Pivot and Support and Resistence

[Moha 0]

Hello everyone, I've been having this doubt for some time.

Are pivot and support/resistence the same thing?

What is the best way to identify support and resistance?

[Martin D 27]

Hi,

No they're not the same thing. It's quite a wide ranging topic.

There are multiple ways that people try and determine where the market is going to turn or find support on a pullback:
- There's indicators such as pivots, moving averages, MACD, RSI etc they have no actual power on the market except people look at them and therefore it can be an area of increased trading liquidity which causes the market to do what is expected from them.
- There's support and resistance which is basically where has the market turned previously, previously the market failed to get through X price and so it way fail to get through there again, there's many different timeframes you can look at this to find different timeframes participants (5 min, 1hr, 1 day etc etc). Again as people are watching this area it can be somewhere the market turns or if it gets through then breakout traders may enter causing an additional push in that direction.
- There's also supply and demand areas, this is similar to support and resistance but it's more concerned with volume (and so it differs a bit). If a stock spends some time in an area then a lot of traders will have their entries there, if we go off to the long side and then come back to that area the theory is that those people will defend there positions (or be looking to build a bigger position in that area but run out of liquidity the last time it was here) and so that area of supply will act as resistance.

Basically there are hundreds of different ways people try to work out where a market will reverse or find support on a pullback. You just have to build your system and look to confirm it with order flow that shows other people agree with you.

If you're looking for what people typically refer to as support/resistance then this is what Carlos and Peter do on the morning show everyday, just watch them and they typically answer a couple of questions if you're unsure of something.