I have been watching the SPY for years and have noticed the same thing. In the smaller tfs there several trends per week, and sometimes more than one a day.
I don't know about that. If you take fundamentals and news out of it... it really is just pattern recognition. I'd be willing to bet if you taught a bright kid a few basics, fed him/her a couple addy's, and parked them in front of a screen full-time for a month or two with a demo account... we might be surprised at the results. I don't see why it wouldn't work.
Whats that mean? ------------------------------ I don't understand why everyone on ET hates IB's charts. A chart's a chart more or less. I can add any number of studies, draw all the lines I want, change colors...x-axis,y-axis.... its a friggin chart. What makes one better than the other?
My issue is that the futures charts at IB are back adjusted so if you look at a weekly / daily chart it will show you previous levels which never actually traded in the front month contracts. This makes CL charts unreadable since it expires every month. Also 4 hour charts on index futures dont show properly because of the 15min and 30 min breaks after the trading day. I spoke with customer care there and no resolutions... So must chart elsewhere.
It means the live data provided is the big SP contract not ES. I hardly look at the investing.com charts---maybe ES is there as well---don't know.
Oh I see that. I have never used a 4 hour chart but now that I look, I see how they get screwed up at the break. The candles kinda overlap. That said, whatever it is you're doing... it must be some surgical precision... which is good I guess.... I never would have noticed had I not had to look real hard. Putting you on "follow".
The strategy, for example, might be buy/short retracements in a trend. That is the general strategy. The set up, on the other hand, is an individual occurrence of whatever conditions have been defined for entry, stop loss, profit taking etc within the individual traders's application of the general strategy, e.g. market is by definition (of the trader's own making) in an uptrend, and he will buy the 5 period thingamajig is less than 20 a 5 minute bar closes higher than the immediately prior 5 minute bar. I'll not disagree with you. I know only what I know, which is often simply that I know little to nothing at all. And knowing how little I know, I certainly have no idea what you know. Again, I will not disagree with you. I do feel, however, that my understanding of what was shown in that chart may be more aligned with what @speedo said in that I do not look at this as an "MA system" really. I may or may not characterize it as @speedo himself does, in the finer points (we each have our own "finer points"). None of that matters at all, really, other than that it is the trader's own responsibility to define his set-ups, define "chop," and decide what considerations and concessions must be made with respect to expanding and contracting volatility. In my humble opinion is that the MA's do not give you any information that is not already discernible to the naked eye on a naked chart. But they sure do make it easier to discern it quickly and easily while wasting time posting on a trading forum lol. Bottom line, Laissez Faire, if you could sit by my side at my trading desk, and if you and I were to discuss the intraday price action as it unfolded before our eyes, we would likely disagree about very, very little. These forums, impersonal and one dimensional as they are, do not make for the best medium for interpersonal communication. But hey, it is what we got, right?
I am a bit OCD so stuff like that 4 hour chart glitch drives me nuts. Biggest issue though is the long term futures charts.
https://www.investing.com/indices/us-spx-500-futures The "S&P 500 Futures Discussions" you can bring up on that page (lower right corner) are pretty good at night with Europeans trading ES. As usual lots of idiots, but when something breaks, its posted in a flash. Some good macro insights from some of the better posters.