Nudity and You
If you look anywhere on the internet, there are so many people that tell you how to trade. Whether it’s with indicators, trading naked, or using the positions of Jupiter and Sirius to determine the tidal flows of Neptune, you are constantly bombarded with articles or PDFs telling you how to trade. Some people make it seem easy; some people make it look hard. In this article, you will see that it isn’t necessarily hard to learn how to trade, but that the application of that knowledge is. This article will also deal specifically with mostly price action based trading. No astrology or chicken bones here. Most of the methods described here can be learned elsewhere, but that isn’t the point. The point is to show you in what order to learn these things. In order to describe the best way to learn how to trade, it’s time to look at a super awesome analogy: clothes.
Before you get dressed, you are always naked. No clothes, just the good ole birthday suit. This is also how you want to start off trading. The best way to learn how the market works and how to get general experience in the market is to start off trading naked. Trading naked, for those who don’t know, is trading with absolutely nothing on the charts. This means no oscillators, no moving averages, no fancy market watch computer thingies. It is just you and the candlesticks. The reason this type of trading is first on the list is because it clears away all the clutter of complicated indicator systems (and because of the whole being naked/trading naked thing).
When you trade naked, all you see is the price. You get to see how the market moves at certain times, how the price reacts to different levels, the different patterns a certain currency pair develops, etc. To be more specific, you are learning. When you have a ton of indicators on your chart on the first day, or when you are trained by someone else to trade when two lines cross, you aren’t learning anything. You are just following the recommendation of a couple of lines on your screen. This is ok if that’s all you think you can do with trading, but, if all your indicators were taken away, you would be more lost than a camel in Antarctica.
The way you would naked trade starting out is by not trading. Yes. This does sound ridiculous. At this point in the learning process, you really shouldn’t be trading anyways. Instead, you should pretty much just be watching the price. Learning how it moves. If you absolutely can’t contain yourself and need to trade, then the best bet would be to start out on a demo account and just follow movement. Trust your instincts and go with the direction that the price is going. Real quick, just so you know, once you put some more clothes on, this is NOT how you want to trade, but for learning purposes, it is all right for now.
Trading without indicators teaches you to rely on yourself. You start to develop this thing called experience. The most successful traders in the market are those with years of trading experience. Granted, you don’t want to spend thirty years learning how to trade, but this stage in the learning process definitely helps with all the next stages.
