Nothing is 100% foolproof obviously but RSI, used for trend identification not reversals points, I find does an accurate job. Here is Friday's 1 minute chart which captured the 3 swings (but 2 false readings in magenta circles) using settings of 60/40 and length of 12. Above 40 is bullish, below 60 is bearish. HTH.
Laissez Faire, The trend of the chart depends on when the trader first opens the chart and looks at it.
Laissez Faire, The ES gives reasonable trends intraday, depends on what timeframe and how much loss a trader can withstand. Yes, it chops around and does not move instantly, but the stoploss takes care of that part.
To determine a trend you must first draw a Sperendeo trendline. It's described in his first book. It is inflexible and precise. MTrader knows this.
Friday was a 'trend day' on the ES. Open in top of the range and Close at the bottom of the range. The pullbacks were relatively shallow with the largest being roughly 7 points in a nearly 40 point down trend. However, these days ain't common in the ES.
C'est vrai, Laissez Faire - indeed a trend day. Now une question. At what reasonably precise moment (say on a 300 second chart) did the trend change, which set up the trend day, begin?
So like I'm talking about a 300 second chart. I actually trade a 900 second chart and use the 300 second chart as one of many reference points. FYI, of course you can trade a reversal and even a retrace on a 300 second chart, if you know what you're doing. I will agree that it is not a trivial exercise. ES is traded 24/5 except for naptime and teatime. If you are a BSD and have enough big green to hold through settlement then whoopdedo. If not, you get off the train, wait for a bit and reboard. Hmmm. I wonder what it is that allows one to do this?
I totally agree with all five on why most fail. We all have rules of some kind which make up our Trading Plans, toughest ongoing problems as following the Trading Plan as we designed, and where automation makes it so much better at least for me. This past three weeks I manually traded twice for an hour, more like afraid of is I don't use, I will lose it, and surprisingly I was slow but my system wasn't. It did better than me. ES is in my thoughts one of the toughest markets to trade as trend can be both up and down depending on two different traders, but both can do well by sticking to their rules. I think by having the most volume, ES gets most advertising so newer traders and trading rooms tend to push it most, Nasdaq trends more cause of less volume and each tick being $5. Trend can be a handful of ideas like Close beyond a pivot, higher highs/higher lows for uptrend, Thrust Bar up for uptrend, Price hitting so much above upper Bollinger Band for uptrend, slope of moving average, RSI hitting 65/35, nice signal is when it comes down to fifty to buy. Any of them as good for trend, so long as you get use to one of them and not be bouncing from one to the other, that is what too many do and never get good at one of them.