LOL That was one of the most confused explanations of the accumulation and distribution cycle I have ever seen. No wonder people don't believe volume has anything to do with trading, with explanations like that one. :eek: But hey, thanks anyway, you tried.
Definition #1: Price opens at the lower left hand side of a chart and closes at the upper right hand side of a chart, or price opens at the upper left hand side of a chart and closes at the lower right hand side of a chart. Definition #2: Thursday 7/23
The question imposed was do you reasonably ANTICIPATE or attempt to IDENTIFY a trend day before the day starts. (paraphrased) That question is based on using osmosis as part of your plan. In other words, the answer is no but you still would like to see more ONE-WAY trend days. The way you recognize a trend day without actually looking for one is quite simply just be cognisant of the possibility that one could pop up on any given day. But what you do in the normal course of your daytrading is follow your plan. Then the question has a better chance to be answered by the specific individual answering the question when it is related to how the player plays the market day in day out. A scalper that is drawing a thousand spyderweb lines all day on the chart is a noise trader and is not looking for a trend day. That type of trading plan will not allow a trader to recognize a trend day if it jumped off the chart and slapped the viewer upside the head. A BO (breakout) trader will be the trader that catches a trend early and will ride the trend for all it is worth. Thats the whole mission of a BO trader. Trend days "HAPPEN" they are not planned on. Think about getting "LUCKY" when sitting at the hotel bar. A BO trader worth his/her salt is a natural to catch trend, 0ne-way days. Work the retraces, stay with it, do not reverse until a solid reversal signal and you will capture a trend day without looking for one. There is no such thing as "OVERLAP" as claimed. Either the trend is up or the trend is down. Please do not ask me what overlap is, i never heard such silliness before.
This is my own parochial view as well. But then you will agree that such trading has nothing to do with identifying or anticipating a trend day as such, but rather has everything to do with holding when the holding is good (and getting in at what appears to be a low risk entry point).
I'd say probably 70%(ish) There are certain traits you can look at to help you determine if the move you are seeing is likely to be a trending move or not. Keep in mind too that trend days occur every single day in individual stocks. The best thing to look at is stocks/indexes which are coiled up (ie volatility has been lower) and then that have a large gap up in the morning, and follow through on that gap with a wide range the first 20 minutes of the day. Typically if you are going to see a trend day move, the range in the first 20 to 40 minutes will be at least 80% as large are the range on a typical day. The one thing with a trend day, however, is that the most common pattern is for a very sharp move in the morning, then to move sideways all day..then have another, very sharp, move higher into the close, usually after a shakeout move that tends to occur around 2pm. This stuff still works very well. I have an entire lesson written on how to identify and trade trend days. I'm about 80% certain that it's posted to ET. Linda Rashke also has an excellent article posted about how to ID and trade them. Brandon
Please be sure to participate in my other poll as well: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=171190
A day with very little trading vol (relative) and price in any one time period. An example: price breaks to upside in first 15-20 minutes and continues in direction of b/o with little consolidation. So, over any 30 mn period the realtive volume is low (say, no more than 10-20% of the days vol). I think one thing that "causes" a trend day is the fact many come out of nowhere and catch a majority traders on the wrong side. Another factor, especially with index traders is that they are continually fading the move all day long. I'm glad this came up. I have been thinking of adjusting my strategy to try to capitalize on these days. My thinking is to just add one more contract and place a breakeven stop. So if I normally trade 2 NQ scalping, I would add a third and keep this on as long as possible. Of course I would want to limit this to possibly only the first few scalps of the day. Edited first line