it is like when you a driving a vehicle... You should be aware of everything ahead of you. different things will be relevant on different days according to whether you are driving in busy market street or in a major city road or on a freeway. it is stupid to say this is what i will watch and the other things are not important. it depends in what kind of environment you are in, that puts context on what you looking or watching for. S&R may be major in certain type of context. this is where experience and time spent doing, that makes a major difference. rather than just seeing set up and even context experience gives you different perspective on what is happening in front of you. that is why some traders will swear by S&R while others will swear by trend lines and others by Brooks
What most people fail to realize is that in a market such as ES which is extremely competitive there are hundreds if not thousands of strategies (manual and algorithmic both) being employed simultaneously with trading decisions being made for a wide variety of reasons/triggers/signals. This, partially explains why liquid index futures move the way they do with plenty of 'noisy' movement. For example, you'll have arbitrage players/algorithms working simultaneously with mean reversion algorithms or trend following algorithms where a mean reversion algorithm will sell a pop and a trending algorithm / BO algorithm may buy it. There's always a tug of war between buyers and sellers. And this is with no mention of hedging activity (which is the reason these markets exist to begin with) where a hedger may dump a larger buy/sell order at market in any given moment at a price they deem favorable. This was also what happened during the Flash Crash. All this makes for a complex market where only the few are making any money consistently. If anyone can do it with KISS, be my guest. But I have not seen any evidence of anyone doing so.
I think this is a really bad question to understand if a strategy is profitable. Let me give you an example: Say i have 100k. That's about 20x the accont size an avg retailer has. Now, say i make 20% return on that capital every year consistantly. Also, let's say my trailing drawdown is 1:5 doing it meaning that for a 20% return i don't have an open loss bigger than 4% at any given time from the highs of my PnL. Now, that strategy would put me on top of every hedge fund out there. I'd literally be amongst the best in the world. And now let's see if i'm getting rich with these numbers. 20% of 100k is 20k per year. That's about 1600 usd / month. Gross. Would you consider that "rich"?
now many people are explaining Brooks in you tube. has the world gone mad? why are they explaining a sales man talking his own book
you are right. no one realsies that they have no edge 90% of the time and that is why they lose 90% of the time. if you cannot ONLY trade when you have an edge then you are dead in the water. most people do not realise they even NEED an edge. noisy movement you say... in the world's most liquid market? no way. what is noise ? it is what a trader is not bothered about. GS in it's long term portfolio says: a 2% fall in the ES, in the day is noise. For a day trader LONG in ES when it falls 2% that probably will kill him. it may be noise [!] but to some IT KILLS.