I don't know about shorts, but I found this morning to be not only exceptionally simple but also exceptionally easy on the long side.
I was referring to yesterday and today repeating essentially the same situation from the long side. I can see I did not word my post as carefully as I should have.
Well then I'm sorry but you can't post anymore And, incidentally, it appears that it's not over yet (not counting the potential 200pts to the upside). Still simple, though.
Those who are attempting to trade the SLA would do well to think less about themselves and their "stops" and their entries and their "targets" and their bar intervals and whatever other fears are guiding their efforts and think more about what traders want and what traders are doing to get it. A trading plan that is created out of fear will not serve you well.
I don't have a journal of my own, DbPhoenix, so I hope you don't mind my parking this here. I am posting this to try to illustrate how I started the observation phase that DbPhoenix recommends, and what it might allow one to focus upon, when one's thoughts are turned toward what price is doing, rather than trying to figure out where you can make a trade now. When I first started to prepare to trade the NQ, I had no end of charts marked up like this. I started with the 5 minute chart for my observations because when I first started trading, I traded stocks only, and for stocks, I used the 5 minute only, and so I was used to it. I still watch a 5 minute most of the time I am not preparing for a trade or in a trade. So this is a 5 minute bar interval of the NQ showing just the NY session hours showing today's activity through 1:20 EST or so. All the horizontal lines are at previous highs, lows, or break down areas. Once I felt that I was able to recognize potential areas of, let's just call them support and resistance, it became a simple matter of really focusing on trading when it reached these areas to recognize the characteristics that potential reversal behavior tends to exhibit, and what characteristics potential continuation behavior tends to exhibit. Also, I do not want people to think that I do not find the Globex price activity important. I run both charts, and the 24 our chart is my chart. The NY session chart does help me "clean up" and "compress" my view somewhat. It is a personal preference of mine, and I neither recommend it or not. It helps me, imo, but I wouldn't want to go into the day not knowing if the NQ traded outside of the previous day's range or not, and what character the overnight trade had (e.g. ranging, hinging, trending). My point? I think if you are interested in learning SLA/AMT would spend a week or two watching just a 5 minute chart tick by tick, learning to tell a support/resistance level from a meaningless squiggle swing, it would prepare you a sound foundation for the next step, which is developing your trading plan based upon those observations. Imo, much of the difficulty people seem to have, not simply with SLA/AMT, but trading in general, is that most have not spent the time necessary to feel comfortable and knowledgeable enough to have any confidence whatsoever in the decisions they are going to have to make when trading, because they really have no clue as to how the market tends to behave. It doesn't take long if you set your mind to doing it. It will take forever, imo, if you try to skip this step. It will also take forever if you are framing your observations in terms of "oh, that looks like a short." or "boy, if I had taken that long." For example, since I took that chart picture and started typing this too long post, price has essentially traded in a hinge. "What are traders going to with that?" Not, "where should I place a sell stop? Or should I place a buy stop?"
40, Have you thought about starting a journal? You seem to trade more on s/r and I am sure you would have many followers.