Quote from Threei:
I agree. And the next natural step for such trader would be, IMO, to make his life easier by laying out those patterns he spotted and learned to exploit, then forming setups to trade on and making his trading simple "see recognizable setup - take the trade - set your stop - take profit or stop, whichever signalled first".
See, it's nice to trade solely on what you listed... for a year, or two, or three. Then you find out (well, at least I did) that you simply risk to get burnt out by everyday's repeating of entire process. Big part of this process can be made automatic, pre-programmed, there is no need to do it over and over. You can formalize it, leaving way smaller part to your discretion (and yes, I am strong believer in discretionary trading despite having a system, those two do not necessary contradict each other). You systematize things that are the same and make them your system. Then you apply some amount of discretion to cherry-pick those of setups where your intuition is screaming. Bottom line is, if you trade ALL of the signals your system gives you, you still have positive expectancy. If your intuition is good, it allows you to increase your profits. That's where art and science meet, and trading, IMO, is a mix of both. Science part is easy and can be taught. Art part is more of grey area, it hardly can be taught directly but the student can be shown where and how to move. Then it's up to him to make it or not. It's the same as with psychology of trading - correct mindset can be described, shown, even tricks helping to get there can be explained - but eventually it comes to whether one makes all necessary steps or not.