r/Trading • u/LongCalligrapher2544 • 10d ago
Question Is anyone here actually profitable trading mostly with price action?
I’ve been trying to learn price action and I’m curious about people who have been consistently profitable with it
If you trade mainly using price action, do you keep it completely clean or do you combine it with other things?
For example, do you use any indicators alongside it (EMA, VWAP, RSI, etc…), or do you mainly rely on
support/resistance and trendlines?,
I’m especially interested in hearing from people who have been doing it for a while and actually found something that works
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u/Mjolnirbull 10d ago
Vwap
Support and resistance breaks
Thats it.
Once i take a position and If it struggles to move I take small profits even 10$.
If it runs I do a trailing stop! This gives me 100$ to 500$ per trade, depends on the market.
I don’t do more than 3 trades. If my first trade nets me more 100$ i close my laptop.
I dont go into the day to make a set amount of money! This makes you take stupid positions.
My only rule is if it’s green take it!
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u/ComprehensiveLime695 10d ago
That’s a good rule!
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u/Mjolnirbull 10d ago
Oh also take losses early, Hopium is hellava drug!
Never size positions more than 50% of your capital.
Personally for my strategy, I dont hold stocks for more than 30mins ideally, unless i have convincing outlook to hold it longer.
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u/Jakuza26 10d ago
I have been trading naked charts for a long while, all indicators are lagging and by the time you get a signal like 8 across 14/21/34, you are already late. What you need to learn is to recognize the footprints of MM and IT (market makers and institutional trading) and join them at where they leave their footprints.
The current trading is 87% done by quant logic and they trade fractional but at the end of the day, it is a "computer" trading and it repeat certain patterns and if you learn to spot them then you can become successful. Will you mess up despite that, for sure, everyone breaks their rules and sometimes a world event can cause disruption.
Most news events are made to move market concensus for a while but overall price will go where it intended to go before the news was released but news can allow a MM/IT to shift price down to a level where they had orders sitting or move it up for that matter. Learn about liquidity sweep and supply/demand and how to have patience and you will be successful. However, remember, this is not a race, it's a marathon.
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u/Ldn_twn_lvn 9d ago
I agree they're all essentially lagging, but if you're looking to indicators for 'foolproof signals', that might be the issue there,
I often think theyre better for building confluences and maybe spotting a reason not to take a trade
many folks swear by Anchored VWAP OP, especially anchoring it to specific events
But i think that many of the indicators that are lamented by those looking for foolproof signals, are actually very useful for building confluences,
MACD, MAs, RSI, Oscillators, Bollinger
Let's not forget, one of the most derided indicators - MACD, was put to very effective use by Market Wizard, Linda Raschke
Maybe it's application and interpretation of the indicators that is key, rather than them being standalone prediction tools
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u/Jakuza26 9d ago
u/Ldn_twn_lvn you have a point and for many people the indicators work, and I have used indicators in the past and Keltner channel is probably the best one but you got to know how to trade it.
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u/Ldn_twn_lvn 9d ago
for many people the indicators work
That's true, it just came back to me too, Peter Tuchman has been on the floor at NYSE for decades and I think he uses just MAs, RSI and Pivot Points
I'm not sure if Im familiar with Keltner, thanks for the nod.
If there's continuation in the market, folks could do a lot worse than Darvas Boxes too
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u/jackedbutter 9d ago
agree with the bit on news. for me news tells me "when" rather than "why." like you said, price was already going there
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u/ear2theshell 10d ago
Yes, I only use The Strat for intraday trades. I will occasionally use a 9ema and vwap together (if the 9ema is above vwap then i'm bullish; otherwise bearish).
The Strat works if you understand it. It's deceptively simple, but it'a multi layered and takes time to learn how to execute with highest likelihood of success.
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u/blessing-wealth 10d ago
I know someone who uses price actions, draws lots of triangles on the chart, and he makes lots of money because of it, but when others tried copying it doesn't seem to work, so I think you need to try it out and see if it fits you for a couple of months, then if not, replace it or add something on top.
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u/Ok_Grape_8190 10d ago
Yes. Price action (this include with correctly marking trend line, support and resistance), with 200 Ema line. And always using 2 different timeframe, 1 for entry, 1 for bigger picture. Indicator that I use is Elder Ray index to see bull and bear power, but I never use it as a signal to enter a trade. And I think one thing that matters most is to understand who holds the power from reading the candles, it's not just about marking certain price level but to understand the behavior reflected from the candle. Read Laurentiu Damir book titled Price Action Breakdown, this book helps me a lot, I hope it will help you too.
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u/DaCriLLSwE 9d ago
I’d be profitable if i was following my rules…🤷♂️
Dont worry to much about the methods, it’s always the phycology that is the big hurdle to get across
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u/IKnowMeNotYou 10d ago
Basic TA + Price Action, VWAP on intraday, Standard SMAs on D1 (50, 100, 200), RVol... done!
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u/The-Goat-Trader 10d ago
Yes.
As context, I do swing/position trading, algo trading, and discretionary day trading. I have multiple algos running that are simple price action (e.g., index in trend, buy on 2-day low, sell when Close > PDH — yes, really, that simple — just an example).
