Use stops loss as a money management method to help to cut losses and are especially useful for when you are not able to monitor the market.
Here is another megaphone pattern today 12-29-2016 in the ES. For those interested in such things! Good for two legs down and several points.
Here is another megaphone pattern made on 12-30-2016. Megaphone patterns are tradeable. I hope I have illustrated that clearly. I don't see any comments so I guess no interest... so... adios for now but I do hope someone gets some ideas from these illustrations that came from price action in the ES over the last few days.
I have much tighter rules for drawing a megaphone, I don't see a Megaphone in these charts at all, and that is what is great about trading.
Agreed - That so called 'Megaphone' of yours does not come close to a valid pattern. Not to mention it was never intended for intra-day - it is applied to the weekly and daily charts since it typically takes about 2 months to play out. Sure, you will see patterns on smaller time frames - the problem is the reliability drops way, way down and HFT's know these patterns and like to cause fake breakouts to exploit trapped day traders.
I totally disagree, the reliability does not drop down if you experienced enough to understand how to trade, it is like any other patterns. As far as fake breakouts they started long before HFTs, you can go back to 1982 on S&P charts and see false breakouts on megaphones. Traders use "HFT" like chewing gum as an excuse, you either figure out the game better than others or you in the heap of those who blame others. Patterns are like an indicator and most don't see the LEFT of now, meaning to identify one does not do certain types of trades, like trend breakouts as by time to getting in price will be reversing, usually by seeing 2 points on each side gives one the chance to not take 2 break out trades and allows on with trend deep retracement trade plus picking up the failed extension to other side. But your charts, are intraday, LOL. And by the way, my "pattern" is straight from Thomas Bulkowski, so guess you going to tell him he is wrong, there is not time element on how long it takes to develop the pattern. If a pattern only works on dailies and weeklies and not intraday, it is not going to be a good pattern, whether they happen or not. http://thepatternsite.com/bt.html Oh, one from 12-29 not a megaphone, it is a Diamond pattern. There is not right or wrong in trading, just making money is all that counts. It is nice you have well explained charts.
Hft could careless about these intraday patterns. They are more concerned with millisecond and scalping a tick or two here there, or pennies here and there, and doing so hundreds and thousands of times a day. They have actually made trading more precise and added liquidity. Using HFT's as an excuse for unsuccessful trading has become fashionable. If anything, they have helped the daytrader. In addition, anything that looks like a megaphone or expanding triangle can be traded. Time frame has nothing to do with it. You are wrong about that. Not all expanding triangles are perfectly shaped just like a perfect megaphone but it doesn't matter. If it looks somewhat like a duck..and quacks kinda like a duck then it has a high propability of being a duck and can be eaten as duck! You are never going to get perfectly shaped patterns all the time. In addition, any type of pattern can and will fail at times but that is just the uncertainty that is part and parcel in the markets and something one learns to live with and trade with. If price doesn't behave as probable in a pattern that is forming i will quickly change my opinion and can reverse on a dime. It simply doesn't matter to me. I know the megaphone pattern is tradable intraday on charts of 5 minutes or greater with a high degree of probability, if one knows what they are doing.
You are very misinformed if you think HFTs are good for traders - you are obviously a rank novice without a clue. Some HFTs play the intra-day spreads, other HFTs play the common entry signals from indicators and chart patterns commonly used mainly by day traders that result in clustered orders. Man you are beyond green! Your grasp of chart patterns is so flawed it is laughable. Try reading and following the rules and protocols for pattern recognition as outlined by the founders of TA instead of making up your own flawed version of what you want it to be. I have been at it for decades with TA and have an open mind since there is some variances between individuals at times, but when you break every rule of TA and just make up your own wacky version that one thing, but when you go promoting it like you do than do expect peer reviews by those that take TA seriously.
It's absolutely out of the question: nobody with a $1k account should be daytrading stocks! You'd want your risk-per-trade, including dealing costs, to be something between $5 and a maximum of $10 per trade - that's simply not going to work. One way would be to be practising/learning by daytrading spot forex instead, somewhere like Oanda which allows infinite granularity of position-sizing (i.e. you can trade in position-sizes as small as you want, with dealing-costs to match pro rata). Another way would be to be practising/learning on a demo account instead.
Thanks. On 12-29 ignore the orange channel lines down. The green lines are the megaphone pattern. I didn't draw it precise which means little to me but one could draw it back a little further on the mouth of the megaphone and pick up the three connecting points on each side. They are there. Bulkowski can believe whatever he wants to believe from his testing..etc. I don't care. I am interested in tradable patterns that have probable chance of succeeding. For me they don't have to be perfect and seldom are. I trade different than many. I will exit at the end of each leg with profit and enter again if pattern resumes. I have never seen the logic to hold on through a PB and then a resumption when i can lock in 2 points of profit. Then wait for the PB and enter again. Comm are not that much. ES can whip saw back and forth quite quickly. If it gives me 2 points i am taking them. If it is a high probability trade i will take 1 point. I know that sound backwards but High probabilty trades don't usually give big rewards. There is a tradeoff. Generally, you can't have high probability, big reward, and low risk. Such an ideal trade as that is very rare. So, if my trade unfolds as high prob i will exit on any quick profit. If it changes i can always go back in.