Forex Crowd Behavior – Identifying Trends and Reversals

Market crowds are unpredictable and contingent on a host of factors. Some are useful; some are expensive blunders.

Herd mentality makes the investors act in the same direction as everyone else, a fact that is especially harmful when it comes to the Forex industry where extremes of optimism and negativity have their epochs of the high and low.

Greed.

Greed can be one of the strongest crowd-pleasing factors. If all traders buy currency in a trade at the same time, you will want to do it because you are safe in numbers – this is social proof and could push a lot of traders into acting randomly on the market.

• If the reaction of the crowd turns either too good or bad, it might have reached a major nudge. George Soros, the renowned trader, is so adept at picking up on this kind of transition by entering around key market peaks – when the crowd becomes either dramatically positive or negative.

Understanding market movement psychology is of critical importance to any Forex trader, no matter their level of experience and trading style. Knowing the emotion driving market crowd behavior will ensure you don’t make a decision based solely on fear or greed and focus on your trading strategy instead.

Fear.

As human behaviourists have found, people are more scared of missing the opportunity to make a profit than they are of losing their life savings, inducing the crowd, and serving as a surprisingly powerful inducement to which most traders cave.

Crowd psychology helps traders identify a profit opportunity, and can result in serious losses if it isn’t managed well. Therefore, it is important that traders form their own trading strategy and execute it without crowd pressures pushing you to lose track of your plan.

You can avoid herding by keeping tabs on market activity with government reports (Commitments of Traders report), media reports and professional opinion. A sentiment analysis is the ability to spot major shifts in the market and change your trade plan accordingly. To be able to spot when the general sentiment is at its highest can stop greedy investments or early selling before prices come back down (fear). You can use this knowledge to make good contrarian trades when it’s working!

Leadership.

Financial markets are rife with herd mentality. Some traders feel the urge to follow other traders’ trading patterns lest they be seen as making a mistake; such herd-like behaviour typically emerges after major news announcements in which currency rates shoot skyward.

When it comes to Forex, there is nothing you can do more effectively than have your own style of trading, and not following the crowd. But your risk management should go beyond informed trading decisions.

The market is always changing and new information can drastically alter crowds. If one was to focus on herd dynamics alone, the errors could be rendered meaningless with the arrival of new information – or they could cause huge losses in unrefined trading mistakes. Therefore, it’s important to have the detailed information on all of the crowd behaviour influence factors of market crowd behaviour to utilize these strategies when trading.

Contrary opinion.

If a community’s judgment differs from one trader’s own fixed trading algorithm, then the trader will either comply with it and risk losing as an inevitable consequence or not. All effective day trading techniques will be forced to contend with this choice that is ultimately the one determining their viability.

Opposite opinion traders will quickly spot cases in which crowd feeling is out of proportion. So when stocks become oversold on news, or experience dramatic pessimism or panic selling when something goes live, contrarian traders understand this to be an opportunity to take everyone’s view and strike back against it.

One is the “wisdom of crowds”, which states that a multi-person estimate is better than any one individual estimate. CTA/Money Managers use this principle when trading the stocks, taking the opposite direction as what they’re getting trapped in the crowd.