what about 3DAY on the daily? Between the weekly and daily. the 4500 tick and maybe 144 for ES, 233 YM ticks just to get a look at speed of action in terms of getting tactical?
Is a new uptrend trend only formed following two HHs and HLs and a new downtrend only formed following two LLs and LHs?
"The word 'trend' is often meaningless. Why? What is it? Is it the trend since 1929 or merely the trend over the last 29 minutes? "
Defining trends using adjacent candle setups doesn't work. Trends have be viewed as forest from the trees. For example, this is a trend: Note, from March '03 to the end of the chart, there is not one headfake in that entire trend.... The key is defining the trend.....getting in on the retracement, as price resumes in the original direction, during the retracement. It's at that point, an entry can be made, with a very tight stop. That makes it feasible to pyramid into trends. It all comes down to how a trend is defined... takes some experimentation.
I would say it comes down not just to definition, necessarily, but to if a trend can be identified with reasonable odds prospectively rather than retrospectively. It is fine to identify a trend, but at that moment of definition what is the expected value? That is what counts.
that's all I do all night long is add to winners and losers. I don't see how you can do one without the other. I always get filled on a pull back unless I just really need to add at any price. Don't matter to me if it is a trend or a chop. I spend all my time and energy protecting myself from being on the wrong side of one of those trends like in the chart above. Thankfully, they are very rare, but still, you can't allow yourself to be wiped out only rarely. But all the money is made when I get on the right side of a trend. The chop just pays the bills, or in a bad month just keeps me alive. but if I was long on the chart above, it would have been a bitch, because it never pulled back enough to add into. But like I said, charts like that are very rare, and I'm too old to wait around for another one. a lot of this I learned from listening to Warren Buffet. The one that gets you when you speed it up into swing or day trading is overcoming the spread, because sometimes by the time that trend appears in your favor, you have a lot of costs to overcome.