I've been studying this for a while now and I'm having a hard time finding the trend in the time frame I'm looking at.
For example if I like to trade a few times a week I'm going to be looking at maybe the one hour for hour time frame. I'm going to find my trend in the 4 hour and find my patterns and such in the 1 hour.
My problem is how far do I look back for data on the 4-hour to find the direction I should be trading... There are so many trends within trends and if I go too far back I might actually be looking at the daily trend and if I don't go far enough I might be looking at a small time frame trend I need to know which swings to focus on and find the pullback.
I think you hid a loaded question within your message post.
You already know what is a trend and you can very easily find them. The problem is that you're trying to base your trade signal strategy on trendlines and you have not been able to perform well with that.
Simply, your question is really about your patterns and how to use them with your trendlines.
The only way someone can help you with that is for you to start another thread, trade journal or just a journal where you've outlined whatever you refer to as
"my patterns" and whatever you perceive to be a
trendlines.
Seriously, your patterns could easily be throwing darts at a dart board because you've posted
no information about those "my patterns"
nor have you shown exactly how they're merged with your trendline analysis.
Post lots of annotated charts exactly as you see them on your monitor along with disclosing your trade performance so far with "your patterns" and "trendlines".
That's one of the key issues about asking for help online. You need to open yourself to scrutiny about your trade method and trade performance to make any real progress. Most traders will
not do that...they will hide critical elements about their trading and they hope others will wave a magical wand to fix things for them via making some kind of recommendation for them.
wrbtrader