(Sorry if you already mentioned this.) Do you still manage to be in cash overnight? My main problem when I looked into 15-minute bars last year is that I usually had to hold overnight, which in stocks at least, was often too expensive to my taste. That's making me lean towards 5-minute going forwards despite the less relaxed pace.
I couldn't speak for the stocks, but NQ being a mean reverting instrument, you don't usually get to hold that long, before it turns on you, so yeah, I'm always flat before the end of the day. The 5 minute chart is fine, but now you're competing against people, such as Al Brooks, and NoDoji... Schaefer
. I work on an oil rig, I do a 3 week stretch offshore where the internet combined with shift rota make watching let alone trading a near impossibility, however, once my stint comes to an end I have 3 weeks to myself which allows me to watch/study/trade the markets throughout the day largely uninterrupted and without distraction.
Al Brooks trades? Back when I was futzing with candlesticks, I learned to "blend" them in my head in order to get a more "macro" view of the price behavior and avoid getting tangled up in patterns. For example, if you blend a hammer and an inverted hammer in your head, you get a shooting star. Eventually, all this seemed really stupid and I went back to OHLC bars. However, if you understand that price is continuous and that all charts are at bottom tick charts, you can also blend OHLC bars in your head. In fact, you almost have to if you're going to stay on top of what 5m bar traders and 15m bar traders and so on are seeing through the day (these often account for the seemginly unexplainable pauses one sees in a 1m chart). So if you want to know what a 15m bar looks like, just blend three 5m bars in your head. It's faster and eventually easier than flipping back and forth among different displays. And as you near the end of the day, focus on the 5m and make your decisions off that.
1m, though of course I meant swing lows. Here, for example, the LSL was 39, so if we hit 37, I'll exit. If price hasn't hit 48 yet, it's unlikely to do so in the next twenty minutes. But then you never know.