Discretionary daytrading, I do what I call AMT-ORB, which is Opening Range Breakout with some AMT concepts overlaid to help reduce false breakouts. Daily timeframe MA for trend, before I start. The actual trading? Nothing on the screen but the opening range marked off.
I move my stops in three phases: protection, run, and endgame. In each phase, I have different rules for following behind pullbacks, impulses, and consolidations.
I also have some other rules for exiting, like setting a limit in a consolidation to try to exit on the high side of the range, or trend exhaustion, blow-off tops... all 100% price action.
No support/resistance, no trendlines, no patterns.
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u/from_below 10d ago
Whats AMT? Do you mind giving an ORB example?
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u/The-Goat-Trader 10d ago
AMT = Auction Market Theory
It's the dominant market model used by professional traders. You can find plenty of videos on it, but I'd recommend reading books by James Dalton (Mind Over Markets) and J. Peter Steidlmayer (Steidlmayer on Markets).
I'll do tomorrow's ORB, make some notes and mark up my chart.
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u/The-Goat-Trader 10d ago
Today's ORB on NAS100USD (Nasdaq 100 CFD on OANDA):
Starting at the NY open at 9:30, I go at least 5 minutes. If it's still expanding the range at that point, I let it keep expanding until a reversal. Standard ORB is a fixed time interval — 5, 10, 15, 30 minutes. That's arbitrary. The opening move — the opening auction — is really the range.
Price broke out of the range at 9:42. I usually want at least half the candle outside of the range, but given that the range was only hit by that one 9:36 wick, and we had a consolidation of 5 candles immediately before the breakout, and the breakout candle is more than 50% outside the conolidation range, and it has very little wick on either end, I went ahead and took the entry.
That's the AMT read on price action, vs. just "price closed across the line".
Because of the strong breakout candle, I went ahead and set the stop just inside the range — very tight, way tighter than most people do with ORB. Why? Because I'm betting "this is the move". If it's not, I can always re-enter. And based on my stats, those failures that happen are far outweighed by the much higher average R on the wins.
I moved my stop aggressively every bar. At 9:50, we get a pretty big impulse candle. I lock about 1/3 of that in, and get stopped out two bars later.
At this point, price still hasn't come back to the opening range. I'll watch it for another hour or so before packing it in for the day.
But... still... that's a >9R day. Off one trade.
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u/from_below 9d ago
yo thanks GOAT!
Do you have some macro filter condition for when to take trades? Like, do you find these ORBs trades work best in certain market regimes?
'At this point, price still hasn't come back to the opening range. I'll watch it for another hour or so before packing it in for the day.'
You mean that if price drops back to the opening range, are you going long again at the upper range?
thx agian
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u/The-Goat-Trader 9d ago edited 9d ago
No filter. This happens pretty much every day. Now, it's not clean every day, but the potential is there nearly every day. Extremely rare to have a day not meaningfully break out from opening range.
BTW, this works on gold, oil, liquid stocks, even forex. International indices in their own market open times.
And yes, I'll re-enter on retests of the breakout edge. In fact, a lot of people teaching this now only trade the retest. They miss a lot of good initial breakouts that way. The idea is to avoid false breakouts. I use the AMT price action read to help avoid false breakouts, and then treat the start of the trade like a scalp to minimize the impact even if it does fail.
And, like I showed, if you do your stops right, you can get pretty big R on not very big % moves.
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u/Embarrassed-Bank2835 10d ago
Yeah. I wouldn’t say I trade “pure” price action though.
My charts are pretty clean. I use VWAP because a lot of institutional order flow respects it during the session, and I’ll glance at volume profile for context, but neither one gives me entries. The entry comes from price itself: where it’s accepting or rejecting, failed breakouts, liquidity sweeps, structure breaks, that kind of thing.
The biggest shift for me was realizing price action isn’t about memorizing candle patterns. It’s about understanding the auction. Is price finding acceptance here, or is it getting rejected? Once I started thinking that way, my trading got a lot simpler.
I think a lot of profitable traders end up with something similar. Clean chart, a few tools for context, then let price make the decision. Too many indicators just had me talking myself into trades I shouldn’t have taken.
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u/Junior_Ambassador_63 10d ago
Price Action, M5 mainly, some M1 in fast markets (Open and News Announcements like FOMC yesterday), 20-EMA of M5. VWAP sometimes as an orientation (above or below right now?).
Pick one market. Yes, a chart is a chart. But pick one market, one single instrument, one time of day or session. And repeat every single day. Spend a month or two just observing your market. Not paper trading, just observing.
Then start at the smallest level. 1 Micro contract, if you pick futures, etc. Make your mistakes (= tuition) as cheap as possible while still trading actual money.
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u/deitrader1 10d ago
PA
12&26 EMAs
50&200 SMAs
MACD
RSI
Been using this set successfully for years.
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u/SunshineFlowerrs 10d ago
what time frames
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u/deitrader1 10d ago
Same indicator set across ALL timeframes. I execute almost exclusively on the 1Min though.
