One thing I learned about 10 years ago was to look for bullish formations in a rising market. Trade in the direction of the trend. Puts the odds in your favor. In a falling market look for bearish formations and trade in that direction. Here is a near-perfect Head & Shoulder formation in NQ. It is a 3-minute candle chart. I have seen these fail over and over.
You can also view those head shoulder things as a consolidation pattern , and the market might continue to go up, or the market might decide to go nowhere. In summary, if you see such a pattern, the market can - continue to go up - reverse direction and go down - go nowhere or various combinations of the above. Only time will tell.
These formations are for the week. Look at the daily or weekly chart and see if you can see the same. We may have a downdraft this week.
1. The implication for this pattern is, "break of the neck line suggests downside target equal to the height of the pattern". Well, that objective was satisfied in ~ 15 minutes.... just a short term trading play. 2. H&S more likely to be significant if on the daily chart. 3. Always mention of H&S, but I've found it over the years to be highly unreliable. Yes, every now and then a significant one shows up.... but in general, not.
Where ever you look, there's head&shoulder patterns, sure's getting bearish by gum. Once price begins to fall, here's one to help you keep your hair on.
Each day ask the good Lord for a signal. Just walk outside and look up above. It's amazing how often this helps me not to follow a trend and get sucked into dummy trades.
Zoom your chart out to get more reliable formations. Whether they are reversals or continuations, that neck-line is highly trade-able. I've been thinking that any TA on charts faster that 30 mins are all fakeouts. I've even been considering changing to 1 hr charts for day trades.
H&S I've found are better for swings than daytrading. Intraday simple cups, ascending triangles and mean reversion pivots are best imo.