Crowds move markets and at major market turning points, the crowds are
almost always wrong. When crowd sentiment is overwhelmingly positive or overwhelmingly negative – it's a signal that the trend is exhausted and the market is ready to move powerfully in the opposite direction. Sentiment has long been a tool used by equity, futures, and options traders.
In Sentiment in the Forex Market, FXCM analyst Jaime Saettele applies sentiment analysis to the currency market, using both traditional and new sentiment indicators, including: Commitment of Traders reports; time cycles; pivot points; oscillators; and Fibonacci time and price ratios. He also explains how to interpret news coverage of the markets to get a sense of when participants have become overly bullish or bearish.
Saettele points out that several
famous traders such as George Soros and Robert Prechter made huge profits by identifying shifts in crowd sentiment at major market turning points. Many individual traders lose money in the currency market, Saettele asserts, because they are too short-term oriented and trade impulsively. He believes retail traders would be much more successful if they adopted a longer-term, contrarian approach, utilizing sentiment indicators to position themselves at the beginning points of major trends.
With a number of firms now offering retail traders direct access to the interbank foreign exchange market, participation in the FX market has grown substantially. As a result, the amount of technical and fundamental information available to traders has increased exponentially in recent years. An area that has failed to receive the same amount of attention is sentiment.
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