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Been trading Forex recently since the equities market is pretty Zzzz. I kinda noticed daily pivots were not causing any price reactions and stopped paying attention to them. Then today I thought back... Wait a minute, I remember daily pivots having reactions a year ago... Wth?
So, I goggled around and someone mentioned London open as the proper start/end time. So, I switched everything to a 2AM CST start/end time and pivots are working again! Eg: Price is reacting to them consistently again.
Now, just to make sure... Is the London open the official time that people are using for Forex daily pivots? Eg: Is it the time used by default across most retail/professional charting programs and etc? Or is 2am CST not correct? It could also be 00:00 GMT... Not sure!
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
I remember back in late march 2010... Over traders audio... Goldman came in to sell 1000 cars exactly at the weekly pivot and it stopped the market dead. Set the top of the market for nearly a week. If you don't have the same daily candles as others, and the same pivots as others... It's as bad as trading with the wrong prices! lol...
A lot of things have changed I admit... Old indicators like RSI and chart patterns are no longer reliable. Traditional pattern reliability has gone down year by year. This has been statistically proven. As retail traders and the masses have gotten their hands on the same tools that use to only be in the hands of the pro's they have become less effective and their usefulness has been priced out of the market.
Here is the interesting thing about technical analysis... Some things price themselves out when too many people use them and some reinforce themselves. Pivots become reinforced while momentum signals and similar get priced out. Why the difference?
Here is my explanation... Say there was a specific EMA cross that reliably predicted a average one hour move up in prices five years ago... Once many people found out about it, it instead creates a new scenario. People jumping into that signal create an overbought state of the market within minutes and the market instead snaps back within around a quarter of the time. That is the mechanism through which signal/momentum based technical analysis gets priced out.
However... Things like pivots become reinforced. As more and more people become aware of them they become stronger. Their breaks and price action on tests become more meaningful.
Old momentum and overbought/oversold trading techniques failing in this market isn't just due to professional analysis tools becoming available to everyone. This is also a different type of market. Well, when it comes to the stock market, that is. It is a momentum market with strangely different behavior than past markets. Price pressure remains polarized upward for durations around twice as long as during the .com bubble, and around 1/3rd longer than the bull market that ended in 2007.
Quite interesting really... If you want a visual example showing exactly what I am talking about I can post one.
Probably a lot of that is due to QE and central bankers micro-managing market sentiment. If you look at a chart showing where QE programs start and end vs market trends... Central bankers massive effect on sentiment is quite obvious.
I came across the pivot issue you are currently dealing with awhile back. However, I did not find one particular "opening" time to be conclusively "the one". Sometimes NY-based pivots worked, sometimes London-based pivots worked, sometimes GMT-based. I eventually just moved on from pivots.
Anyway, I would suggest trying NY pivots during the US session and London or GMT pivots during the European session, as in the end, no matter where people are, they tend to be self-centric.