Nice thought process. I have read the books by Brett Steenbarge. I would suggest you to read the book trading in the zone by mark douglas. Mark’s definition on self-discipline: it is a mental technique to redirect our focus of attention to the object of our goal or desire, when that goal or desire conflicts with some other component of our mental environment. Based on this definition, self-discipline is not a personality trait; people are not born with self-discipline; as a technique to be used in the process of personal transformation, anybody can choose to use self-discipline. In this book, Mark used his journey of becoming a runner to illustrate the underlying dynamics of how to apply the self-discipline technique effectively. When a trader really understands the content in the book by Mark, i believe it is very challenging not to be a consistently profitable trader. How to know whether really understanding the content? It happens when a trader can freely and effectively use the material from the book.
Choppier is not a bad thing, just use a larger time frame, often times that's the best habit to have, run through all the time frames preopen, and choose your style. The only bad about a larger time chart is that the range of the bar is longer and your stop risk is larger, but that would depend on where you enter. A big benefit is that you will see where the noise will be, so your stops that you use may not be hit.
I'm hoping and thinking that the YM will be something I can scalp in the direction of the trend. It should give more opportunities to get into trades, because it has more pullbacks than the NQ. I do like a lot of things about the NQ but waiting for, what I was looking for to enter a trend didn't happen very often and I seemed to miss the entries. Rather than focusing on trends with YM, because it doesn't trend as neatly, I will just be taking smaller profits, but getting in more often, which is how I'd rather trade...if I can do it with a high win rate and low risk, and it looks like that should be easier to do with YM than with NQ. But time will tell. At this rate, every time I come up with a plan I change it within a day or less, so hopefully this will be something I can get to work and stick with.
Define trend? What are your parameters that define a Trend? A Trend is not revealed until after the fact and look backs are what they are.
A trend to me, is what I look for intraday...is it tending to go down or up in the first 2 1/2 hours after the Open. I don't trade after that. There's usually about 2 trends during that time...and chop.
I'm using the 1 min and 5 min charts. I do drop down to smaller sometimes, but find that I lose track of the overall picture if I watch smaller timeframes too much. Yes, I have tried the RTY a few times in demo mode, and compared it with the YM. Maybe I should take another look. Thanks!
Implementing a method with your parameters, may not work very well within your time period, have you looked at this? plus If your using the 1mn or 5mn chart, than your view is a small one, market chop will show up within those time frames, but the picture is often times much brighter when I'm looking at anything greater than a 30mn time frame. It takes 30- 1mn bars to be laid down every 1/2 hour, the minute and the 5minute can dance and do all kinds of somersaults, but still end up closing and staying within the longer term 30mn chart formation.