In summary the market opened in no mans land, it could have chosen to test resistance first and then support. Instead it chose to test support. On top of that it chose to test it at a key time, the first hour low, therefore, eventhough we had gaped down, and market looked "bearish" how we open and where we open dictates the intraday trades. Had we taken that low and "flipped" those lines I plotted, It would had been a very different outcome, it would had gone to the next area that "matters".
That makes sense, that low was the target area for the short trade I didn't take. I did consider going long after the low was put in, but same problem... I got hung up seeing resistance on the 5-min chart and didn't take the trade. I do look at daily chart levels and have them in mind as possible magnets or reaction points but have been wary of adding 30 and 60 min charts into the picture. In the past I had serious analysis paralysis issues and decided to reduce the amount of information for me to process. I have found some success on the sim of late, focusing on my intraday 5-min charts and usually only trading the first 2 hrs and sometimes the last 90 mins of the sesion. I'll go through some charts and look at the backtests and backtest shoulder creation patterns. Thanks.
Good Lines RedTank - exactly the same as I use. For some reason TL's seem to confuse a lot of traders and I know it was for me too in the early days. I'd forgotten what it was like until I mentored some newbies over the past few weeks and then it all came back to me. It's so obvious I don't mention it much here, but the skill that makes it easy and obvious is one developed over years. Developed and years are key words as I know experienced traders that don't use TL's because they never got out of the confusing stage and so decided S&R lines are the only safe things to use. In the live chat room we use these lines in all time frames from well below 1 min to weekly in every session. The best source I know of for free education is Cornix's blog. To digress, the attached chart shows the corresponding support on the SPX to the Dow 12700. Always cross reference as mentioned much earlier in the thread. I'll ask Cornix to post an example and link again.
With pleasure, Xspurt, I posted daily chart with corresponding trendlines just a couple of hours ago in my blog as an update to previous longer-term analysis posts I made there. Euro nicely bounced yesterday exactly off the intersection of two trendlines on the daily plus 50% retrace, but that is usually of secondary importance for me, because I tend to just eyeball depth of the retracement and not focus too much on the exact fib numbers it approaches. Here is the link to that last post: http://www.cornixforex.com/2012/04/euro-daily-price-action/
Thanks X, Actually I'm doing pretty well with this stuff. It's just once in a while I have a day that makes me wonder if I'm missing something, so I'll put up a chart and see if the more experienced eyes here have anything to add. I do share ideas with Cornix fairly regularly and he's been a great help. Speaking of blogs the Al fans may find this one interesting: http://ninetrans.blogspot.com/2012/04/your-trading-edge.html
Today we had the bear flag pennant backtest. If it continues to hold we gonna get the second leg down and take the higher low. If it produces a fake down and we hop back inside the pennant, there is a good chance we take out the right shoulder and consequently make new year highs. Tomorrow is key, I remain neutral without prediction