It's a good start your charts that you posted. Now why don't you try to take a Sim trade off of one of your charts. Then in Excel or here right down the reasons for the trade, if you made profit or a loss and your summary of the price action that got you into or out of the trade. If you are able to take a winning trade, then go back to previous days charts and see if you are able to determine a pattern that repeats itself that will give you a possible PA setup to take a similar trade in the future. Looking at your chart, there are some areas that would have allowed me to make a successful trade. I took a small loss today on a good trade setup when I clicked sell instead of buy, so watch out for stupid mistakes like I made, and if you get into them you can always click reverse which is what I should have done instead of just killing the trade.
I had no way of knowing I should've entered anywhere today. I'm still studying charts and to see if I can even come up with reasons why an entry might make sense.
You keep studying intraday charts and in some cases micro charts, you studying the trees and not the forest. When you begin this process you must first learn about the forest. Until you educate yourself in high probability areas of PA, do not go below the 60min, and stop using ridiculous tick/volume/second settings that hurt more than help at your stage. You are getting valuable suggestions, do not ignore them.
That is vague. Can I have some examples of "high probability areas of PA?" Why shouldn't I go below 60 minutes? What constitutes "ridiculous" tick/volume/second settings and why do they hurt more than they help? On a related note, is there a place I can get free historical daily continuous ES charts? Sierrachart is a little weird about that. I'd like to have a longer term timeframe to see historical S/R points.
Here's my chart for today. The red upward sloping trendline is the top of a channel that began last year. Yesterday in the ES journal I posted a daily chart showing this: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/attachment.php?s=&postid=3805283
Let's have a look at that IHS on the 5 second chart: Each point of the IHS was accompanied by high volume. I'm pretty bad at reading volume but it looks like the first shoulder had higher volume, the head definitely had higher volume, and the right shoulder had higher volume. I don't know what the significance of this is, if any, but I thought I'd post it.
Not trying to be ugly condescending or counter productive. But I think you're chasing your tail with this one.
I'm not being vague, I'm actually being quite clear. You are doing research and I am telling you how and where to begin and where not to look. The answers you will find on your own, just "trying" to give you a hand as to where and how to look during the beginning of your research. I told you in a previous post, the lower you go in timeframes, the more noise you will find, and the less areas of high probability you will discover because noise will make the research much harder. I'm not saying fast timeframes cannot be used to trade, but until you know what to look for you will make your work 50x harder by starting where noise is abundant. Time based charts accentuate these areas with more clarity because the charts are more commonly used, and you need others traders to see them as well. I mentioned 60min and above because that's when the ratio of noise vs content is balanced favorably for someone researching for these key areas. Tradingview.com and freestockcharts.com has free daily continuous data.