House of If You Can Draw A Straight Line

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:D. I work on an oil rig, I do a 3 week stretch offshore where the internet combined with shift rota make watching let alone trading a near impossibility, however, once my stint comes to an end I have 3 weeks to myself which allows me to watch/study/trade the markets throughout the day largely uninterrupted and without distraction.

My buddy's buddy does that rig thing. Gets to travel across the world for work. Mud business.
 
I couldn't speak for the stocks, but NQ being a mean reverting instrument, you don't usually get to hold that long, before it turns on you, so yeah, I'm always flat before the end of the day. The 5 minute chart is fine, but now you're competing against people, such as Al Brooks, and NoDoji...:D

The more the merrier. ;) In stocks, the main problem I had was that if I'm starting with a clean slate at 9:30 Eastern, the longer the timeframe the more time it took before I saw something interesting. For example with 39-minute bars you get wider, slower trends, which I like, but then forget about being flat at 16:00 if you want to catch anything decent, and of course one out of three nights you'll get a 2% gap, which I hate (regardless if it helps or hurts - I hate the added uncertainty). Even 15-minute bars often take the whole morning to speak to me, which is a total waste of potential.

I'm still shopping around, but it looks like I'll settle on 5-minute bars this year. Like DP says, bar size is just a manner of representing continuous data anyway, but I think it'll be my sweet spot between "blink and you'll miss it" and "too slow for going flat every night".

(Too bad my platforms don't have tick-based charts though; those look like they may be useful for condensing overnight sessions in Forex and futures. Oh well, still just a gimmick in the end.)

Oh, that being said, my experience was limited to stocks, where pre-market is anemic at best, and some Forex, which isn't fun if you're asleep during the London morning. Now this NQ futures is new to me but seems to have a decent overnight session to minimize 9:30 surprises, yet unlike Forex, seems to have the bulk of its useful moves still bundled between 8:00 and 16:00 which is when I'm around. Might just be what I've been looking for.
 
Today's 15 minute chart for NQ. I keep my channels, and diagonal lines to a minimum. Almost made it to my profit target of 4347.

Schaefer

PS: DB, please let me know, if I'm cluttering your thread.

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