indicators and or patterns out of hand, ask yourself what they are, Google/you-tube for examples of price action or S+R+ daily pivot trading, practice and see if you overlay any indicators whether or not the result would have been that much different. Is PA any more reliable, what are we looking for, price acceleration away from a given point; away from the mean (an average) or the daily pivot? Are there other ways of seeing that?
I actually recently re-visited an old strat. I used a couple of years back, worked well at the time; stochs, macd, rsi, couple of MAs (one exponential) and used the psar for exit..it still 'works' OK vis a vis other methods. Bit messy, bit unecessary (same info. different maths genius), mightn't get me in as close to the 'b of the bang' I want to be now but heh..
Oh and aim for excellence not perfection and you must have the intellectual curiosity to go and discover what works
for you. Don't lose sight of the fact that you're dealing with probabilities, it's a given that most of us on these forums are right at the nitty end of the food chain, so we havn't got a clue what price will do next..No G.Sachs BSD on here going to give you a heads up that he's dumping the equivalent of Libya's sovereign wealth on the Euro this afternoon..
Oh, one more thing, Gerald Appeal, Welles Wilder, George Lane..wtf do/did they know eh? Bunch of maths nerds
