Fractal is a concept in which some of us just note. Quarterly bars, Monthly bars, Weekly bars, Daily bars, min bars... When comparing 12 years of of quarterly bars or 4 years of monthly bars, or 9 months of weekly bars, after scaling the vertical axis of your chart, the activity pattern looks exactly the same (ie. same pattern symmetries - pennants, shoulders, etc...). It is accepting this context that promotes the idea to trade each period independently since the same PV relationship occurs regardless of the zoom in or zoom out. What floor trader wants to do such things? I commute from LI with a large number of them. Having shot the breeze with quite a few, the consensus I had gathered from a number of them, they are simply interested in there Level 3 screen so that they can see where things are buillding so that they can service the flow of the dominant mass... However, this was just my consensus. Too often they would say buy this buy that whenever I asked why, the always spoke about news events... It is different that what I do and certainly for many it is fine and sufficiently successful. So be it. You authoritatively mention a few items and they certainly provide some additional points of interest. We all sit here and discuss (some more seriously and constructively then others) more so not to ridicule but rather support and make some consensus on how to evaluate, conclude, and understand what scopes and bounds the "trajectory" you are relating... I'm sure that I could throw up some killer trading logs. But that would prove no point and lead to the usual, "do it in real time in a chat room and let me judge for myself" mentality... Nonetheless, ET has shown time and time again why serious questions will continue to go unanswered for one reason or another. My chief objective always in many of the things I do is to increase my skill level. To do this, I strive to be as open minded and self-consistent as possible... Time and time again, it has happened to be the most far fetched item that catch my attention and result in providing me some of the best insight... Regards...
Traderlivermore..... Excellent post. Well said. Refreshing to see somebody come on ET and NOT beat around the bush with a bunch of horseshit. BSAM
One more thing: Channels are better, they are the natural extension of trendlines. If prices are escaping out of the bands, or touching or not touching at all the band... that in itself tells me a lot. Or, if nothing has changed in the trajectory of the ball, why can't the ball reach (or...the opposite) one of its extreme noise values?? Makes me wonder... That's what I think was Jesse Livermore's greatest lesson: testing! Support & Resistance. The high, the low... with M and W. Good luck guys.
Right on. I read tons of stuff to find that ounce or two that rings a bell. p.s for the most part this is one of the best threads I have seen on this board.
Finally, you have the ball at your testing point... What do you do then? Well, you're going to drop the ball, unless you manage the trade. You do some research as to what the ball usually does, and you place your order with a stop. That's it. Good luck.
Here is the 3m chart of ES today, 5-12, with only the regular trading hours. The trendlines that are on this page are the trendlines that were drawn premarket from previous days info and was posted a few posts back on a 15m ES chart. http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/attachment.php?s=&postid=746976 This goes to show how trendlines are not always so picture perfect as some of my previous chart examples may have displayed. However, with so many important trendlines overlapping in the 1175 to 1171 area, one could perhaps say that this contributed to the choppiness that was happening in these areas. The day was quite choppy until the afternoon collapse where the lower trendlines acted as support .
Here's my annotations for the day. Depending on my mood and regular day job schedule, I rotate between chart representations. This is a continuous transaction chart via QuoteTracker (some good things in life are in fact free). An "M" day with a few choppy point regions as I'm certain traderlivermore had seen... I did my lines in real time with occasional readjustments. For FTT fanatics, you see them right? You know what's next, right??? If not, look closer... The chart speaketh loud and clear...
All most al discussions of trendlines refer to the right line as the trendline and that the channel is formed as a parallelogram formed with the trendline and the intitial price volaitility as the left channel line. As volatility increases (another measure of a trend beginning) the spread of the parallel lines is widened by adding another left line projection. All trendlines and their channels are drawn at the BEGINNING of trends in the space to the right (half of the width of the chart) of the bar being formed. Then as money is made by trading the long diagonal of the parallelogram, at the end of the long diagonal the next trend begins. You have all the points required to draw the next trend channel by the time the price leaves the prior channel. This leaving of the prior channel at the point where the ensuing channel is completely drawn and projected is well into your current trade and well after you have taken profits on the prior long diagonal of the prior trendline channel. You can observe here in this thread that almost no one is drawing trendline channels on the fratcatl that is most tradable from the viewpoint of monitoring and chart annotating. It takes three points to draw a channel in the trading channel. that trading channel esists in between the channel formed in the next slower channel and is a construct that is made within that slower trend channel. \ Anyone can work this out quite simply by looking at the long term trends the intermediate term trends, and the positiontrading trends to arrive at the boundaries of the intraday trading trend channels. It is much less an art than a science. Once a person understands pace, then they can determine whether or not to reade the traverses of the intraday channels. On average every day has four intraday trend channels. The H/L range of the days as they go by gives you the measure of the intraday tend channels as a first approximation of the potential value of the long diagonals. There is one very nice addition. When you are approaching the contemporary R or S that exists, you will see that the price action is a retesting of those values and as a consequence a trend channel is formed at the slope of the R and/or S slope which is nearly never perfectly flat. Obviously you make more money profit velocity at thses time because you "see" chop which is a periodic entrained (within a nearly flat trendline channel) higher frequency than the four trends of an average day. Luckily, the day is broken into am and pm with a low volume interlude interposed whereby there is not enough activity to support trends. You can leave the market for this period of lowprofitability and greatest daily risk. Then, fortunately you beging your profit making as the pm market wakes up and you are lead into the first pm trend channel with a bracket entry where the market dictates to you the direction of your trade. where a person the begin to annotate trend channels for 10 of 20 days in the manner described, he would have the answers to all the questions this post raises. Keeping things this KISS will give you a good multiple of the daily market H/L range since ther are four chances to make trend proifits across this range and their are additional profits from the times the S and/or R are tsted and you get profits from the first movement in the pm BO. AFTER KISS comes intermediate and then expert trading. Intermediate trading involves using and additional variable and expert trading comes along when you trade with sports memory primarily. The first difficult step is to move the forming bar to the middle of your chart. This step is the step that frees your mind from the need to mistakenly predict. It also shows you just how much of the past is involved in making analysis from monitoring. If you have a small amount of data to use to get three ppoints to draw the parallelogram , it is less likely that you will be drawing many possible alternatives. How long in minutes is a long diagonal if the day has a slow middle and two trends am and two trends pm? How many actions are taken in a day to make three times the daily H-l point range?