dont know how well it works but theres a theory that when you get an outside candle,meaning higher high and lower low,you are about to see a wave change,its an EW rule,you stick guys can study it. If you want to know the definition of price action or tape reading,the way they used to do it is stand in the pit all day and watch every print,it's size ,its price,like a football coach watching every offensive and defensive play of the opposing team for the entire game,hour,day ,week,month,year,and coming up with a strategy to win,without charts and bars ,you need to memorize every move,its speed ,where it stalled ,how fast it bounced ,how hi,remember those prices and trade it. It helps immensely if you are in the pit and you can add to this info,whos been walking in with buy or sell orders and how large are they comparde to the normal evry day stuff, do i see anything stronger or weaker, you can do this from a computer on your couch,but its a whole lot easier with s/r lines and vol spikes and 1 or 2 oscillators
dunno, jjrvat posted it in the Day Trading 2.0 thread: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=113456&perpage=30&pagenumber=31 edit - you know what, it might be Heikin Ashi candles, in which case, disregard it completely.
omg that trend is parabolic :eek: Every Forex chart I see is full of crazy trends. Is it always that way? I've even heard of people leaving futures and equities to trade Forex because of the trends.
IF, you're getting a lot of well-meaning helpers, but the good ones are in 3 signal camps... 1. Aggressive 2. Moderate 3. Conservative Then you have all sorts of personal preferences that further mix things up for you. All well intended and confusion is going to happen with lots of cooks. It might help if you decided what style you want to trade and understood the rules that applied to that method. For example, looking back at the last chart you asked for help with... waiting to take out the low of the wide red candle is Conservative. Trading on bar closes is Moderate. Using Bar H or L breaks is aggressive. Each of these methods has different stop placements as well as different entries and exits. Conservative entries usually have biggest stops whereas aggressive entries have closest stops. Also by posting such a small frame of reference as your last chart, it is isolating the current PA from the prior market information and it's vital that you allow prior PA to speak. Let's take a limited look at your last chart. Here's what I see... PA has 2 red candles falling to dashed lines, so I take that dashed line as support. I don't know anything about the prior action there and I only see 2 red candles so I can't tell if PA is messy or high quality approaching support. This is vital missing information that shows you don't know how to distinguish a high quality set up from a low quality one. Anyway, from your yellow "LOW" there is a Key Reversal Signal (that's a Bar Chart Signal) on the 1st green candle. Other PA readers would see a 2-Bar Close reversal and if I could see more to the left this might be a more conservative 3-Bar Close signal. So on this dashed support there are at least 2 Buy Signals and perhaps 3 different signals. How you take the trade depends on your level of experience but will benefit from more reading to the left. A simple entry is Buy on the break above the green Key Reversal Bar and stop is 1-2 ticks below the low. This stop is not taken out as dashed support does its job. 2 candles later there is another bottom confirming signal - the red Hammer candle. No surprises a bullish green candle follows with a body that swallows the prior 3 bodies and almost all the candle bodies to the left. That's very bullish. Now we have the expected push up and conservative traders go ong on the close above the big green candle. The move up to the top has high quality candles i.e. little body overlap. That means, unlike when I couldn't see left at the bottom I can now see a good reversal potentially setting up. The Hanging Man Harami red candle top is telling you a top is due and it reversed at dashed resistance. Bar Chart Traders see a Key Reversal and jump on the Short. The aggressive entry is the break of the red candle low with a stop 1 -2 ticks above the wick but in this case above the dashed resistance to let resistance do it's job. That stop worked but a more conservative trade is 2nd reaction to this resistance from a lower high red candle when it takes out the low of the green doji with your blue dash on it. Again, more conservative, a wider stop and a less profitable entry. The quality of the up move is confirmed by the wide red candle eating up 5 prior bodies. The mid of this candle is resistance and PA pops back up there before attacking the lows. The close of this big red candle brings in the 2-Bar Close and 3-Bar Close traders. The next close below this candle brings in the most conservative traders. Knowing how other traders think is essential to knowing when your trade can expect a favourable kick as other signals are generated. Having given you all of this, if any trader I trained tried to take a trade from a single time frame postage stamp chart like this, I'd want to take something hard to the back of their skull. I know you don't trade from a tiny chart like this, but asking questions using such a small reference shows you're not accustomed to reading left. This is all basic stuff but I hope it helps clarify some of the confusion when many styles are advising you all at the same time. As cash said, I never knew learning PA could be this complicated lol. But nice to see lots of help.
yes, trends seem to be more powerful, in forex. EU moved over 1500 pips in about 2 weeks, and take a look at usd/chf, 5 days of straight down movement and we're now at 2 year lows...in 5 days!! lol. I'd like to see mega mover google pop 1500 pts in a week or two on just one standard lot, a 1500 pip move, would pocket you 15,000.
this is all thats ever on my charts why do you guys make it seem so hard notice how the only lines i mark is my entrance exit and tp entrance short mid line exit(tp) bottom line SL top line. trade with bias and let price come to you.
I might be interpreting your post and chart incorrrectly but from what I can gather, your profit target is less than your stop loss? Is this because you scale out of your trades (and let some of the position continue running past your initial profit target?) If not, how do you overcome the negative expectancy of such a strategy? Do you have a very high hit (success) rate with your trades? Thanks for elaborating. By the way: I'm glad i'm not the only one who charts and trades with such a simple set up. Like they say - the path to perfection is elimination; leaving just the bare essential.