No - not giving up, not by a long shot. I didn't mean to give that impression. Just dropping the intraday channels from my trading is all. It's a lot easier for me without them.
Here's an example of why I'm not trying to do this on intraday charts anymore. I've attached a 2-hour chart of 6E. This is something I tried to make sense of while it developed. It also shows that higher timeframes can be noisy and choppy just as well as smaller ones. Without going into undue detail about when I drew each one and why, the problem I run into is that none of the channels pan out as I would have expected. The trend lines can be useful reaction points at times, but playing from one channel limit to another is highly unrealistic in my observation. In hindsight I can say that there were nice long trades off the yellow and blue up trendlines. But those were both contained in larger down channels, and thus would have been counter trend trades to be skipped. There were good short trades when price broke back below the red TL (early July) and purple TL (late July) but they were messy, especially the red one. Breaks above and below the line could have stopped a trader out numerous times. The short back below the steep pink down channel would have been a loss. And there were other lines I considered, but have left them off the chart as they would make things too cluttered. When price rallied off the July 11 low I could have drawn an up channel. Could also have done it with the rally off the May 23 low, once the June 13 low was put in as the potential first low at the lower rail. Both of these would have resulted in losses had I tried to play them, or any other lines I haven't shown. Of course in hindsight, obviously I should just draw a larger scale channel like the green one I have in there. But I didn't know that at the time. For all I knew price would erupt out of that July 11 low into a steep uptrend. It had poked below the May lows and rallied sharply, came back to test the May lows on July 18 and put in the third point for my channel structure. And since price has now broken below the blue up channel, I could draw a more sideways channel with the upper limit going from the late July high across to the late Aug high. But who knows, I have no idea. This has been one giant head trip, drawing and adjusting all these lines and trying to make sense of them at the right edge.... and on an intraday chart it's even worse. I find myself staring at the screen and thinking "WTF???" I can see how trendlines can be useful for a price action trader. What I can't see is how the channel method discussed here, where you enter and hold your position to exit at the opposite channel line, can work. Not trying to start an argument but my experience was that hardly ever happens. Simple as this may be I can't make any sense of it.
No time to get to involved in this but your problems may lay in how you produce the channels , once they are obvious they start to lose value , there are methods to anticipate channels fairly accurately before they are visible to the masses , herein lies the key for me . its a litle bit discretionary but using swing high/lows and repetetive rates of regression with a bit of range know how you can do things that will trully amaze you , look at some market geometry stuff based around price structure patterns repeat , ranges repeat , its all in the eye ............... you only need 3 points of reference to start a channel
Just to prove I did get one right once in a while. I think I drew this in on Tuesday last week as an experiment... SPX daily. Looks like a bear flag.
combine with market profile (just 3 areas )and match it against support /res in other currencies..when you see the screen and say WTF,thats when you sit on your hands and wait til you see something tradeable,at the moment you could look for a reaction off that first ledge(1.4122) and see how it acts as support
I'm really really sorry to bring things down from one of the most constructive and educational and inspiring threads I think I have seen on a public forum in a long long time, but, as a noob to trading and in particular to forex, can anyone suggest a good book or something to learn about these trend channels? I have read through the whole thread carefully and probably only picked up about 25% of the content. I have placed a few trades throughout the day in my demo account and lost a bit and gain a bit with an 11 pip profit for the day. I would love to master this technique as part of my methodology. So what should I seek to help me learn about this stuff? Thanks in advance.
I'm still reading through the thread. Thanks to all who have contributed. Does anybody have any comments on Andrews pitchfork v. Trend channels ? I'm trying out both at the moment and will continue to do so. But i figure i should probably stick to one over the other otherwise too many conflicting lines. Any thoughts appreciated. thanks