4 ms·

I figured that stuff was determined by looking at orders to buy at a certain price? If there is a large number of orders to buy currency at 5.30 from your examp

• quink 12y ago
  Nope, technical analysis of the usual sort doesn't look at the book at all. It just looks at the past prices and, if you're really lucky, past volumes. Going past what's traditionally technical analysis, in that example at 5.30 it's possible that there's a wall of people. However, the trading in any intermediate currently pair between those, NOK-USD-JPY, for example, will negate that wall in no time at all for sheer volume alone and any artificially imposed walls based on this kind of numerology would be chopped down by HFTs looking for arbitrage opportunities in milliseconds. If you're looking at a big pair like EUR-USD with a hypothetical wall at 1.25, for example, it's possible it might last for a little longer. But again, arbitrage across currency pairs - EUR-JPY-USD or EUR-GBP-USD or whatever - will wipe out any numerical niceties in marginally longer than no time at all. That said the more TA traders are out there the more the actual investors (and with SPY having an annual volume 8.5 times its number of shares there seem to be too few of those) can get themselves a long-term good average of "Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful." just through regularly putting money aside and investing through dollar cost averaging in index ETFs/mutual funds.