I personally focus on daily, 1 Hour, 15 minute and 1 minute. Daily to anticipate the daily future price movement. 1 minute for entry. 15 minute often shows 123 patterns often in a form of spike. 1 Hour to wait for 123 daily pattern. By focusing on 1 Hour, I could see a how a daily trend pattern forms and also it helps me avoid trading in a narrow range. Yesterday, after EURUSD made new high, prices went through a narrow range. One thing I learned is that better not trade an insider bar cos you don't know which direction the price will go eventually. Although I anticipated it to depreciate but then I got tired of waiting and gave up. But come to think of it I should have set a limited order at the then dailylow. I know there are people who uses bigger than daily time frames, for example, weekly and monthly ... is it helpful for daytraders too? or is it only used by those who buy/sell forward/futures contract? Some people talk about 4 Hour chart.. there must be a good reason but I have not found any good use of 4 Hour chart so far.
Interesting post. My favorite timeframes : 15 min, 1h, daily, weekly. I tried 1 min or 5 min : too short, lots of false signals. Except during high volatility day. For example, if market is already down -3%/-4%, and i am waiting for a countertrend : I would lower my favorite timeframes to 5 min, 15 min and 1 h. I don't use 4H chart too. Maybe it is a mistake ? But too many timeframes make difficult to be 100% focused. CM
Typically Daily, Weekly and Monthly, if vix is above 20, I would consider 1min for the opening two hours.
1sec & 1min but also 240min, because if you get the 1s you sometimes catch the 100-200pip move as the trade winds up. Very nice low risk with 8pip stops, more profit, less loss! Now, the problem with 1m/10s/1s/100ms is that they require complete confidence and the ability to trade instictively, most need to think about the trade as it is happening, which does not work at these timeframes, you are then behind the curve. Part of the reason the HFTs did the floor traders in, you need to be smart, confident, pro-active, and reactive, half-monk half-hitman! Do have a system that runs in the cloud sending sms signals so don't have to sit there monitoring, find it much nicer to let the trade come to you than chase it but that comes down to a trading style!
I use a 15 minute chart just to see the "big picture" with daily volume profile. I look at it once or twice a day. For trading I have a two tick renko footprint chart up and a 150 tick candle chart.
saying my own time frame is useless . instead look at fractal nature of market , : if price resists on a higher timeframe like 4 hours (4h),look at lower timeframes like 15 min to find a significant resistance too . in this way you don't trade against higher timeframe .
a typical setup would be : 1- look at daily / 4 hours chart to understand total trend of market 2- look at 30 min / 15 min chart to identify setup 3- look at 5 min for your entry due to lower stop loss length
I used to use 5 minute one just because some of top level traders on ET in old days like back in 2009 used to use 5 minute timeframes as examples. But then when I actually started my real trading I started to feel its a bit slow compared to 1 minute, and too often I suffered spikes on 5 minute time frames. By focusing on 1minute, I could avoid getting suffered spikes Have a look at EURO chart today. [15minute] - There was excess buying right after excess selling, indicating that EURO is now in bullish sentiment. [1Hour] - Especially, given that low of the day was at 1.10290. It has '9' at the end - The left-digit effect/threshold level effect/price clustering and undercutting effect, all say the same thing. When prices end in 9 at the bottom, it attracts liquidity demanders to buy. Anyway, my point is that there was clear excess buying at the low of EUR today. [Daily] - after the Brexit, looks like EUR boys have decided to stay in the range created by Brexit shock for some time. Well, surely it will bring price stability to EUR, and the anticipation that I can make for Friday is definitely UP UP UP Yep, I agree too many timeframes will create distraction
You must be a stock trader and trade futures/forward contracts then But what about the timeframes in between 1 min and Daily ???