Ironfist,
I'm also a trainee PA trader, so I'd like to share some realizations I had recently that might be helpful. It should be a useful exercise for me as well...
The basic idea is that price is always moving between support and resistance. You read major S/R levels off a long term (15/60min) chart, but the same principle applies even on very small timeframes.
Keeping track of micro S/R both lets you know what the market is currently doing, and tells you in advance where you will enter your trades. I think the staple advice to watch for HH/HL or LH/LL is a bit misleading: what you actually want to see is support becoming resistance (for shorts), or resistance becoming support (for longs).
I've drawn some additional lines on your YM chart from earlier. The chart is a bit unclear - I would be using OHLC or HL bars and probably a faster chart - but you get the general idea. Some of these (I can guess at least 7900, 7950, and 7990) should be on your trading chart already based on your review of the longer-term charts. The rest should be added as they become visible, like signposts.
An uptrend occurs when price breaks resistance, and then turns that resistance into support. Reverse for a downtrend. When one of these things isn't happening it's a warning that the trend might be changing. Concerning your first trade, at around 11:12 price broke that line at ~7990, technically making a "higher high" but we didn't see it turning to support. It looks to me like this was a major pivot so some kind of retrace or consolidation is to be expected. Afterwards the line reverted to being resistance and price headed back to the bottom of the range. If you really wanted to go long here as a range play, or because you thought the uptrend was still good, the thing to do would be to wait until we get to that bottom line, see if price just blasts through or if it seems to stall, then place a limit order a tick or two above the line and let the market fill you. Sometimes you won't get filled, that's just life. If you wait until you see the fat green bar, 90% of the time you'll be far too late. Your risk on this trade would be tiny, with your stop placed a couple ticks below the previous low.
For your exit, you had several options. Price gave you at least a couple bars' warning that the 7990 line was holding as R again, so you could take a scalp exit there for 20-30 points. Or you could hold for a higher target and accept that your small stop might be hit, if the resistance level didn't break. If you did hold (and didn't get taken out in the 3rd test of support) then the warning to exit would be when price tried yet again to break 7990, made another "higher high," yet again failed to make it support, and yet again found resistance there after the drop. No guarantees, but the long side is looking pretty sickly at this point.
The above analysis would also keep you out of the second trade. Even though there was a "higher high" this is misleading, because what you really need to see is resistance becoming support. When a major pivot starts as resistance, is broken, but fails to become support and instead becomes resistance again, that's a bearish sign. The higher low is not actually a significant signal: because price is in a chop zone, all we're really concerned about is whether the top and bottom of the zone are holding or 'flipping.'
Hopefully you'll find this useful...
