Trading crypto. The only indicator that counts.

I'm sure you've seen countless papers, images, presentations with complicated indicators, support lines, fibonacci retracement, moving averages and so on. Perfectly good at summarizing historical prices and predicting guessing future moves based on the past. Three reasons why sometimes they work:

• luck - sometimes you get lucky
• crowd psychology - same indicators means the same buy/sell points used by most
• human mind - our brain adores round numbers. If price fells by 100 units from 12.125 to 12.025 is not even slighty as bad as it falling from 10.095 to 9.095.

Volume. The only indicator that counts when analysing a graph.

Increased volume is needed in order to significantly move a price either up or down. The actual change of volume needed depends on the available supply, previous volume levels, timeframe for the investement.

Steady volume shows the true nature of the market, the actual ratio between supply and demand. Also, changes in price are insignificant. For a bearish market to start climbing, more demand is needed which means.. you guessed it, more volume.

Furthermore, volume shows the true movement of the smart money. 'Whales' usually act in groups. They do have tricks like accumulation/distribution strategies to fool the small investors. I will cover those in a future article.

As an example let's see the star of the past 2 weeks, Ripple(XRP):

Each spike (15-16 DEC, 21-22 DEC, 28 DEC -today ) is called out by an increase in volume. Steady volume between 24th and 28th means no significant change in price.

Follow the volume. See what the smart money are doing.