Sorry.... In my limited thinking, I have always marveled at how one can trade without charts... I actually exorcised DOM and T&S from my screen a while ago as they spike my emotions with the speed. A quick lesson from you will be fantastic.
In this day and age of a ridiculous number algos posting and pulling orders every millisecond, I think the schizophrenic DOM is not useful for making trading decisions. If you are trading lumber or OJ, maybe the order book can still be helpful. For things like ES where the number of contracts on the bid and offer change by the hundred in the blink of an eye, Im not so sure. If people can do it, well good for them I suppose.
in the old days you got your charts in the mail (snail mail) once a week. And by the time you got done with them your fingertips were all black because of the ink. If you wanted anything quicker than that you had to draw your own.
I personally use 2 charts. A daily and an intraday. I dont need a 5, 15, and 30 min chart of the same instrument in view all the time. I just toggle between intraday timeframes when I feel I need to. The majority of the time I have a daily and a 5 min chart up. I guess technically I have 3 charts up, because I have an intraday candle chart and an intraday footprint chart up but they are always the same timeframe.
at anyrate, all you have to do is tally up the number of posts to determine the number of successful traders. Might as well asked, "How many times a day do successful traders eat?" How many charts do successful traders use? Well, I've heard they don't use that many. Although there are rumors that some of them use a lot. I don't know, they never post here. But if all you want to do is be down 6% for the month like I am don't use hardly any.
every tick on every chart is somebodys entry signal and somebodys exit signal. The little guy sees a great buying opportunity on the five minute at the exact same time the big guy is thinking,"Well, let's see, we bought this in 2006 and it"s been a good run but the fundamenals are deteriorating so let's sell and buy something else."
build an i7 rig, 8 gig mem, SSD, the key is a HUGE MOTHERBOARD.. lots of PCI-E X8 slots trade the trend your golden