Why I Deleted Every Indicator and Never Looked Back
By Lin — 10-year gold trader, zero indicators.
Okay, this is going to make a lot of people uncomfortable. I know that.
Here's the thing about the trading industry. The whole business model is pretty simple actually — convince traders they need more tools, then sell them those tools. Indicators, courses, signals, robots... it's this massive multi-billion dollar machine. And it's designed to extract money from people who are already losing.
I was one of those people. I bought everything. No joke, I collected over 5,000 indicators. Coded my own too. I'd optimize, combine, layer them up until my charts looked like a Christmas tree on steroids.
And you know what happened? The harder I tried, the more I lost. Go figure.
The Cold Hard Truth
Let me just say this straight up. Indicators are derived from price. Every single one of them — moving average, RSI, MACD, Bollinger Bands, stochastic — they all take price data and run it through some formula. They're reactive, not predictive. By the time your indicator tells you something, the move has already happened. You're late to the party.
Most traders don't want to hear this. I get it. Because if that's true, then the solution isn't buying something. The solution is seeing the market directly, without a filter. And that's way harder than just downloading another indicator.
The Tao Te Ching has this line: "The sage acts without doing, and teaches without speaking." The market's the same way. It acts. It teaches. But most traders are too busy adding indicators to actually listen.
Why We Add Indicators
Let's be real about why we do this. Adding an indicator feels productive. You feel like you're doing something when the market is doing nothing. It gives you this false sense of control in an environment where — let's be honest — you have very little control.
I know because I lived it. Every new indicator was just another attempt to tame the market. Another attempt to find certainty in a business that's fundamentally uncertain. Another way to avoid the uncomfortable truth:
Trading is hard. You will lose. There is no shortcut. Period.
What I Use Instead
So today? I trade with exactly zero indicators. My primary tool is the daily chart with one Fibonacci retracement line. That's it. Nothing else.
I call my system 因果有序 — Cause and Effect Order. It's basically a framework for reading market structure without any derived tools. I look at three things:
- Structure — Higher highs, lower lows, accumulation, distribution. That kind of stuff.
- Levels — Key support and resistance where price has reacted before. Simple.
- Cause — What has the market done to set up the next move?
When the cause is clear at 70%, I enter. The remaining 30% reveals itself in motion. I don't need perfect setups. I need a positive expectancy system and the discipline to run it long enough. That's it.
The Liberating Part
Honestly? Deleting every indicator was the most freeing moment of my trading career. Suddenly I wasn't looking at the market through someone else's formula. I was looking at the market itself.
The market is the purest mirror of human nature. Every chart tells a story of fear and greed, hope and despair, euphoria and panic. When you strip away the indicators, you start to see the story. And when you see the story, you start to understand the moves before they happen.
Not because you predicted them. Because you recognized the structure from having seen it before. Jesse Livermore said it best: "Whatever happens in the stock market today has happened before and will happen again." That's why you don't need a thousand indicators. You just need to read the structure and recognize what has happened before.
My Challenge To You
Here's what I want you to do. Delete every indicator from your chart. Every single one. Spend one week trading with nothing but naked price action. No moving averages, no oscillators, no nothing.
Most people won't do it. They'll feel naked. They'll feel lost. They'll find some excuse to add one more indicator "just to be safe." And that's exactly why most people don't make it as traders.
But the ones who stay with the blank chart? Those are the ones who start to see. 因果有序 has one gate. It opens when you see cause where others see noise. That seeing — that is where trading begins.
— Lin
10 years of screen time, one honest record. Read the full philosophy at xaulx.com/about.