How To Trade Moving Averages With Price Action

Explore The Chapters

Many new traders that find it difficult to define the structure of a trending market, therefore they rely on moving averages for trend detection or identification.

Using Moving Averages For Dynamic Support And Resistance Levels

The concept of dynamic support and resistance can be fully understood with a few charts given below.

When the market is in a downtrend, you will notice that price moves up to the moving average lines (upswing) and then bounces back down from them (downswing). (That is if you put moving average lines on your charts).

Here’s an example:

The similar situation happens in an uptrend: prices move down to the moving average lines (downswing) and then bounces up from them (upswing).

Here’s an example shown on the chart below:

Now that you know this concept of dynamic support and resistance using moving averages, the next thing you need to know is that trend trading strategies can be created around them and in a very nice trending market, they are really effective.

For those that love moving averages, look for reversal candlesticks as the price starts to go back to touch the moving average lines and these are used as your confirmation signal to buy or sell.

In a downtrend, you should be looking for bearish reversal candlesticks like the shooting star, bearish harami, spinning tops, dark cloud cover, hanging man etc to go short (sell).
In an uptrend, you should be looking out for bullish reversal candlestick patterns like pin bars, dojis, piercing line, bullish harami etc…

Let’s study the past again…on the chart below is an example of how to trade dynamic support with Price Action:

Now, it’s easy to say here that “ you could have bought here and sold here” etc based on what happened in the past because now you can see how the market has played out in the past…

But real challenge for many traders is that when a setup is happening, they will most likely second guess it because this is how its going to look: