I was up all day till last half hour, around 3:20 es started looking up and 20 ma crossed over 200 ma. prices kept ranging but moving up, so I went long would have made money had I got out @ 896 or 897 but I kept in for greed and then saw it drop below 200 ma, where i went short and then guess what we shot back up. gave back 90% of profits today.
That's why I don't like MA's. When PA gets choppy at all you get chopped up. They lag to much. If you really want to stick with MA's try hull moving avg. it responds much faster.
i use MP and also got chopped today. tough day to trade the indexes. keep your powder dry. flat ain't so bad sometimes.
learn price action first, then you will know how to use MA effectively. When I first started I had a whole mess of MA and other indicators...I can now proudly say that I down to ONE MA, Candlesticks and volume. That one MA just keeps me on the right side of the trend and serves as a trend line, seeing as how I trade fast markets and focus more on price action then anything else. Review your chart again, but this time remove all the indicators you have, just look at price it self. Remember, traders in the pit don't ask each other where stochastics are at, where MACD is heading or did price cross XYZ MA, they just look at price and you should aswell. Happy Trading. Edit: This is what I see based on my price action analysis. The three bars before 15:40 stair cased down, making everyone believe that trend had changed that we might sell off into the close. But this move was engineered by a pro, who was only trying to get out of his short at a good price. The last bar before 15:40 had a volume of over 10,000 contracts, I use this as my control on the 1 min chart to indicate the end of a move, which leads me to believe that we might stall or reverse. If i was short at this point I would puke out all my contracts and wait for confirmation. My confirmation comes on the 15:40 bar when price breaks the previous bars high, indicating a reversal. Remember that same pro who moved the market on the downside, well now he is long at the best price, squeezing out all the shorts( amateurs with their MAs etc etc). Review the Traders Trick Entry, although not a clear cut example, you can see how market movers will deliberately sabotage themselves to get a better price. moving along to the 15:45 bar, price made another volume spike of 10,000 contracts, time to puke out all those longs. after that you see that price kinda chopped around, moved another 4 points but at this time that same pro is going home to smoke a cigar, while the amateurs are getting margin-called. By no means am I a professional myself, far from it, please take my analysis with a grain of salt.
woops I looked at the wrong trade instead of 15:20 I looked at 15:40 because of the cross hairs on quotetracker you can disregard my last post but I hope others benefit from it.