Forex traders bring all kinds of strategies and trading timelines to the table when they analyze forex charts. Both chart patterns and forex indicators can be used to evaluate trade opportunities depending on both your personal trading preferences and the price activity taking place on the forex charts.

When it comes to identifying a price breakout, though, technical indicators can help you determine not only the start of a breakout event, but also the kind of momentum it might carry for traders who open a position at the start of this movement.

Before we discuss the top technical indicators for confirming forex breakouts, though, let’s make sure we understand how breakouts start.

Within the forex market, there are traders known as position traders (sometimes referred to as “buy and hold” traders), who take positions for the long term. They base this on long-term charts and macroeconomics, and they operate in pretty much every market there is—including the hyperactive forex market. 

Considering how the popularity of position trading is growing, it’s worth putting this market approach under the microscope. Here’s a look at the details behind position trading, along with how common traders use positions.

When you choose to engage in forex trading, you’ll quickly come to understand that it pays dividends to make use of any and every tool that is made available. What these “tools” should do is help push forward your trading strategy, improving your output, and effectively helping generate further profit. Looking at what could very well take your forex trading efforts to the next level, forex trading signals happen to be something that no active trader can really afford to ignore.

When you’re building a list of forex pairs to target through a swing trading strategy, there are a few basic characteristics you want to prioritize to identify the strongest trading opportunities possible. Any currency pair is going to offer price movements that create swing trading potential over time, but if you’re serious about swing trading, you want to limit your focus to the pairs that offer the highest profit potential through this trading strategy.

Index trading is a popular, easy way to invest in a group of businesses, or a representative sample of a country’s largest companies, without being forced to invest in individual companies.

For forex traders, index trading is an attractive alternative to directly investing in a specific country’s stock market. Typically, indices are designed to offer a reflection of a given country’s economic strength. But these indices can also serve as a high-performing collection of select holdings from a single market, offering a more concentrated investment opportunity in a foreign country’s economy.

Contract-for-difference (CFD) trading is popular for index investments. Of the various indices available around the world, the US30 is one of the best-known options available to traders, offering an easy way to get exposure to 30 of the United States’ largest companies.

A popular way of identifying trends is using moving averages. A moving average is a line on a chart that smoothes out price action by calculating an average of closing prices over a period of time and displaying the result on a chart providing an overall direction for a set period.

There are two variables to be determined when using a moving average. You need to decide first on the time period you are going to use to obtain the average and, second, what method of averaging you are going to use.

Volatility is a two-sided coin when it comes to forex trading. On the one hand, volatility is how forex traders are able to turn a profit, especially when looking to make a quick buck off short-term trades.

It is widely accepted that when you start trading, you never consider the most critical issues to becoming a consistently profitable trader.  Often, all you can think of is how much money you are going to make and how you cannot wait to start.

When it comes to managing risk, an often-overlooked component is probability, or the likelihood of something happening.  Even then, I strongly believe that many traders misinterpret the rules of probability. Some believe that if they have an unprofitable trade, somehow this increases the chance that their next trade will be profitable. If they incur a string of losses, they believe that their chance of a profitable trade increases as each unprofitable trade passes.

The most dominant issues in November were the United States Federal Reserve (Fed) and their plan on interest rates, as well as the latest update in the Brexit and election saga.  In the U.S., the spotlights are always on the Fed and at a recent conference in Washington, New York Federal Reserve President John Williams said that the Fed has interest rates at the appropriate level for the U.S. economy.  "I think we have monetary policy in the right place. The economy is right where we would like it to be." Markets only see around a 25% probability of a rates move at the Fed’s next meeting on 10th – 11th December.  The Brexit critics continue to roll up to have their say.  Recently retired former speaker John Bercow says leaving the EU is the United Kingdom's 'biggest blunder since World War II'.  At a dinner in London, Mr Bercow was quoted as saying, “I don’t think it helps the UK. Brexit is the biggest mistake of this country after the war. I respect prime minister Johnson, but Brexit doesn’t help us. It’s better to be part of the [EU] power bloc.”

Unfortunately, many people who start trading find success difficult to achieve, especially early on.  Trading is a challenging endeavour that has torn people from across the world across generations, from every extreme of their emotions.  

It is our money that is directly involved in trading and therefore at risk, and the potential of making more money is our primary motivation for beginning this undertaking.  Ironically, it is the money that encourages the vast majority to attempt to trade yet it is the money that causes most people to fail.