I returned to working on 'M' (my annotation skills) yesterday. I was somewhat relieved that the little skill I thought I had aquired seemed to still be there. After market close I posted my chart ... and then Spydertrader posts in response to PointOne and says there was only one FTT for the whole day. On my chart there are at least 28 FTT's. :eek: After a slightly nauseating moment (actually, several nauseating moments) I started to backtrack the journal to see what I missed. Beginning with Spydertraders traverse post I can see that I don't put enough emphasis on the traverses and tapes that build the full trend channels. I annotate everything, regardless of resolution level. I'm sorry for posting a chart that is so out of line with respect to the journal. I'm unsure on how to go on from here, but I would very much appreciate if those of you whom are more experienced in 'thoroughly annotating charts' would consider posting your charts after market close. I'm sure I'm not alone in wanting more reference material. Thanks.
While I cannot 'see' through your eyes, my guess would be because you see a channel where I refer to a traverse. - Spydertrader
Just because you have 'annotated everything' doesn't mean you are 'out of line' with the rest of the journal. My post, with respect to the one FTT, refers to Traverses. Plenty of FTT's throughout the day on the 'tape' level to be seen, but if one plans to focus on trading the same fractal throughout the entire day, then one needs to focus on how tapes build traverses and traverses build channels. Otherwise, you'll simply be 'jumping fractals' throughout the day. While this is all well and good, as long as the trader knows he / she is actually doing so, I find most people attempting to learn do not realize they have 'jumped fractals' even after being explicitly told they have done so. As such, I recommend focusing on one fractal and locating the sequences which exist across all examples of the same fractal, and once located (and understood), one can then replicate that same template across all fractals. It is, in a nutshell, how I could, after trading equities on a daily timeframe for three years, walk in and trade futures without knowing how or why. - Spydertrader Edit: In some of Jack's posts one might think it appears as if an interchanging of the definitions of fractal and timeframe has taken place. Again, and in the post above, one should not make this error in judgement.
No, I see the dominant up traverse FTT, but it is also inside the Pt3 up Channel, which then turned and became the new downtrend. It was the only FTT of the day, why wasn't it also the FTT of the up channel?
You are getting caught up with the up 'container'. It is very difficult to discern what exactly constitutes a traverse, which leads to equal confusion as to what constitutes a channel. It appears that there was not a channel formed throughout the duration of Friday A clear cut definition of a tape/traverse would be extremely beneficial to all, rather than the definition that Spyder posted that does not distinguish between the two
I take your query to be: What can constitute a point 1? This seems to me a simple question, and a very key question because point 1 is the name we've given to the beginning of a period of extraction. Off the top of my head, I can think of 8 moments that can constitute a point 1. I'm not claiming this is an exhaustive list: ftt, fte, bo, fbo, p1, p2, p3, fp3. These are all moments of action, depending on the fractal on which they occur.
It's clear to me (now) that where I was considering the possibility of a P2 long, this was not a possibility at all because of the FTT of the "dominant" traverse before a 123 channel had been established. To get to a possible channel P2 we must have seen a full traverse of the green, at the very least. I had jumped fractals and got ahead of myself in the tapes, traverses, channels hierarchy.