What was left when I stripped every indicator off my chart for a month

[Fairman]

What was left when I stripped every indicator off my chart for a month

my charts had become a mess, with several indicators, lines and zones, and I couldn't tell which of them was actually helping. So for a month I removed everything except price, volume and a few horizontal lines I drew myself.

The first week was uncomfortable. I felt like I was missing information. But I noticed my decisions got quicker and I had fewer conflicting signals. I stopped trying to reconcile what three tools were telling me and just looked at what price was doing at my levels.

Over the month, I added back only two things: a session clock so I knew what time it was in GMT, and an ATR readout in the corner for sizing stops. Nothing else. I realised the other indicators had mostly been giving me reasons to take trades I wasn't sure about.

I'm not saying indicators are bad, some of them help me. It's that I couldn't say which until I took them away and checked. If your chart is crowded, try it for a couple of weeks and see what you actually miss.

[Fairman]

I did the same experiment and came to almost the same place. The ATR readout is the one thing I added back too, purely for stop sizing. What surprised me was how often my old indicators had been telling me what I already saw from price. Two moving averages, a momentum indicator and a band were all saying trend up when the chart was obviously going up. Taking them away showed me how much of it was decoration. The clean chart made my levels stand out, and those were what I was really trading all along.

[Fairman]

Worth saying that clean charts do not mean no tools forever. For me the point of the exercise was to find out which tools I actually used for decisions. After the month I added one thing back at a time and kept it only if it changed a decision I would otherwise get wrong. Most did not pass that test. The ones that did are the ones I trust now. It is also a good exercise to repeat every year or so, because indicators have a way of creeping back onto the chart one at a time.

[Shadow Trader]

Volume is worth a second look on that stripped setup. On spot FX the platform shows tick volume, the count of price changes on that one feed, so it tracks activity reasonably well but says nothing about the size behind a move.

Horizontal lines can clutter a screen as badly as indicators. A rule like no more than three drawn levels above price and three below, with anything older than two weeks deleted unless price touched it again, keeps the clean look from silting up.

A sharper version of the experiment is a blind replay. Say you pull 30 old setups as plain price screenshots and write take or skip on each, then repeat with the old indicators switched on; any tool that flips fewer than three or four of the 30 decisions is decoration.

The session clock is the addition I would rank highest. Plenty of bad trades are fine setups taken at the wrong hour, and no indicator shows that.

Did removing the indicators change your trade count much? Fewer conflicting signals sometimes means more trades, not fewer.