Read the market poorly today, but did not follow it for the whole session. I was expecting a range day because of my mixed sector screen and mixed TICK. I`m curious if I could have read it any better if I relied on pure price action. I do seem to trade range days much better than trend days. No trades today, but + 7,25 points for the week and an accuracy of 83% for the week. I will consider going live again next week if I can complete my new trading plan Enjoy the long weekend, traders!
Technical analysis is useful and very handy with retracements in strong trends but extremely unreliable in trying to catch tops in uptrends and bottoms in downtrends. Such evidence is found right here on this journal.
Thanks Ammo, I haven't seen a trendline drawn like that before. (starting from a high crossing to a low and crossing back to a high.) 1. Is this your own thing/ 2. have you found from your experience that it is effective? Good trading!
I, too, do better on range days, but I trade the manic CL, so you never know when what appears to be a nice trend will violently reverse You're having trouble with trend days, but you're trading an instrument that often has very clean trending days, and you want to learn to take advantage of them. On your chart you posted: "I donât feel I read the market well today. I feel so much more comfortable shorting into a range. I hesitate to enter long when the market is making new highs." Before you start your trading day, make note of levels from larger time frames. The larger time frame price action will often dictate the intraday action. As of the close on 1/13, the previous resistance level on ES daily chart was 1277.00 (Jan 6th high). In an up trend, previous resistance often holds as support. It's not exact, but should be very close. Yesterday, if price pulled back, you would look for support to be established somewhere near 1277.00. In the overnight session leading into the major news releases, price made a long trend down to 1274.25, and found support there after the major news releases. On your 5-min chart, you have basically a double bottom with the major news on the table. Once price puts in its first higher high off this double bottom (moves above 1278.00), look to enter long on a pullback that doesn't breach the higher low. The break through 1278.00 occurs at 09:15 ET and the pullback is very small, finds buyers at 1277.00, and closes above 1278.50. That's a perfect "key bar" long signal, with your stop below 1277.00. The break through 1277.00 resistance that happened back on Jan 12th took price eventually to 1284.50. So once price breaks through 1284.50, trail a stop just below each pivot low, targeting 1291.00 or end of day close. As long as the trend isn't breached (a previous pivot support area broken), it remains your friend, and you can even add to your position when previous resistance 1284.50 breaks out and price pulls back to it. That's how to work a trend day, and thanks to Bighog for elucidating methods for "milking" a trend. It's not easy because you think price is getting "too high", but when you consider there's so much programmed trading designed to follow trends this way, you're following the direction of demand.