LH/LL etc on that chart is pure noise. "It" doesn't get you in and "watching the tick chart" doesn't get you in. Your belief about that chart convinces you to get in sooner. You know how I used to label the trades where I got in based on the price action of a very narrow bar interval instead of focusing on high probability setups using a larger bar interval? I labeled them JTG which stands for "Jumping The Gun". That label went in my trading errors column. My definition of "sooner" is "prior to a valid signal".
I know I've dabbled in these lower time frames before and have gotten completely messed up, but its because I was doing this at inappropriate levels. 40D just said in my journal today that he is all about trading the important levels. But at these levels he will absolutely be watching this lower time frame stuff. Db also goes to great lengths to talk about this. (I hope they come across these posts so they can share their views because I don't want to be saying what I think they might say). I think Db would say that even the trades put on by the algos matter. Now don't get me wrong, neither of these guys would be trading all the stuff in the middle because we really don't know the path that price will take to get to the next level, but the fact that one important level is rejected makes it that much more probable that the other end of the extreme will be tested, and that might take an hour or all day. I wouldn't dare use a HH or HL on a 5 second chart in the middle of nowhere, but just based on what I'm seeing today, when price approaches an important level it provides a killer trade, and even when price is stuck in a range and exits, these as well provide a killer trade (I just showed that in my chart today for Trade 14). If I have to wait for a RET that is visible on a 1 minute chart it may never come until 10 points later which is just too late and at this point, it will be a bit more random if we go up first or down first before continuing.
KP, can’t you see where all this is going? Don’t you see what Fortydraws and others are telling you? Your daily trading exercise in self immolation is getting painful to witness. Just look at the current trend of your personal account. I ask you as one trader to another, at this point in time, would you be going Long KP, or would you be Shorting the Living Shit out of every account uptick? The problem that I see with what you are doing stems from your deeply entrenched belief that all of your trading problems can be resolved from more or better technical analysis. And this is a totally “Inoperative Belief” and it could well be your eventual undoing. More or even better technical analysis will not resolve your current trading problems. Understand, and I repeat,… more or even better technical analysis cannot not resolve your current trading problems. There is nothing wrong with technical analysis per se, or even talking technical analysis as you do on a continuing basis. The problem that I see is with; “How you are trying to use your analysis”. You are trying to use your analysis to make yourself RIGHT on a trade, and for a particular trade to work out. And this simply cannot be done. You are asking your analysis to do something that it simply cannot do…and that is the fact. Technical analysis cannot make you right on any given trade. You are using and abusing your analysis to try to be RIGHT! For some odd reason, you appear to have a problem with being wrong on something or some issue. You staunchly fight and combat anything or anyone who presents you with something that has the potential to make you feel or be wrong. This is a problem, and from what I have seen over the intervening months, I believe to be,…your main problem. In terms of your analysis, the fact of the matter is that the outcome of any given single trade is completely and absolutely RANDOM. Yeah… I know…you've heard all this before. But somehow the underlying fundamental premise still seems to evade you. Which is that; it doesn’t matter worth a tinkers damn what the hell you are attempting to do with your technical analysis, because no matter what you do technically…IT CANNOT MAKE THIS CURRENT TRADE WORK OUT, AND MAKE IT OR YOU RIGHT! You are attempting to use your technical analysis for something it CANNOT, and WAS NOT designed to do. And what you are currently doing in your daily Journal machinations, is a total and complete exercise in futility, frustration, and ultimately…FAILURE. Hopefully, and I do so hope that there will come a day that you are willing to be “OPEN” to a new way of thinking and acting, and ready to wake up from your deepening nightmare. Otherwise, your painful and frustrating market lessons will be continued and be repeated, until you are ready,……and no amount of technical analysis,...advanced or otherwise can change that. Still on your side.... KDASFTG
Probably not. Levels are price areas. I did not mean to imply that you should expect price to always or even most of the time make trade to a specific price value. That pullback you note in your last chart was a retest of the opening range low, imo. In an earlier post I said "at times price doesn't get as far as expected - that is information too." I doubt you grasp how I'm using these levels, and I'm sure you do not understand the why of my use of the tick charts - that you keep referring to it as "lower timeframe stuff" shows that you really miss what's important to me. You do not need a tick chart or a 5 second chart, or even any chart at all, you could do the same thing on time and sales or even just watching the bid ask in your platform - All I'm watching for is to see which is moving the market - are prices being offered higher and higher, or bid lower and lower. It's about spotting the turns as Richard Wyckoff would say. Think like an old-time floor trader. A floor trader wouldn't think "ok, if 5 seconds from now price is higher I'll buy" or "well it looks like everyone else is buying, but just to be sure let me wait 'til 10:05 and then I'll buy too if price goes even higher sometime between 10:05 and 10:10." If you were in a pit of traders, you would have in your head certain price levels at which price had turned before, let's call them support and resistance prices, and then you would wait for price to get there, and then you would trade based on what you saw the traders around you doing - are buyers willing to keep paying higher and higher leading sellers to continually raise their offers? Or does the expected demand not materialize, and sellers begin offering to sell at prices below the prior support level to entice buyers to buy what they got to sell? All I'm trying to do is "listen" and "see" what other traders are doing. You seem focused on small stops (ironic for someone who let a trade run 20+ points against himself). But I'm not trying to trade with a small stop - that is not and never was my goal. The ability to do so is the result of my learning to spot the shifts where buyers or sellers yield to the other as early as possible and creating a trading plan that enables me to do so at areas where there is a higher probability of such a shift occurring, imo.
