Price action only week challenge

[LondonScalper]

I did a one-week challenge with myself: price action only, no indicators at all on the chart. Here is how it went.

Setup: plain candlestick charts on EURUSD and GBPUSD, M1 and M15, with only horizontal lines for levels I marked before the session. No moving averages, no VWAP, no RSI. Normal risk per trade, normal session times.

Day one felt uncomfortable. I realised how often I glance at a moving average to confirm what I already see in the candles. Without it, I hesitated more and took fewer trades.

By day three, I was reading the charts more directly: where price was rejected, where it moved fast, where it stalled. My entries were slightly earlier because I was not waiting for an indicator to catch up.

Results for the week: about the same as an average week, with fewer trades and slightly better average R. Not a dramatic difference.

What I kept afterwards: I removed two indicators permanently, because the week showed they were not changing my decisions. I kept one moving average on M15 as a rough trend reference.

If you have more than three indicators on your chart, try a week without them. You might find you need fewer than you think.

[Shadow Trader]

One week is a small sample, maybe 20 or 30 trades, so I'd read "slightly better average R" as no worse rather than better. The part that matters is the one you kept: two indicators gone because they never changed a decision.

I did something similar for two weeks and found the opposite of your day one. I took more trades without indicators, not fewer, because nothing was telling me to wait. Most of the extra trades were scratches near the levels.

What helped was a tag on every trade during the challenge: "would I have taken this with my normal chart?" That split the week into the trades that were the same either way and the ones the challenge created.

In my case about a third were new, and those were slightly negative. The rest performed exactly like a normal week, which told me the indicators were mostly decoration, not filters.

Agree on keeping one M15 moving average. Mine stays because it stops me fading a trend on M1 when the higher timeframe is clearly one way.

Which two did you remove? I'd guess RSI was one of them.

[Fairman]

Results for the week: about the same as an average week, with fewer trades and slightly better average R.

Was it a fairly normal week for range and news? One week is a small sample, and if it happened to be quieter or busier than usual the comparison with an average week shifts a lot. The other thing I'd like to know is where the better average R came from. You mention entries were slightly earlier. If the stop stayed at the same structural level, an earlier entry means a tighter stop, so the same move pays more R. That's useful in itself, but it's a different finding from indicators making the decisions worse. Did the stop distances change during the week, or did the gain come from skipping trades the indicators used to talk you into?

[Shadow Trader]

Fairman, your stop distance question is the one I wish I had measured during my own challenge. I went back through the log and the average stop on EURUSD M1 was 4.8 pips with my normal chart and 3.9 pips during the blank week.

That is roughly a fifth tighter, and it lines up with LondonScalper's earlier entries. Same structural level for the stop, just a better fill relative to it, so the R on a 6 pip move jumped without the setup changing.

Where the indicators still mattered was the skip list. About a quarter of the trades I would normally take were ones the RSI or VWAP used to talk me into after a clean rejection. Those skipped tickets were net negative on the weeks I had them tagged.

So the better average R was half tighter stops and half fewer bad adds. One week still cannot prove the edge, but it can show which part of the chart was decorating decisions.

LondonScalper, did your stop distances move at all during the week, or did the gain come only from skipping? I would love a pip number if you kept one.