45pts from the LL of the pre-open range to the top of the next lower range (89). A few more if one went long off the 0950 reversal.
That 0950 was a bit explosive for my taste. The push up alerted me to the fact of demand showing strength and had me get ready to exit my short from yesterday. It would be interesting to see how one could catch that blast upwards on 1 or 5 mins. The retracement from my cursory glance was there but briefly. The fact that price was in proximity to potential support and then shot up like this in RT could be reason enough, if one's prepared, to initiate a position if one wasn't already in. A very interesting session indeed. Anyone remember (DBP or WTF?). At least that was my thinking. Gringo
It's not a matter of "catching that blast". It's a matter, as I pointed out at TL this morning, of doing the prep before the market opens and knowing exactly where you're going to go long or short, exactly where your entry trigger is going to be, and exactly where your stop -- if any -- is going to be. That range was there long before the open. It was there long before today. All one has to do is make those decisions, then wait. But one has first to recognize that there's a range there.
Speaking of Gringo, I should mention that he pointed out a hinge in the Q, which of course translates to the NQ. Since the apex of the hinge and the median of the range were nearly the same, this provided nice confirmation.
And putting together a couple of DbPhoenix's posts from lajax's journal: As gears could attest, in our discussion of prep going back to Wednesday (3/4) of this week, we had 20 [20.50] and 396 as levels below the 2/23 through 3/6AM range in case the range break was to the low side. Again, like DbPhoneix said, it is not magic. These levels have been "out there" for weeks now. But if you don't look for them, and someone else mentions them first, it might seem like magic. IMO, doing the prep of finding the range is most of the technical battle. Once you know where to look for a trade, the entry trigger and stop placement need not be terribly sophisticated. I had an inkling about this and went back to Douglas's chapter on the "Psychology of Price Movement" in The Disciplined Trader. There he describes a tactic where one identifies a trading range, and then trades it by simply placing resting orders near the limits with stops outside the limits.
And if I may repeat, "Once you know where to look for a trade, the entry trigger and stop placement [or exit trigger] need not be terribly sophisticated." Some will post a nearly contiguous succession of novellas complaining about how no one will show them exactly where to enter and exactly where the stop should be. Others will spend an evening or two (not a month, not a year) with a moderate pile of static charts and determine how far away from the upper and lower limits of a range price must travel before one can be reasonably assured that it will not back up on him to the extent of returning to his entry: a tick? Two? Four? Eight? Twelve? At the same time, he can determine how many of the trades that return to his entry reverse and resume the original course, as opposed to those that fail miserably and re-enter the range from which they just attempted to escape. Also at the same time, he can calculate how far price must travel in order for him to comfortably and rationally and logically place a breakeven stop, if he absolutely cannot function without one. And once he's collected this preliminary data, he can then test (OMG!) what he believes may be true -- his hypotheses -- on replay and see live just how price moves as it approaches, breaks through, and tests these levels. Having this data, he can then begin trading it according to the probability data he's just collected, understanding that there is no such thing as a risk-free trade with a guaranteed outcome. Anyone seeking the last should find some other means of occupying his time. Like doing volunteer work at his local homeless shelter. Or his local VA hospital.
Sorry for jumping in here, but as I've just gone through this process... For anyone interested in how long it would take to see if this whole approach is worth the effort. (spoiler alert - it is) I was able to do a years worth of backtesting in under a week. I would do it in batches of a few weeks at a time. So spread over the course of an actual week it was nothing. Now I'm not as smart as the average bear, but if I can do it.... You get the picture. Now for the replay, testing etc
I like that you're reading my posts Db! And you're by no means wrong with your suggestion. Your suggestion does in a way mean moving away somewhat from behavior if the entry is based purely on stats in terms of ticks/points. When 40D is suggesting to always replay certain action that makes one switch from long to short as an example, I keep thinking that what I'm looking for is the nuances of watching price move, as if I was watching a woman dance and seeing the subtleties of her footwork and graceful arm movements, as opposed to just counting steps. But here is the thing. Each time I've done this (and I have), I'm seeing stats that in no way allow for trades that are obvious. A level is literally has to be worked over and over again. Either the entry has to be quite far away to not be triggered easily, which now makes the stop huge, or else the entry is triggered more often than you would like, or it triggers often and there have to be lots of scratches and re-entries before you finally get it right in order to have a tight stop loss. But based on what you and 40D post, I just never see this "working it" in the discussion. I see one or two best entries and that's it. So it just leads me to thinking that the entry criteria is very complicated and involved in order to be able to have such a high win rate and not be sucked into too many scratches.
Clearly you didn't read my last post. You have no stats. You don't know what stats are. You don't even know what a range is. But even if you did know what a range is and what stats are, you wouldn't have any because you haven't done any testing. What you have done is reject the advice of many of the best traders on ET to the point where they've given up posting anything on your thread(s). You do, however, serve as a bad example. (And I'm not reading your posts; I'm reading the posts of people I respect, such as monoid. Your posts? What's the point?)