you cant do it because candles are dependent on time and time is a poison to price action trading. prove me wrong anyone.
i am wondering the following: what chart are you using? are you charting on 24hr es or just day session? i am wondering if you use day session only how you deal with the indicators recalculating and scaling.
Sorry OP. Didn't realize you said "swing trading" I strictly daytrade. More specifically, with higher volatility, I'm only looking to trade the opening 30-45 minutes and call it a day. With lower volatility, I'm trading 60-90 minutes. The Bollinger band plays almost no importance or basis for my trades. I used to backtest it for mean regression trades many years ago and I found it, like most indicators, to be almost worthless in using it to base trades around. I shouldn't even have mentioned it. My bad !. My eyes got accustomed to having it on my charts. I just like to see where price is at in the band with specific types of price structures. Its sort of like a compass or GPS. you might almost 100% sure you know where you are, but the GPS just gives u that extra bit of certainty. That's all its used for. ANd I use 24 hours charts for everything I do. The pre-market structures make my strategy !
i usually start trading around 1-2 hours before the session open and on up to an hour before lunch. i use range bars because i can see the structure much easier.
I trade multiple stock positions over long time periods, eg can be holding for months. Am heading that way more and more of reading pure price action as stops. I have found it difficult weaning myself off old habits of looking at charts with volume, I keep falling into the trap of relying on old methods used over the years, hard to kill off the old ways. I'm gravitating toward trading off spreadsheets firstly to gauge the market sentiment and spreadsheets for a rough idea on how I am travelling overall and to raise red or green flags, then pure price action for the very last decision on buying into or exiting positions. Just looking at how the bars are behaving over maybe a lookback of 30-40 bars. Becomes a pattern recognition exercise, no indicators.
%% NOT sure why you would want to exclude volume; TA is the study of price + volume.Not sure how any could enter an order with no volume. You may mean,volume is secondary?? Good points on holding for months, when appropriate.Time can be your friend , in a good trend; time is an enemy, on the wrong side of of any trend, or some markets. Most all sales have an expiry date on them-not necessarily every 3rd Friday.
My experience, volume can be treacherous as an indicator from the point of view it often gives the wrong signal and lulls one into a false sense of security. Volume is something which goes hand in hand with price so it becomes natural to always refer to it. The trouble with volume, one then uses it as a key indicator and if it's wrong then the trader makes yet another wrong decision. Think of it like this, we trade price, this is the ultimate indicator we seek. Price is what we trade, ($$$$). All stops and entry's should be about $'s. If for example a market top and one were hoping to exit at or near top, price begins to roll over on low volume and the decision is made not to exit because low volume indicates lack of fear and price has a high probability of climbing again. The market often does what is least expected, volume is the crowd. They are often wrong. Pure Price on the other hand is never wrong.