Trader dynamics play a crucial role in establishing key support and resistance levels in the futures markets. The basic forces and behaviors of traders buying and selling can drive price trends and reversal points.
To better understand how trader dynamics can affect support and resistance levels and how to utilize these levels in your futures trading, watch this video featuring real-time examples from the NinjaTrader platform:
Additional topics discussed in this free livestream:
How basic buying and selling can create key price levels in every market
Technical indicators that help identify support and resistance levels
Why price levels can fail to turn a market
How to validate or confirm psychological price levels
Trends That Drive Support and Resistance Levels
As buying pressure builds, prices trend upward, but there comes a point when buyers start selling to take profits. This additional selling pressure can create a resistance level. Resistance levels often form when prices have risen to a point where sentiment considers the market overbought. Such resistance levels can bring in sellers and pause or reverse an uptrend.
Support Levels from Downtrends and Short Squeezes
On the other hand, when the market is in a downtrend, sellers eventually need to buy back their positions to close them, typically at lower prices to secure a profit. This buying pressure can create a support level.
Another concept to consider is a short squeeze, which occurs when traders with short market positions are forced to buy them back quickly when a trade goes against them, possibly on heavy buying. This rush to close short positions can further accelerate the upward trend, often creating dramatic up moves. There can also be long squeezes.
As humans, we like things to be logical, and as traders, we may often choose—even subconsciously—to place orders at round prices that can then become significant support or resistance levels. Numbers like 100, 1,000, or 10,000 are easy to remember and represent perceived areas of value or risk, potentially creating a gathering of orders at these levels.
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