Determine if you are improving your skills. If your skills are improving and your decision inputs are valid, then theoretically those skills would improve a simple mechanical trading method. Some improvements might include among others: 1) avoidance of losing trades 2) buying when the strategy indicates selling or vice versa 3) holding longer/shorter time than indicated Track a simple mechanical method and log your agreement or disagreement with its trades and the eventual outcomes for a week. It may be an eyeopener. If you cannot improve a simple mechanical method with your decision inputs, you must ask yourself if they are really valid. If they are not valid, consider replacing or adjusting them. Please take this for what its worth to you , this isn't posted for the benefit of those feeding on criticism.
You know, I've read alot of the Hershey stuff on here. And my opinion is this: Ya'll are trying to make this shit WAY too complicated. It's a simple small to mid cap volatility/channel breakout model. You don't need all the 1/0/7 ranking stuff or these specific screening criteria, chartscripts, etc. Just understand the model and adapt it to your needs. Solid smaller growing companies that have a volume contraction and then price/vol breakout. That's the whole 9 yards right there. Why all the convoluted rhetoric surrounding it is beyond me. Some people are just verbose I suppose. But it seems like 80% of the material and questions in these threads is just out and out wanking and finding circular arcane constructs to explain extremely simple concepts. I do comment Spyder and his journal. It's very instructive and he/she is very patient w/ questions and focuses on actual implementation and results.
The sequences that you see on the 5 minute chart can also be found on the daily and weekly charts. If you pull up a weekly chart - you will see that we've been bashing into R for about 2 years. Bashes occur on continuation mode -- then there is a sort of recoil in change mode. Bash recoil - bash recoil - bash Eventually the market bashes through R on a climax run or the recoil turns into a pullback... then on to the next phase of the cycle.