Nothing, nothing out there will keep you on trend better than mov avgs. Gee, seems everyone knows about them and yet they still work, that debunks the pendent that says if it is known it is useless as everyone uses them. The pendent always seems to forget that everyone will not use any indicator correctly, end of that argument. To answer the question: YES, adjust the time frame to the moving avg. On a 5 minute ES chart try the well worn canned periods (bars) od the 4 period crossing the 9 period, you can also have the 9 crossing the 19 as a filter. Have Fun later . time to fire up the workstation and bring home some bacon,. Good Luck.....
Without getting into a boring argument I will simply have to disagree. But if we all agreed then there wouldn't be any money to be made in this game.
More profitable or not, depends on you and only you. Depends on your system and creativity. How much work do you want to put in a smaller timeframe system to get it to work extremely well? You always want to be aware of what larger time frames are doing. One method is to take a pullback on a higher time frame, and then drop down at least 5X on a lower timeframe and time it as a "turn". Ninja and I have posted examples of this in dacharts. Here's a link to start off with: http://www.dacharts.org/archives/discussion_topics/Ninja_on_Trend_Turn_Method.htm That's only one idea out of endless ideas. Anything can work, if you do the work. Goinglite
My setups work on most time frames from what I've noticed. So I'd say yes. 5 MA works good on gappers (3.5%+) for support/resistance. 15/30 min time frame. Not too knowledgeable on MAs on longer timeframes. If the stock is above it's 20, 50 and 200 MAs, it's usually a good sign.