Your mind is stuck, you really need to differentiate. It is not possible to get an ftt on 1 bar. On the other hand, if you have an ftt, you must have had a 1,2,3 to get there. You can mix and and match in real time, you can trade any fractal you choose as long as you know what fractal you are trading. There is no set rule to trade a bbt, tape, traverse. If you know what you are doing the faster you trade the more money you will make.
Hmm, ok fair enough! I'd love to observe someone making more and more money by trading faster and faster. I know there's a limit to which speed we can trade, but you know what I mean. I notice a lot of the subfractals can majorly overlap, which foils my positioning (as in the cycle or container can complete without a profit...then, will it do continuation or reversal? Have to know in real time to hold or reverse). But I'm not the guru at this stuff, so who knows what I might miss or do wrong.
You have seriously just answered your own question. If you are not trading sub-fractal why track it? only track your fractal. Track the requirements needed for your fractal to complete. In theory this method is a piece of cake however in real time the piece of cake gets smaller and smaller until crumbs are left The theoretical simplicity of this method attracts many people. I mean how hard can it be, b2b2r2b to ftt to r2r2b2r to ftt, and start again. Free money, right?
That's the catch, though. If not tracking subfractals, then the slower fractal may have met all it's requirements long ago as a trend runs on. And identifying several valid FTTs (and SOCs) that end up failing can suck out all the profit that we made while riding the trend. That's the reason for the other question I've been asking. It seems to happen a lot. I suppose there is no great answer or clue, and the long running trends could foil the method at times. As you said, no method handles everything.
If you can consistently make only 1 point per es contract per day (after costs), you make $12,500 / year, and you can scale up as much as you want: 10 contracts, 100 contracts. You can double your contracts every two weeks.
Here are 2 examples of what I thought were FTT's of a BBT1 that turned out not to be. (Although probably not relevant, I observe that had the day opened at 8:30 instead of 9:30 there would have been significant volume and a different context that would have made more sense to me). What did I do wrong that caused me to believe there was an FTT at bar 5, and again at bar 28?
At some point you need data of a higher granularity in order to more accurately telegraph the faster fractals exact FTT's with greater accuracy. In the past many tools such as 2m YM, STR-SQU, tick charts, etc. were used for this purpose. You won't always be able to pinpoint a BBT's FTT with 100% accuracy on a 5m chart. Sometimes they give us more than the minimum required to construct them; and there's a procedure for handling those cases just as there is with everything else. Maybe this is the problem you're beginning to encounter as your annotations become more accurate. Tried to address some of your questions on the image.