The main problem is being very patient, balancing your own contra-bias with the street bias, and being open minded enough to allow the charts to prove you wrong when it turns out you are.
This is something that newbies should be ingraining in their head, i know even as a veteran trader, i still have problems holding through the waves, and making sure the chart proves me right/wrong. I got my start with a firm where we were hyper focused on moving massived positions 35-100k, only for a few ticks, so i got really good at predicting minute to minute price action, and taking my credits for sitting on the bid/offer plus a few cents, but that game died with high frequency trading stealing the spreads, still to this day i find myself eyeing in on stocks so closely that i sell the temporary top only to see it explode higher the rest of the day. generally my predictions are pretty accurate but i struggle with holding past a couple of waves, and inevitable afternoon consolidation, Tooo focused on the minute to minute action as opposed to looking at the bigger picture and trying to see how the daily candle is going to work out.
btw, for anyone who is actually trying to learn to trade base on this thread, today was a fantastic day in basic technical analysis. First off it was a friday in a weak market so you should have been weary it could likely turn into a short squeeze, second we triple bottomed, third you had overambitious shorts on the jobs number..... so many factors that just made this a textbook long today, and it was one of those days where the price action did exactly what i thought it was going to do.(unfortunately im a pussy and didnt hold for the whole day)
1906 was the line in the sand, if it failed after the first substantial pullback market was done, but instead it tested the high, and started grinding higher, and we blew through it, at that point it should have been party hats and cervezas, anyone still short over 1906 was a moron.
The only thing as predictable as this rally today was the fact that i was going to sell it too soon.
