Db - I have not taken the route of defining and trading one setup first. Instead, I have sought to develop a comprehensive plan using both Continuation and Reversal strategies, thereby covering most of the action. This bigger play field has made it more difficult to balance participation with patience. I wanted your help in determining instances where I am either being too active or too hesitant.
"My colleagues once did a research project to train operators who control the movement of petroleum products in pipelines that can be hundreds of miles long. The operators had been trained on the various pumping stations along the route and on the ways to control each pump to keep the product flowing. They found that the highly skilled controllers had developed a feel for the movement of product inside the pipeline. They had learned to 'play' the pumping stations almost as one would play a musical instrument. My colleagues built a set of decision exercises to present the operators with dilemmas. In one exercise, the technicians at one of the pumping stations had asked permission to shut their station down for 20 mins for routine maintenance. This simple request, had the operators honored it immediately, would have reduced pressure down the line, triggering a chain reaction of pump shutdowns due to low pressure. In fact, the entire line was going to get shut down if that pump was turned off for maintenance. The skilled controllers immediately saw the consequences. They delayed the shutdown until they found a way to re-jigger the other pumps to keep the line flowing. In contrast, I watched a new controller, with just a few months of experience, give permission to turn off the crucial station without thinking of the consequences. The control room operators soon realized that these dilemmas helped the rookies to think about the flow inside the pipeline rather than just follow rules for operating the equipment. Instead of memorizing each of the pumping stations and the features of the pumps (which had been their formal training), they learned more by working out the connections between the stations and the ways they interacted in keeping the lines flowing. The exercise showed them that their mental models were too shallow, and helped them achieve a new way to think about the capabilities of each of the pumping stations along the line and how it interacts with the other pumping stations." - Streetlights and Shadows by Gary Klein
Please don't take this the wrong way, but sometimes your charts are just painful to look at. I remember when mine looked the same and I would feel dubious at how I could have butchered such clean runs of price in a single direction. I would like to see you succeed and improve. Building sub-optimal patterns into the mind makes change increasingly more difficult the longer it goes on, so I've been trying to think of a helpful suggestion I could make, aside from volume discussions which have already been brought up. Perhaps you may want to consider having an adjacent fractal up next to the 1m you're using to trade. It may help you keep things in perspective and refrain from opening positions against the dominant sentiment so often. Channels are another hugely valuable source of information imo, especially for the minimal effort it takes to make them, but you may not be interested in learning them. However, just take a look at the attachment. I've labeled it with terms you're already familiar with to provide an example of how it could have helped you on a day like this. Just some food for thought. I hope you don't take any my comments as presumptuous; my objective is merely to provide concepts that may be of use to you, or at least things to test and observe, and discard if they are unhelpful.