Price Action

Price action is the practice of making decisions from the open, high, low, and close and from the swings they form. A higher high, a failed break, a wide bar that closes on its low, a tight cluster under resistance: these are the objects. Indicators may still be on the chart. They are not required for the read. The phrase is not a strategy. Two price-action traders can look at the same swing and take opposite trades because their timeframes, their levels, and their risk rules differ. "Price action" names the evidence they share, which is the tape of prices, not a signal that prints arrows.

Start with structure. Mark the swings that are obvious at your timeframe and ignore the ones that are noise inside them. Then read the bars at the level that matters, not every bar in between. A hammer in the middle of a range is a shape. A hammer at a weekly low, after a sell climax, is a location plus a shape. Volume, if you have real volume, tells you whether the shape was traded or printed in a vacuum. The goal is a small set of repeatable situations, not a commentary on every candle.

Use price action to define the setup and the invalidation in the market's own units. The stop goes beyond the swing that should not break if you are right. The entry is a break, a hold, or a reclaim you can point at. If you cannot describe the trade without an oscillator value, it is an indicator trade, which is fine, but it is a different craft. Do not collect fifty candle names. Learn how a swing fails and how a level holds. Those two patterns cover more live trades than a catalogue.

Treating "I only trade price action" as a claim of objectivity. Swing marking is a judgement, and traders redraw swings to suit the trade they want. Also ignoring the higher timeframe because the lower-timeframe candles feel more precise. Precision of the bar is not importance of the level. And refusing volume or VWAP as "indicators" when they are direct measurements of the trading you claim to read.

Price action does not know the news that is about to print, and it does not know hidden size. A perfect level fails when the auction changes. Bar patterns on illiquid names are the last trades of a wide spread, not a crowd's decision. And without a written risk rule, price action becomes permission to enter anywhere you can invent a story.