Thanks for the writings jack. As someone else stated, just a few of your paragraphs clarify what in hindsight appears to be obvious. Here is my interpretation. 1. Trends are established by high volume range exentsions in a single direction. 2. Once a trend has been established, a trader should only trade in the direction of the trend (when in an uptrend resistance is constantly taken-out, when in a downtrend, price action falls through support as if it were tissue paper). 3. The dominant trend remains in place until a significant change in trend takes place with a single direction (trend) move on high volume. *** Thanks again. JJ
Yes, and even more importantly, we (OK, I) have a better mental understanding of what takes place in front of my eyes over and over again in the markets. Hope you're getting this T. JJ
Terminator, you are very bright. That's obvious. Be careful accepting the advise you get on ET. Some of it will be a bit nutty. That said, Mr. J. Jam has given you good specific advice, as have some others more capable than I to do so. I want to add, however, some advice of a different sort: Many people think there is a "system" to trading that, if followed exactly, will lead to certain success. I have to say that, after years of being in the market both as an investor and as a trader, i don't believe this is quite true, in spite of the purported success of a few computerized trading "systems." I believe both investing and trading are arts, trading the moreso. They require experience and judgment. You are off to an excellent start, but it is unrealistic to expect to make steady profits and hang on to them from the start. This will come in due time, so stay diligent, and do not let losses discourage you. Learn from them as you are doing now. Concentrate on grasping the fundamentals, such as support and resistance, trend, and price action in conjunction with volume and market breadth. It is also very helpful, i would say essential, to understand something of the inner workings of the market. To that end, before you go another day, acquire, and read several times over, a copy of Edwin Lefevre's classic "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator". The central character, Larry Livingston, is actually Jesse Livermore, who started trading at age 15, but did not learn how to both trade with consistency and hang on to his gains until many years later. You will undoubtedly learn much faster than Livermore did. By far the best way to do that is to find a successful trader who will let you trade alongside them. My best wishes for a successful career. You are off to a great start.
Consistant actions should render consistant results, yes? Yes, i suppose they should. And were it to happen that exactly the same identical situation and set of values for the muriad of parameters, including the intangibles such as sentiment and mood, were exactly repeated, then indeed we ought to see the result repeated with virtual certainty. Given the rarity, near impossibility actually, of that happening, isn't it rather a wonder that we see situations over and over again that are sufficiently similar to produce approximately the same result, at least a good portion of the time? But, of course, these similar, but not identical, events, much to our consternation and dismay, do not always produce the same result. Hence the beauty and art of what we do. Were this not so, we should all boot up or computers and return later to scoop up the cash.
Yes, there are systems out there (with simple rules) that if followed carefully can mechanically extract $ regularly and consistently.
Jimmyjam i've included a copy of your chart with what i would have done had I been doing this in real time. I've tried to be as faithful as possible to the type of trendlines and s/r i would have drawn if i was working on the hard right edge of the chart. As you can see i draw the trendlines and channels on the price but im always shaken out or the trendline broken after only a few bars. I tend to trade on breakouts in heavy volume and i try to buy at the bottom of an up channel and exit at the top. I usually disregard a break of my trend line unless volume is above normal. As for system trading, i pursued discretionary trading because after a long thought of whether or not to continue to exhaust the possibilities of system trading i decided that the time and effort needed to learn programming, software, optimization, not curve fitting the system etc was better spent in learning and developing an intuition about the market, which i believe can only be bought by trading it. lol losses are my "tuition".