I certainly do not have the knowledge to address much of what you say, but it is my feeling that much of what you say culminates in the transaction price. If each next transaction is at a higher price, then buyers are willing to pay more than what sellers are willing to accept. This then creates an up wave until everyone gets a little exhausted and sellers now overwhelm the buyers in that they are able to offer less and less without buyers stepping in. If enough buyers step in to push price higher before we even reach the previous low point, then we have a higher low. If this buying surpasses the previous high, then we have a higher high, and now an up trend. If this should happen at a level that has been important in the past, then its very good reason to assume that we can go long. As you say at the beginning, the fact that price didn't even reach 4119 two hours after the open shows that buyers were too willing to buy, and hence is extremely bullish. This is how I understand it. I am quite intrigued to actually read more of what you have to say, but to be honest, I am getting a bit frustrated. I've got excellent people here helping me, but each of them is different and trades completely differently. Db would say that every transaction is important, but ND has put anything below the 1 minute bar in the category of noise. This certainly works for her, but I imagine that both you and Db would disagree with this. I also believe that KDASFTG trades what would mostly be patterns, and this is completely in the opposite direction of what Db would encourage. Absolutely each trade will have a random outcome since we never know if enough buyers will step in once we go long, but watching these buying and selling waves is certainly much better than watching bars. I absolutely respect ND, but when she writes in capitals that I am on the wrong path, this is extremely discouraging, and nobody here is backing me up who has been on this same journey and trading via the imbalances between demand and supply. I also very much respect KDA, but his points are that my analysis is not particularly important when I would counter that is has actually quite opened my eyes and I explained quite well in my charts why most of my trades today should not have been taken... based on the market, not by how I feel. To be honest, I'm also a bit sad that you feel as if everything is lost on me. You might be right, but it doesn't feel that way to me. Holding a losing trade for a 20 point loss is not a reflection of my understanding, its a reflection of my hopes and fears and lack of discipline. You have also so clearly outlined what you look for to go long and short, and shown this to me in the charts you so kindly put together, but now you steer off in a slightly different direction saying that its about something totally different and that you doubt that I even grasp what you're doing with these charts. The reason why I keep saying lower time frame is because the buying and selling waves are lost in the one minute charts, but when you zoom in, right down to the tick level, then its there. But now I'm still left wondering why after illustrating so well what you look for in charts, you're almost taking away their significance. I really hesitated posting my results today because each time in the past, I feel as if I just had people jumping on me. But at the same time, I have always gotten something useful out of doing so.... I have learned something new. But today it honestly feels like everyone is ganging up on me.... and I'm already down for my stupidity as shown with my trading. I've managed to get right back up on the horse and do some damn good study, but here I'm having do defend myself from every angle and its not easy.
