Sorry I missed your comments. You will find that a chart settles down if you have it running day after day. I superimpose on the INDU (2 min) the 1 unit YM04H ( a MA). I save 1/3 of each day using a screengrabber. nitro's numbers are good as I see it. With regard to seeing the turns, I find a 10 point of five point scale is best. I try to always use the least sensitive (Larger scale intervals) possible to stay away from being hyper. The data gathering is a glance for me. I largelt creme ticks by using the DOM BBid/Bask level with galnces at the third level cummulative. I posted some consecutive days beginner trading for the mid Jan period. The nets were 100, 200 and hogh 300's per/contract per day. Think of a 10% net of margin per day per contract as a beginner level. If you were to compare those with the charting,you would see some congruence with the moves and, before that the xovers. Below are some basic ways to gather data and to do analysis. You will form up some belief pictures in a few days that will get your analysis to a glance level of concentration leading to decisions that are actionable. The most common action is hold. So, in balance, you will use this stuff to do entries and exits, but it is most valuable during hold period to corroborate other monitoring stuff. You will notice extreme end of ranges at first. Later the "inbetween stuff" comes to the fore. Here are the formations that will be most useful. Smart money holding back as a spike begins to arrive. This is the most terrific single signal for a timely reversal. First it signals reversal over just an exit and it occurs before the bottom of the spike. What more could one ask for. I know I am chattig about the end of a prior trade, BUT I want to start with easy recognizable stuff first. nononsense is correct in that any significant money making thing does deserve to be detailed out. He is also correct the receiver of the principle and the detais have to have thought on the part of the receiver. This stuff is a priori for most people that are in balance. Those whose EQ is not up to par have two insurmountable problems and so what I say doesn't matter to them anyway. Nononsense continues to encounter this; his comments in ET are an example of how such an affected person will struggle in the trap he has put himself in. Smart money leads the YM04H because it is a liquid and unlimited market that related to a primary financial index. At the end of a trend prior to it's reasonable end, smart money telegraphs its view. The minority control. Smart money is a minority. What you see is a refusal to proceed by smart money (holding YM)in the trend of the cash market before the cash market trend ends. It appears foroasa monitorig person as a crossover of the YM across the INDU. This is on the what then becomes the last bar of the INDU trend. the INDU bar is a spike. A spike is a bar where to open is away from the extreme and the close is at least a midway return from the extreme. The next bar open and follow on continues away from the extreme. The smart money precedes the cash away from the extreme. This was a discussion invloving 2 to four minutes of real time. when you see the relative motion of the YM slow and INDU continue to the extreme, indu passes YM during this time so the leading player switches out. If you are tading ES you reverse then or as you see the ES stop tradding off the B/A value that is the most extreme at that time. By the time the ES spikes (my definition is three ticks off the past extreme) you are in the trade in the other direction. You have only one job at that point to hold or wash if necessary (For SCT traders you could see an APA on the fast fractal as a low probability occurance.) I will not do a look back annotation here; that is like Monday night Qbacking a Sunday game. Next formations. Stalls and Hitches. Stalls are ends of trends where you can exit and sit sidelined during risk periods where direction is not defined. what you see are conscutive bar crossovers of the INDU by the YM. This is because smart money is sitting on a narorow price range and the INDU is flaming up and down around those values in a hyper manner. I could have said the picture by commenting in the opposite way vis avis INDU and then YM. We need to stay on YM as smart money which is leading the cash which in turn, by the signals we take leads ES. Stalls last quite a while and the cash is relatively volatile. here in mentoring the person working tells me it is "mud". We sit out mud. Hitches are intermediately occuring formations during longer trends. They are small short lived low volatility stalls where the trend resumes. At first no one can differentiate a stall from a hitch. So do not exit at first until a stall is evident. No ruch no change in value of exit . A 2 pair oscillation in ES is a likely thing during this early time. You either get a trend resumption on ES volume picking up or you exit as the time duration of a hitch is exceeded and you then know a stall is evident. There is a lot of "cycling" on the chart. This is the "congestion of CCC on ES. Cycling appears as high mud and low mud alternating with nice fast paced short term trends in between. Playing these gets you in excess of a point a play on the ES using the chart. There are also shorter swing trading opportunities. They are found as cycling on low volume periods or ,occassionally high volume cycling during R of S situations. R and S stand for resistance and Support, respectively. Think of these two as high hitches and low hitches with nice fast paced short term trends connecting them. Mud and hitch swing cycles are mutually exclusive as determined by volume charcteristics. see above, etc. The common ingrediate we need to see is the advent of trends at the end of mud or hitches. This is simply the chat on stretch and squeese. when either occurs you have the signal for entry and taking the ride. Smart money goes first. THAT IS THE KEY RULE. you never see me type in caps. So give this great value. If cash goes first,then what yopuare seeing is smart money NOT going and the deal at hand is going to be a failure to BO. BO means break out. What I am doing here is making you into smart money. Obviously what would follow is trading ahead of smart money. That is SCT and that is not on the table. Read scientist to see the transition to smart money. Okay, you have to get a couple of things straight from now on. we need to follow four steps todo stuff always: gather data, analyze, decide, and act. the first two are IQ and the second two are EQ. IQ is intelligence quotient. EQ is Emotional quotient. IQ is easy and doesn't count for much. It's just the facts m'am. EQ is all your emotions (always present) and their collective and individual balance. The opposite of balance is inflamation. If some important of your emotions are inflamed, then you don't get to play here. If they are inflamed along with others, further, you cannot use your life processes to learn nor remember what you learned. Look at this post. Inflamed emotions regarding some things allow you to think that those things get crossed out. You sift for the stuff your EQ allows to to take in. See if you can remember anything I say. I remember what I say. I do what I am saying as well. I see beginners net 10 to 30% of margin percontract in a given day. The potential of the market varies in what it offers. If you see this as ridiculous, then what is going on is that you have damage in your EQ. It is not a case of disagreeing. Disagreeing is fine. Not doing anything like what I do is fine. What is not fine is allowing your system to not function because of built up difficulties in your biochemistry and then continuing to support this condition. It is like you have an emotional cold that won't go away. Your emotions are producing stuff that messes up the works. What I typed above are helpful pictures of a lot of stuff. to the extent that it is difficult to consider this stuff, think about whether ior not it is difficult to consider anything. acrary posted a mechanical 3:1 thread recently. Another thread talked about predicting. Many many people did not think it is possible to not predict. acrary's thread is based upon using lagging indicators to enter, then scale in a market. There is no prediction in that. It is simply enter late in an extablished trend and using lagging indicators to exit as well. The forte is the 3:1 which substitutes for all other alternatives. how do these two contrasting threads affect you. What is your EQ and how does it bias you or how does it block you? as time passes your life history gives you an EQ which in life prevails for how you get along in life much more than your IQ. don't crap up your EQ obsessively, it will then not allow learning all of which is triggered by an emotional trigger to carry the learning stuff to the memory. I am being a little heavy handed here. There is a lot not going on in ET anymore. The poor EQ situation is causal here.