Quote from 1a2b3cppp:
Aww snaps, it totally just blew through that downward trendline that everyone was talking about.
Symmetrical triangle breakout. That's what you're positioning for in a triangle when the range narrows significantly. If you were short the upper trend line, your stop loss wold be a break of that trend line and you'd reverse to a long on the breakout. If price continued down to the lower trend line, you be prepared to take profits on your short if that line held, and to let the winner run if it broke out downside.
Quote from 1a2b3cppp:
In order to "let the market carry you wherever it goes" you have to be able to predict direction, otherwise you're being "carried" into losses.
I'm already a successful trader. However, if I could predict direction, I would be a much, much more successful trader. Much more successful. Instead of scaling in, averaging down, and hedging, I could just go all in in the direction that the market was going to go. Hence my interest in this thread.
You have to be able to predict (that's what trading is, your prediction that price will go there), but you don't have to be able to predict successfully. If we could always predict successfully, we'd all be much, much more successful traders. Fortunately, it's not necessary.
Trade what you see and let the market carry you. If your prediction fails, your stop loss limits your loss; if your prediction is correct, you achieve your target profit or better. If you've done the work necessary to define a highly survivable R:R, then the profits will appear regularly.
Whether trend lines and corresponding channel lines are honored or break is irrelevant. Be prepared to act on either scenario, using a stop loss to take you out of failures.
When trading this way, you don't need to average down or hedge.
This thread demonstrates several frameworks for designing a solid trading plan. You have to do the work to adapt the framework to your instrument, your preferred time frame, and your personality at this point in time.
Nobody who's posted here or anywhere else can successfully predict what the market's going to do at every S/R level. What the profitable traders here can do is trade based on probabilities with reasonable profit targets and protective stops to provide an additional money management edge.
Metal caught my attention because I'd only recently begun to seriously pay attention to TLs and channels and I saw his framework and went running with it. I now use this concept so much that by the end of the day my primary chart looks like the web of a spider on caffeine.
It's transformed my trading and taken me to a whole new level. But I had to do the work. I didn't challenge metal and say "What about THAT trend line? It failed! So there!" I didn't ask him to call every trade in real time and prove it.
I dug into my charts and adapted the framework to my existing strategies, resulting in methods of extracting more money from the market each day.