Lets do some reasoning here. As a background comment, what you see happening right now after about two years is a screen picture (DVD type) beginning to compose itself throughout the full area of the screen. Some parts get formed then grow. More and more parts keep forming up as well. The truth of the matter is that the whole picture has not been seen as yet even though all the parts have been in view at one time or another. You can see that there is getting to be an understanding that all trends should be drawn and projected. But so far no one is doing it. To day I grabbed an attachment to see if I could annotate it properly by fixing a little this or that. I could not. I expected to see 1/3 of screen on right blank and I expected to see the chart scaled as would be indicated by the projections. What I saw instead was 2/3 to the right blank and no reference points on the left for the lines that came on the screen from who knows where (I do know actually) and none of the smaller term channels were projected and none if the trading channels were drwan or projected. I know the person is in earnest. It is just a matter of my repeating the instructions 10 to 20 more times using slightly different wording. Lets assume someone can post a set of channels as I requested and lets assume they post what you posted above. I will reason through merging the thoughts of the two matters. Your post it a MAJOR bridge to making money by using channels. Let us reason. If I, Jack Hershey, see a point 1, I have absolultey zero qualms about using that value to trade with a market entry. I reason as follows: I annotate. What I annotate is a matter of fact at that NOW moment. This is monitoring. I analyze what I annotated and compare it with the truth of the markets. If I see a point 1 I compare with the fact that point 1 is the beginning point of a trend that I knopw is either of two types of trends. Lateral is one type and the other is the oppposite of the ened trend. I know that price is going to the oppoisite side of the channel (the LTL for that eiter lateral or ____channel). I know this is the first traverse of the channel. I, therefore decide to _______. If it is the beginning of the day, the blank is filled with "enter"; if it is during the day the balnk is filled with "reverse". The decision is made. Now I act. I know to act. So I act. I am sweeping at this point with my capital in the market and I logged everything. I am logging STR/SQU if I need to go to that fineness. Coarse, medium, fine ,etc. Hours pass and I am debriefing I look at what you read as a synopsis in logs. What I didn't write here covers ponts 2 aqnd 3, etc. I check out whether i reversed on pt 2. How much did I make? If the pt 1 and 2 are on same bar or consecutive bars or did I need a third bar to get rolling. 5 min, 10min or 10 min plus. 81 bars in a day. 20 to 40 actions a day. My debriefing day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, is very pithy and educational. It tells me this: Compared to the average daily earnings of ET, of 80 different edges in many subsets, I can make more than the average earnings of an ET person by just trading one point 1 entry per day NO MATTER WHERE I GET OUT AFTER THAT ENTRY. Look draw a horizontal line (breakeven) through any point 1 and see how many times you can wash from that value. See how many times you can exit when the price is 1 point (ES) from that values. QED. Now lets begin to think. Upon entry. you are annotating pt 2 and pt 3; you are in a trade, in a trend, and you know that the trend will have a few gaussians. coarse, coarse, coarse, medium, coarse, medium, coarse, medium, fine..... You hit the first fine.. sideline and annotate to get the houskeeping done. You did nine sweeps. Rest ,recover have a coffee. For me it is different than you, though. I am sweeping on sports memory. Were you to sit to my right and annotate you would not be able to keep up with me. were you to sit to my right and I were annotating, you would go nuts..... at first. Let a couple of weeks pass and you would feel right on and in the groove and be keeping up perfectly. In fact, you would be "anticipating" by then. you would be itching to go from coarse to medium EVEN IF YOU SAW CONTINUE ON COARSE........ This is because you have time as you see it. I see it as repeating coarse, however. the written decision "continue saves some analysis time, decision time, act not acting time (Continuing to hold). So how can a person who is well along and making a good amount of money read this post and use it well. All they do is splice what they are doing with this post by adding it to their logs and debriefing at the front end of what they are now doing. These people are all doing well and beginning at a certain point. They get scissors and a glue stick. They print the logs they have. they smear glue on the top of the log and pick it up and slide it up this post until they get to where they entered the trade. The text above that gluing place is everything I did before they did an entry. Say they print out 20 copies of this post. Then they snip all their logs at each entry. They paste these to separate copies and pile up the results with the beginning of the day on top. Well wee can see that each segment that is glued to gether ends with an exit. My bet is this: That exit was not far before my entry on point 1. my entry usually was a reverse that just happens to ocur after their exit for a set of reasons. Make a list of those reasons and see if they are medium or fine ones. If it is hard to figure out it is because you are not sweeping very well as yet. The single most prominent reason for not sweeping well is not having gotten past the normal problem of most people where they repeatedly examine on part of their screen to see if WHAT THEY WANT TO HAPPEN IS GOING TO HAPPEN. Sweeping was invented to break people of the habit of giving undue emphasis on stuff that they like to do and watch. you make money not by watching what you want to watch but by watching WHAT YOU NEED TO WATCH. So this little post is a terrific and important one. It says that you do know what you are doing at all times and so you can do analysis of what you annotated and you then decide. It says that you always do the same things. Annotating is a monitoring thing with the sweeping; analysis immediately follows as does decision making and acting ...then sweeping, analysis... Now, if it becomes clear to use the right 1/3 of your screen as the future (blank and containing ALL projections for that scale). And if you choose to begin to sweep........ and if IF1 and IF 2 is there...... And if you always, between sweeps (and without dwelling anymore on your fav observation places) do analysis, decision making and acting.......You will find that the 20 pastings bottoms come very close to the entries I made at the top of the next sheet where your stuff is pasted on the bottom. It is so hard to begin.......to just do it.
