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There is no hard and fast rule on whether to use fundamental or technical analysis when it comes to forex trading and analysis. There are good things to be said about technical analysis and there are equally good things to be said about fundamental analysis. I think that a persons preference aligns with certain other preferences and probably align to whether you are a right brain thinker or a left brain thinker and as is often the case with such things you just need to firstly understand the differences between them to be able to make a choice in what you might use.

I myself prefer to use primarily technical analysis. With Forex of course no amount of technical analysis will provide any answers to what amounts to a trading halt, that is the market trading sideways prior to some major point of fundamental interest such as an election an interest rate change or debt announcements etc that alter the course of the markets.  All the market indicator tools around are primarily about technical analysis and metatrader has some great parts for this.

For fundamental analysis on the forex market you need to have a clear understanding on the relationship of interest rates and all other fundamentals that might affect the movement of a currency pair. What does a rising interest rate in Japan or Australia have on currency movements. What is the likely attitude of the market to a change of government at the upcoming election.

Technical analysts don’t need to so strongly know about the impact of these fundamental events however  the technical analyst does need to be aware that such events are most likely to create trading opportunities and be on the lookout for the signals that say game on. What the  technical analyst needs to do is find the opportunities by monitoring the graphs to find when price movement is to occur. A technical trader should not go into the market until a trend has formed alleviating the number of time when the market fails to move from the news or worse takes a temporary opposite position that activates a stop loss. Use what was Warren Buffets share trading strategy to take small but almost guaranteed successes rather than speculating with larger opportunities that might go bad and damage your capital.

From this one can conclude that neither is right, but how our brains think will probably guide the best choice. One thing to keep in mind is that a trader that is versed in both techniques of analysis and is able to separate what choices have been made with a trade in the market will likely be a very successful trader. If you choose to take a trading position with fundamental analysis don’t second guess yourself with technical analysis  and vice versa.

Now as you get started in your quest to develop your skills as a forex trader one of the  things you will be tempted to do is to change around the time frame you use for trading. For example you might want use the 15 minute time frame for conducting your technical analysis in the market. This is fine and really depending on your strategy you can choose to use a number of different time frames. So back to our example you have started out analysing the market at the 15 min time period and then you have decided there is an opportunity in the market.

You enter a trade with your broker and it all appears to be going OK. You expected the market to go up and it has been, but it hasn’t really gone as far as you might have liked your profit is very small and surely based on your research it will travel higher. It has now in fact appears to have turned against your proposed trade and you are looking likely to lose money on this deal. So you now choose to change your time period for the trade to a 5 minute interval, it seems reasonable you don’t have a close enough view with a 15 minute interval. The market now looks OK, it even appears like it might or has turned up again  a small spike occurs in the market, but these are fleeting and difficult to catch. but you breathed a slight sigh of relief. You can now be happier. Then it appears that the market is turning down again and well it looks kind of strange, as the fall seems quicker and larger. Your perception of the market behavior is altered to how you originally decided to take your market position. Of course you could take the other tack and move the time frame out looking also to save a falling trade looking for a longer term downside.

Many of these will end up with a margin call situation and disaster is not culled. This is a difficult idea for some new traders to swallow and will be a hard lesson learned by some.  s trade that is taking you negative is  a bad trade at the best of times an learning to close them out early and take a small loss is a clever trading tactic

Happy trading

Peter