What I notice is that in hindsight, it does line up perfectly with something. But when just looking forward, there are too many possibilities. That's what I struggle with. There are actually too many setups, or reasons to take a long. It seem obvious later to see where I should have gone long and held, but then if you are being honest, you can also see reasons for why you should have gone short as the long was progressing.
60-minute indicates lower here, IMO. But we're coming into a range low, so I don't want to short either. Tricky (for me at least). These kind of range bound days are my achilles heel. If I didn't get greedy on that prior long it would have been a good day, though. But when the market starts pumping it's easy to get greedy and discard 7 certain points in favor of 15-20 uncertain ones.
But do ever ask why reversal occurs at that particular price or time? Or do you think they merely happen haphazardly?
I make a shit ton of notes on a 5 second chart and can usually explain 80% of moves. The reasons for price to turn, for me at least, comes down to hitting some key level, like an overnight high or low, or previous day high or low. Another is VWAP that I love. Then also simply swing highs or lows tend to also turn price, trying to form a double top or bottom, and I would call this support or resistance since it turned here previously. And the big part of this is using NQ and ES with eachother. For example, even though we have been in this range, at 13:11, ES turns at 4114.75. It just so happened to be a poke of a previous swing low that stands out clearly, but NQ also spiked down to 12503, which is a very round number, which works amazingly consistently on NQ (but of course not every time). So it make sense for ES to turn up here given a few things were lining up. But then using these observations, and thinking that of course the long was obvious in hindsight means that I have now consider all the other areas where interesting things happen and price doesn't turn.
So there is nothing haphazard about why they turn. Often I will at least see a battle at a level where enough traders are each trying to win, so it sets up a mini struggle, which is very clear on the 5 second chart. One thing I don't really do is use channels or trendlines because drawing these is so subjective, but I know you use them quite a bit, and often when I don't see a reason for price to turn, it can come from some sort of trendline. But as I say, these are subjective enough, and already what I'm doing is subjective, so really, now we have far too many subjective variables which makes doing this forward much harder than doing it backwards!
8rt +13.5pts, all were selling the spikes. Was expecting a larger move in YM and ES but didn't get it today. 4116 4094 4080 are next, let's see where it opens tomorrow. Buy the DIP is running out of steam.