two days of narrow ranges...... lost patience...did not keep losses low...... bad personal management
while brooks does talk basically about set ups and some patterns.......he also talks about watching the bars......he does not explain more.......... it also means watching the swings makes sense......since they are a bar in some other TF. maybe what he means is compare the size of up bars to down bars......size of up swings to down swings. also how deep or shallow are the retracements. deep retracements may mean the counter trend traders are getting more aggressive brooks is very persistent that set ups is only for controlling risk...... and yet that is what everyone focusses on:set ups. if you do not understand this then any conflicting signals and set ups will force you wrongly out of your correct position early.
this is more important than S/R pivots ema.....because it is intra bar momentum that rules short term price movements. last 4-5 dys i have NOT been watching this intra day momentum and that is the MOST CRITICAL TO KNOWING MARKET DIRECTION. Brooks does not even have a section on this because it is so difficult to explain
i have wasted 30 years of my life looking for patterns, set ups........watching the bars form gives a HUGE idea on how strong the bull or bear is. that gives a far better idea of long or short than any DB,DT S/R trendlines pivots LL LH HL HH and all that jazz...... what i have been concentrating on for decades. like they say doing the same things and expecting different results is futility, frustration or insanity I remember the David Fuller saying that a trend is something that is consistent. i have not heard this description of a trend from any one else. Surprisingly not even Brooks
I think you are trying too much at the same time. Find just one edge and do it over and over again. I define an edge as a profitable setup that has a higher than 50% win rate. If you keep doing it, and better understand what you are looking for then your win rate will go up. Also, why not break up your day. Just for example spend no more than 3 hours trading, and then 3 hours making guaranteed money doing something part time. All trades recently were ES futures though I have also traded CL. I felt that this week I did not have a losing day so I wanted to check and I was right. This is my 1 week break down. Yes, you are right I probably doing 1 or 2 max trades per day. If I do 10 trades in a day then I probably lost money that day and was over trading.