Excellent... this is much more detailed so thank-you. I'm actually doing my own thing now, and I am at the point of thinking this can't be this easy, and just have to get past the "win some, lose some" problem, but at long as the losses are small and wins are bigger, then it should be full steam ahead.
I completely agree with your list of suggested members. The trouble is that I cannot for the life of me understand Handle's charts. I try and try, and I can see what he is trying to do, but I simply cannot figure out where suggested entries, exits and stops are. What I do love about his approach though is that its simple and focused on keeping risk low. I can see for my personality that controlling risk is of utmost importance until I feel a bit more comfortable, so I'm all about looking for low risk entries with tight stops and just let the chips fall where they may.
What I have started to do, instead of giving out exact entries, stops and targets is try to force the reader to do back testing. By doing so, reader starts to look for reasons of Price chart reading, times of when you should not put on trades is as important to memorize as when to put on a trade. We would love to take completed target trades, but the market is pretty good most of the time to show price stalling so unless you plainly just get out, putting a trailing stop is pointless cause I am not going for long profits. The biggest reason I don't give out exact areas to get out is people who can't learn to help themselves design methods will never know when to adjust the system, it is never one system for every volatility. People buy systems all the time but unless you can identify how to adjust them, they will still continually lose even with the best systems.
So KP, start going back one day at a time, I normally do breakouts of 2 ticks and hitting bid/ask as not wanting to project my trades sitting on the Dome, so targets if you trading retail, smaller size, always around $100, risk is always small tad beyond $100, I have mentioned this before. When price gets volatile, I don't trade. Most of my signals came elsewhere, I have found by great expense of redesigning "the wheel" seldom help, I just want to tail coat the general greatest volume, make a little and quickly get out so I don't take losses. Many charts are color coded for a reason as they mean they of one type of signal, Black has to do with Volume divergence, I expect volume to reduce when going to extremes but I require certain amount of points in a "swing" (I know most don't take the time to look at last 20 days checking "swing" distance, you want an idea of how far market will go on "mean" when it is most likely to reverse. Red means price patterns like Head & Shoulders and Triple tops/bottoms, both signals have tested out for me and have traded a number of years. There are breakout trades like retracement trades back to 18ma and volume signals. Oh, and price patterns work best near extremes of a 'swing", so I am trying to be patient line up "my ducks in a row" to give trade best chance of success. You should notice I put a black hash at top of a "swing" and bottom of a "Swing" and then thin black line to identify the swing. Most that have PMed me understand or ask my questions on how to read my charts, not hard since I don't do trendlines too much on method am doing now, trendlines are much more difficult to trade one minute bars. Cyan is retracement to 18ma, I generally only take first trade only unless I only made a tick profit. The Purple trades are entering on next whole point away and has to end in ".00" in ES and every 2 points that are even "2.00" , "4.00" not hard. Risk, if bars are too big, I will wait for breakout and then wait for retracement to enter to get risk down. I very seldom take trades when bars are over $150 cause I do want my stops to be minimum beyond the pattern and if bar is too small is why I keep stops at little more than $100. I been hammering for long period of time about "Time", I have found winning trades have a common factor of being so many ticks ahead by so much time, and it will vary between 3 minutes and 3 minutes & 20 seconds, so each weekend they are tested to see how long it takes to get to so many ticks, so there is homework every weekend to stay as sharp as I can.
Now if you don't know how to read charts, ask, but be sure to have tried doing it yourself first, most people can not be taught how to trade, but they can be shown tools of how to learn and threw much practice can learn, but you really have to work hard at it, trying to copy exactly what I do will never work cause you are not me and by studying hours each day, you start memorizing what to but more importantly what not to do.
If you are lost as to what I have on a chart, you can PM me, I don't follow any threads, so quoting me only way I know to check out threads. But I do expect people to do much of their own work, only way to learn how to "fish".
You don't want to buy into coming resistance nor sell into coming support. Always look first to how not to take a trade before looking where to take a trade, I want to take the least trades to make 4-6 ES points.
Stats comes before trading, if your stats are bad, so will your trading be bad.
Starbucks time.
