Thursday, July 31, 2008

Fibonacci Retracement



In the Fibonacci sequence of numbers, each number after the first two is the sum of the previous two numbers. Thus the sequence is 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, etc.

The higher up in the sequence, the closer two consecutive numbers of the sequence divided by each other will approach the golden ratio (approximately 1 : 1.618 or 0.618 : 1).


Fibonacci Retracement in technical analysis refers to the likelihood that a financial asset's price will retrace a large portion of an original move and find support or resistance at the key Fibonacci levels before it continues in the original direction. These levels are created by drawing a trendline between two extreme points and then dividing the vertical distance by the key Fibonacci ratios of 23.6%, 38.2%, 50%, 61.8% and 100%.

Fibonacci retracement is a very popular tool used by many technical traders to help identify strategic places for transactions to be placed, target prices or stop losses. The notion of retracement is used in many indicators such as Tirone levels, Gartley patterns, Elliott Wave theory and more.