No indicator contains information that is not already in price and volume. Every one of them is a smoothing, a ratio or a lag applied to data on your screen. That does not make them useless. A good transformation makes something visible you would otherwise miss, but it does mean stacking six of them adds no information at all.
Keep
- ·VWAP: not really an indicator; it is the benchmark real flow trades against. Non-negotiable intraday.
- ·9 and 20 EMA: a visual trailing stop and a read on whether pullbacks are deepening.
- ·Volume, with a relative-volume overlay: the only confirmation input that exists.
- ·Level 2 and time & sales: not indicators, and more informative than all of them combined. Where the resting size actually is.
Situational
RSI is worth one specific use: divergence. Price making a higher high while RSI makes a lower high says the second push had less force behind it, which is useful for timing a parabolic fade. As an overbought/oversold signal it is actively harmful on momentum names, which routinely sit above 90 for hours while continuing to run. "Overbought" is not a sell signal; it is a description of a strong trend.
MACD is two moving averages and their difference. If you already have the 9 and 20 EMA on the chart, MACD is telling you something you can see, one bar later.
Delete
| Indicator | Why it fails here |
|---|---|
| Bollinger Bands | Assume a distribution low floats do not have. Price rides the upper band for entire sessions. |
| Stochastics | Pins at 100 in exactly the conditions you are trying to trade. |
| Ichimoku | Built for a different timeframe and instrument class. Consumes chart space. |
| Fibonacci retracements | Post-hoc. With enough levels something always lines up. Use the actual structure lows instead. |
| Anything with more than two parameters | You will fit them to the last month and call it evidence. |
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