Attached is a chart. if someone has a daily and can post it with 1/3 blank to the right (future I would appreciate it.
here is a beginning effort. I drew in some trendlines. I just started in the middle of an unannotated chart of the daily. I didn't start on the far left because it is not clear. I did three trendlines that began and ended. The one to the right of these is just a segment. I will further this process in another post.
I drew in heliotrope (known as pink) ten more lines. These are lines that are parallel to the trendlines in blue and are drawn as segments. for historical parts they are just there. Yiou can see where I put some tick marks. These are places where the price came to the extended parallel segment and they are not lines drawn to the prices that turn out to be parallel. The blue trendline segment was extended to go along with the increased volatility of the channel as the left channel segments were drawn in. you would draw them and project them and see that price broke through these going away from the original trend line. You can see that I am not too neat nor too accurate. I tried and that is how it turned out. This is simply an outer boundary of what is going on and I have covered a bout a year with four blue lines and ten pink lines. This covers several quarters and roll overs.
Here is another chart showing more detail. The detail is the next fractal level down (faster) that lets you see the traverses of channels within the thin green channel that bounds the traverses. I tick marked the pts 1, 2, and 3 for these three channels. Settle into looking at the chart. see that when you take these daily bars that form this stuff on to the trading fractal (5 min) that each bar showing so far in the daily is going to be broken into 81 pieces. So to get the picture between the daily and the 5 min, you expand the daily chart by going to the 60 or 30 or15 to get more bars (6, or 12 or high 20's ,respectively). When you get to the 5 min, you are using 2 consecutive bars and perhaps a third bar to confirm a trend. So we are on a blue short trend in a thin green long trend where there was a FTT in the thin green and we see that this sets up a double top. Not withstanding national and international events, the chart is there and it is readable and we have a putting green using the daily data. We recognize that we can take 20 to 40 actions on each of the bars that appear on these charts. So the putting green showing is for "position" trading the ES. This is a lot of points per putt. We are tuned into a faster trading fractal where more points are made than on this daily type chart. So we definitely see the ball park and its potential to deliver a lot of capital.
I will give you my take on it. The first instance was not a trend reversal on the 5min. It was a retrace which is normal. Five bars later you get an ftt which gives you a new channel. You then get an ftt in the new channel which is my signal to short again when the new pt. 3 appears. Some of the more experienced players may Know how to reverse at these points but Im not there yet. I am out at the first sign of trouble and then waiting to get back in on the new pt. 3. Keep in mind that Im just a student on this stuff too. edit. I screwed up the illustration. the top ftt should read pt. 3. [/QUOTE] I looked at the chart. Here is a suggestion. If you can give enough history to tie the lines in a little, I can comment better. I will do price alone mostly for making points but it would be nice to see the volume as well. What it comes down to for making money is to go from where you are to being more aggressive when you get more comfortable. I was noting before today something about doing some pasting. You can see what I meant by this one chart. The gap in time between yor entry and mine is the distance from point 1 to point 3 for the time being. When you look at the price difference it is about zilch usually. But occassionally it isn't simply because you could trade 1 to 2 and 2 to 3 also. that is what is enterint the picture here. Taking 20 actions a day to 40 actions a day. More and more we are going to be thinking about exits on the left channel line. Using the daily charts as an example only of channel formations, you can see a smoking gun getting ready to smoke. on the way to that thin green line, the action in the blue channel that is possible is one thing. It is the subject of your chart in this response. It is those FTT that occurred in those channels. The fuzziness of your channels may be because of the grab of the chart you made from your whole chart. If you do draw ASAP, then there is less fuzziness. I know I am insisting on everyone drawing. It is tough to get those I want to move along faster to draw for us. I annotate my 2 min YM price without fail. I can only say that if you do it habitually you get to see price hitting the left channel line. There is something about reversing on that line and seeing the ticks keep building in the account. If you are drawing trendlines on traverses you see the two lines meeting (the traverse trendline and the left channel line in which the traverse is occurring). These are pennants with pionts at the most profitable place for the next 5 to 15 minutes. What stops a point is added volatility on increasing volume. there you ride the bar into new volatility as the sweep focus. This commentary may not seem to be answering yor comments. But see that I am speaking about making money in the vicinity of what you have as your picture. Look at ends of money making as beginnings of new money making where you can slip in two actions and still wind up back at prices relating to pt 1 and pt 3. you can go on either pt 1 or pt 3 and hold. If you get to point 2 with a point of more (from early in on pt 1) then you reverse on over to point 3 and reverse again at pt 3 with a lightly lessor position than the original point 1. you make the point 2 to point 3 money as well. At worst you see some pairs of washes (See that 7 point print I did most recently) Getting late here. SAT is especially busy. Our agency is being given more control on the national data base and advertizing projections. Looking at a tenfold activity increase on no additional staffing. Paper mill is materializing as we redo the software. LOL. The right software gives us 10 times cash flow. I needed to have permission computerwise to change how we flow results inward to get overrides to come to us. Oh well. LOL.