Support and Resistance with CFDs
When trading CFDs off the back of technical data, there are few more important terms of which you must be familiar than support and resistance. Support and resistance levels provide traders with clear and defined parameters for trading, and enable decisions to be made over both short and long term outlooks to drive a profit. No matter whether you're looking at CFDs on company shares or CFDs on commodities, the interplay of support and resistance makes for a more naturally obvious trading system, and helps define the outer limits of possible CFD transactions.
Support is defined as the bottom end of a market for a particular CFD, that is the point at which downwards momentum halts and buyers re-enter the market in recognition of the under pricing of the CFD. Resistance, in contrast, is the top end of the pricing spectrum, and the point at which traders close out their positions in order to realise their profit - in other words, the point of resistance is the notional ceiling through which the CFD price does not penetrate.
Support and resistance work as trading indicators because markets behave in a relatively cyclical fashion. Take, for example, oil prices. The market for oil is driven by supply and demand, and all things being equal, prices will naturally fluctuate between set levels, revolving around the true value which tends to lie somewhere in the middle. As those that require oil for manufacturing start to buy it, demand increases and forces prices upwards until they reach an unsustainable level, at which point prices fall until they are too cheap, which encourages buyers to re-enter the market, and so the cycle continues.
With investors and price speculators jumping in on the action, and external factors prompting decisions to buy and sell, this serves to make the market a little more volatile and a little less predictable in practice, but nevertheless at a conceptual level, there is both a support and resistance level at which prices become unsustainable at both ends of the spectrum.
Any strategy relying on trading resistance and/or support requires the ability to identify support and resistance levels. One of the key ways in which traders reach conclusions about these thresholds is through graphical analysis, and through closely monitoring the behaviour of prices as the markets move through their cycles.
A one-time low isn't enough to justify trading that as the market support - a support is a consistent price point, or more accurately prize zone through which the price of the relevant CFD stubbornly does not move, and it is crucial to check and double check these levels as the market moves through its cycle to ensure you're making a sensible investment decision. Once these levels have been firmly established, its time to sit out and wait the next potential turning point, before riding the wave of the cycle as market trends begin to reverse.
Trading off the back of support and resistance measures allows traders to capitalise on the cyclical nature of the markets, and to take advantage of under and over pricing in specific CFD classes. With the aid of graphical analysis, and a consistent monitoring of CFD prices and external price triggers, trading through support and resistance boundaries can be an effective way to improve your success and consistency when trading contracts for difference.