Kp, there is nothing wrong with learning, but you are learning for all the wrong reasons. And I do so hope that there will come a day that you are willing to be “OPEN” to a new way of thinking and acting. Still on your side.... KDASFTG
Regarding intervals smaller than 1m. This is the playing field for algos and bots. Extracting info from these intervals requires precise unwavering definitions for all the tiny details. I believe it's so rare to achieve this clarity without hard coding it that I am siding with those discouraging you from exploring these intervals. Given fortydraws ability to formulate a plan and his attention to detail, I am open to the possibility someone highly disciplined who knows exactly what they're looking for, iow has precise definitions of what's acceptable and unacceptable (regardless of whether or not they're consciously aware they're consistently applying the same rules every time) .....given all that then I accept and invent the possibility (for whoever opts to pursue that level of *stringent discipline* ...without coding it) ...that this can be a fruitful path. But that's clearly not the path you've been on. And not a path for anyone other than programmers.
"I've got excellent people here helping me, but each of them is different and trades completely differently." Which is precisely why all these good people - DbPhoenix, NoDoji, Redneck, BhProp, KDAASFG and others have urged you for nearly the entire year you've been journaling to stop trading and get about the business of just watching the market. If you do this,l at some point you may discover certain patterns of behavior that repeat with enough frequency and whose occurrence indicates that one outcome is now more likely than another outcome and out of that observation, a trading plan of your very own may be born. I've only been trading for a few years. When I started, I had no idea about how the market worked. So I started watching the stock market. One thing I noticed was that stocks that gap open in a big way tended to settle in for a few minutes and then break one way or the other. Those that broke in the direction of the gap tended to keep right on going all day. My first trading plan was born. When I became interested in the NQ futures as a result of DbPhoenix's SLA threads, I started watching. First I did everything as DbPhoenix taught. Overtime, I noticed some other patterns of market behavior, and I put together my NQ plan - which if you look at what I posted here in your journal now in 2015 and the examples I posted to DbPhoenix's journal in 2013, you will see that little if anything has changed. A sound trading plan is born from the efforts of patient and careful observation, not under the pressure of losing nearly a grand a day while winging it. It doesn't have to take long. Neither of my plans took more than a few weeks of watching, backtesting and forward testing. That's me. Some people can keep a journal for a year or more and not come up with anything. Probably because what they are trying to come up with is "where would I buy?" Where would I sell?" That is not what you should be doing. You should be watching a simple chart and pay attention to how price behaves - how it thrusts and thrashes and then hesitates. How does it behave just after it ramps up 10 points in a minute? "Oh, look, it rallied to 4119 and then fell back to the low of the day. Let me see what happens here. It is approaching that 4119 again, let me watch carefully to see what traders do here this time." You cannot trade while searching for a trading plan. For now, this will have to be my last post to your journal. Not because I'm trying to be mean or impatient or negative, but because I really believe that at this point, I am probably doing you far more harm than good. I hope you finally stop winging it and set to the task of observing and noting patterns of behavior that may be of interest to you so that you might develop a sound approach.
I'd like to ask for an explanation of what you mean here before I jump to conclusions but I guess I will just go with the the obvious one. I don't deny that trading without having a solid plan isn't the smartest, and losing $1000 in a day is foolish, so its fair to say that I am deaf with regards to advice surrounding my trading. But I do wish you were able to address some of the things with regards those pesky lower time frames. I know you say that one doesn't need to look at something lower than a 1 minute chart because he can see the action if he watches the right tick, but this still means that what goes on within that 1 minute bar at a major support or resistance level is vital. I spent all night analyzing my trades on the 5 sec chart because I don't remember what happened, but that 5 second chart will have recorded the behavior of this much better than the 1 minute chart. If I'm even wrong about this then I will forever shut my mouth. But for the sake of helping others who may one day go through this journal, I thought that you might have at least cleared this up. Its not a case of proving ND wrong and myself right, but I am out for the truth, and it seems to me that what ND is claiming with regards to the "noise" of anything less than 1 minute charts is inconsistent with what you teach and what originates from Wyckoff (not that I'm an expert on him mind you). I spent so much time grappling with the differentiation between trading patterns and trading behavior and given the activity in my journal in the past 24 hours I think this issue has come back full circle. I'm not saying that having just one minute charts to go on is bad. If the rejection of a level is solid, it will be there on the 1 minute chart and 5 minute chart and so on. But if you're waiting for that bar to "close", and looking for an entry below it, then the longer you wait, the further away you are from this rejection and therefore the greater chance of price doing something unexpected. That's how I see it, and that's what I get from everything I've learned thus far.