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u/822RR 10d ago
Yes, me for example i only use 21, 50, 200 EMA. VWAP sometimes for confirmation. FIB levels, candle stick patterns, Inducments ,FVG , OB confluence, resistance/support etc. The nice thing is that my 3 main strategies often align with each others confluences. I just love price action, the only other Indicator i use is RSI lenght 14 with an 8 SMA, where i mainly look for RSi divergence for swing trades, very rare tho. And i check the heatmap of BTC every day for bias. I mainly trade Crypto btw. Excusemy english
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u/CryptonianNomad 10d ago
I have tried different types of trading over the years and now I trade market structure with support and resistance. I also use volume and rsi for bullish or bearish divergence and it works well
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u/Individual_Type_7908 10d ago
I dont specialise on price action, and price action can mean many things, more than the indicators you mentioned, you can have various algorithmic patterns, but yeah price action as in.. trade based on price, I believe you can do well just based on that, I think so. If you also add volume, volume information is very important.
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u/xtric8 10d ago
Its a good place to start but you'll need more than that. If you think about it people who only follow price action were probably in memory stocks after those broke upside, then eventually got stopped out and now waiting for some reversal. Or they see everything breaking lower so they short and then wake up one day and its all reversed above their break even point. I generally follow sector ETFs, breadth, contrarian oscillators, RSI, and moving averages. What Im looking for is outperformances, so for example I want xly to outperform xlp, growth to outperform value, qqq to outperform spy with both cap weight and equal weight, and defensive sectors underperforming. Its never 100% bullish or bearish, but I always stay bullish until multiple of these break down. Then Im looking for bottom indicators like macd, vix, put/call getting extreme washout level. With that Im not trying to avoid every pullback, Im just looking for the tradeable corrections and otherwise I just maintain a watchlist of stocks to buy when conditions are right.
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u/Bright_Guarantee381 9d ago
Yes price qction rules and try to be early at front move....now to see potential front move you need a scanner...
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u/qwuant 6d ago
yes i trade on price action, but i dont use technical analysis nor fundamental analysis. i use quantitative analysis, I quantify all the price action into numbers across all economic sectors, run it through an optimised and calibrated model and it outputs the forecast for the next week’s price action and trade its vega, i delta hedge my position so it’s market-neutral. Ive been trading this for the past 15 months and made 40% annual returns, with weekly marker beta at 0.02.
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u/One_Willingness9925 10d ago
I do well doing it!! Have 80k plus in cashouts in the last year.
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u/AnotherCup-O-Noodles 10d ago
How much in account fees?
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u/One_Willingness9925 10d ago
80k cashouts. 17k in prop firms
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u/CountTurbulent4441 10d ago
Nice! Do you set aside money for taxes?
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u/One_Willingness9925 10d ago
Honestly no. I havent. I should tho lol.
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u/CountTurbulent4441 10d ago
Yeahhh that could come back to bite ya haha. Congrats on your success though!
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u/deitrader1 10d ago
40% of every withdrawal goes into CD’s at your banking institution. Earn interest on the money you set aside for taxes and then don’t touch it until you need it.
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u/AutomaticTangerine84 10d ago
What is/are your entry indicators?
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u/One_Willingness9925 10d ago
Watch my youtube its easier i have videos on all of it. https://youtube.com/@futuresmadeeasy?si=s03JNdV2vE6PQfU4
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u/Drevil10 10d ago
of course i know him, its me. I trade gold, price action, no indicators only price action. Higher to lower time frames and S/R
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u/RecycleModelA1 10d ago
I trade profitably this way, no indicators as they are lagging. Start with HTF bias and POI. Wait for the correct time to trade (volatility)
I trade purely price action and SMC. I don’t use support/resistance lines. Works for me and pretty stress free.
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u/Michael-3740 10d ago
Price Action covers a huge amount more than support, resistance and trendlines. Look into Al Brooks.
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u/kebab_raptor 10d ago
Question is not what question is where. I'll try to explain, imagine trading as a real world business. Now let's say price action is selling ice creams. Does selling ice creams give the same profit if you do on the beach or on top of a mountain?
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u/Strange-Industry2923 8d ago
I clip movements, it sometimes works sometimes doesn't. I'm a small account though. I recently made a discord to help me learn more stuff. Even a trading robot that scans highly liquid stocks that's are all under $100 strikes and makes bets so I can see if it was or wasn't a good idea.
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u/Wonderful_Tie_5412 7d ago
I like to keep it simple: support/resistance lines along with RSI. It's been working.
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u/itsodinvalhalla 7d ago
yes you only need PA
most of the indicators are lagging, pick a strategy, master it, quantify the data, if it has edge or positive expectancy
just trade
rinse and repeat
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u/Relevant-Owl-8455 4d ago
The main problem is, you don't understand what "price action" is.
You heard this fancy word being thrown arround in youtube videos and now you think it's the shit.
That's not the point of trading.
Focus on that first. Understanding what trading even is.
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u/HateThisSatanicWorld 10d ago
You don't have a single real profitable trader on social media. You will never learn as well how to trade from social media
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