By "correct", I mean whatever will put you on the correct side of the trade. Since I don't know what the market will do, I don't worry about forming an opinion.
I believe that having a gameplan ahead of time can be beneficial as you see how the day unfolds. As we all know it is a game of probabilities, you go long because price is more likely to go higher and go short because price is more likely to go lower. A game plan will introduce higher timeframe, and higher timeframe players into your intra-day trading. If your higher timeframe analysis (daily, weekly, etc.) suggest one direction over the other you would look closely and place targets and stops at the right places. If your daily chart suggests a big down day, you will not go for 2-3 pts, you will hold for longer as a downtrend develops. The fact that the "gameplan" did not pan out does not mean anything, so some of the "setups" you have on the 3 min chart. TM Trader
m618, I think it's good to see the bigger picture, but you already know my chart setup and how I trade...going for quick hits. The highest time-frame I watch is the 30 min. chart. On occasion, I will switch it to the 60 min. to get the big picture. -FastTrader
Obviously, the ES got pretty oversold going into the end of the 3rd quarter, with fund selling rather than any "mark-up" going into the last day of Sept. If you got caught-up trying to PLAY PICK THE TOP, you would have never gotten Long after the oversold condition. That's ok, as long as you then changed your opinion of the market once the ES blew thru the 61.8% retracement ( from 1039.00 to 987.75 )around the 1020.00 level. True, today the market took out Monday's low at 1026.25 before coming back into the range. This is key. Since the market could not sustain trading BELOW 1026.25, it was telling all of us that it wanted to go higher. The late afternoon retest of the morning lows around 1:45PM EST proved to be successful and a move back above several moving averages and the 1031.50 level told you that you could not play the short-side for the rest of the session. Obviously, all of this is very DYNAMIC and difficult to try and "call" on a thread like this . . . As Victor Sperandeo ( my first boss ) once said: "Observe What Is Happening, And Assume That It Will Continue"
Why do you use a 720 minute chart? I have never seen that before? How long do you hold your trades? based on these charts you would look for swing trade entries. DTP
That's a 720 minute, all sessions chart. Two bars = 1 day. I look at swing points from Weekly charts all the way down to the 2 minute levels. From these swing points, I draw the fib levels. I look for confluence of fib levels across time frames to find potential reversal points, on a day trading basis. -- M
The confluence of what's going on is a nice back drop for making money. I simply plot the long term, intermediate term, and superimpose my intraday trading on that. Recently the long term went through a failure to BO down and the IT leg 3 (short) came to an end to begin the fourh leg of this quarter. Intraday trading in this context is very rewarding. I also go further in focusing on the sentiment of the day. It may vary during the day among three possibilites. Since I am in the market extracting money through the whole day, I like doing a preopen warmup to start my day. It was neat to see some people say they did not want anything to intefere with their trading by knowing anything outside of the moment. Thanks for starting the thread.
Thanks for your post Grob. I'm glad to see the thread is generating some positive and constructive postings. -- M
I don't know if I'd be drawing trendlines with the after hours "all sessions" on. Might work better with tick charts, though Q-charts doesn't have them. Its hard to get a 2 day chart anywhere. Even if you put in 720 minutes on q-charts (without all sessions) it won't give you a two day - it stops at one. Oh well.