Curious to know what time frames intraday traders here trade on (L2 scalping, 1/5/15 min charting, etc) Most of my short-term trades come down to looking for a. Divergences between an NDX stock/sector and the ND futures on a 3min chart (selling relative weakness, buying relative strength), trade duration usually anywhere from 15min - 2 hrs. b. 5-day 15-min MA crossovers, looking for oversold/overbought reversals (could lead to overnights). Anyone care to share? More questions: Which time frame would you say the largest number of players are concentrating on? How many out there have been able to successfully trade across several time frames, and how many think its best to concentrate on a particular time frame only?
I generally use 5 min bars but will sometimes use as long as 60 min bars. My bigger profits have come from using 60 min bars BUT the longer the timeframe the wider you need to set your stop (hard or mental) or you'll get shaken out every time. A lot also depends on the particular stock and its volatility within a given timeframe. If you don't have much experience trading, I'd recommend you stay with listed stocks which may be less exciting but which are generally less volatile. Good luck.
I trade off the 5 minute candles. I purposely chose a system for intraday trading only. Holding overnight is too risky for my comfort level. The beauty of not holding overnight especially in this environment is of course being able to sleep at night. Even shorts carried overnight are risky now. What if they capture or kill bin laden? Then again risk comes with territory I suppose and you know this stuff already. ********************************************** "Effort only fully releases its reward after a person refuses to quit." -Napoleon Hill
i trade 2min charts, (just to be different ) and also some things off the 5min charts. Holding period between 2-20minutes. I make about 20 trades a day, usually one position at a time, but quite often two.
I like to use 100 tick bars for the ES emini. Here's a snapshot of my screen to give an idea of what it looks like. Sorry about the quality,but attachments can't be more than 102kb.
Let me re-phrase that: It doesn't really have anything to do with the size of the attachment. Elitetrader is more than generous to allow 102K attachments. The truth is...my screen-capture program sucks.(There, I feel a lot better now)