I posted a 1 pager on SCT in the psychology forum under the "fear" thread.
In two other places on ET there are some threads running re: tape reading and volume and price (journal).
tape reading means= volume and price charting.
Volume and price is a misnomer for supply and demand without any strategy for making money.
Throughout history things have changed. Transportation makes a good example. In my life horses were cart pullers for bread, milk and ice delivery. Autos and trucks have come to the fore and will be around quite a while. Failure to put wings on railroad cars has led to airborne stuff and not using ships to cross oceans. 20 mil gets you a ride to the space station. My packer llamas are retired from exploration and trail designing and helis now drop in materials for remote campsites and everyone has locators now.
Chalk boards and ticker tape machines spawned tape reading. I watched while seated in cushy leather lounges giving orders to lackys. I inked IT veluum chart grids in the 50's for blueprinting and brown lining copies to give to others. This was the replacement for the original strategies for tape reading. the volume on the day Kennedy died nailed the coffin of that era definitely. QED.
Supply and demand came and went too. (Think 24/7 arriving, electronics. and global and markets sizing up through inventions like mutual funds, etc). Count the # of journal participants and the disconnect on strategy aspects. QED.
Details change too. Pounds became dollars related to pieces of 8 and prices became 8ths of dollars. Curbs became exchanges and buckets became phones and tickers. Now here we are.
Trivial maths were applied: averages, geometry, MLR, periodicity, indicators, transformations, fractals, bigger is better (random, neural), etc.
Prediction somehow made it's convenient appearance. Asset allocation "fixed" everything until we learned "bubbling".
The Brinson, Singer, Beebower, almost religious ratio, 91, 6, and 2, is,as we speak, still getting the coffin nailed.
Nobel awards made their appearances all the way up to profits>>>fear and losses>>>>hope.
As in transportation, time compression prevails and dooms both methods and strategies. There are always remnants of the past, however.
Now we make money just everywhere. Electronic support has crossed a line where people are no longer faster than their support sytems. See tape reading as a cool slow example.
So where do we sit as we face a global burgening of market growth that will shift our opportunity by orders of magnitude. ET is not a place when maximixing, minimizing and optimizing is part of the vocabulary. Nor is market regionalization arbitrage going on either. Risk management here is an on/off switch and not marginall concerned.
People are going to have to learn. They are going to have to deal with how "progress" is coming at such a rate that "getting more for less" will be the dominant theme for the generation ahead. "Getting more for less" is the theme of deflation. How to "get it", that is, to learn how to be on top of the future, requires learning.
Time compression, oversupply of everything (cheap labor, electronic advances, money supply expanding, financial markets appearing and growing) for the generation ahead, getting more for less all collectively lead to unprecedented wealth building for those who are equipped.
Lets say a beginner is a learner and he becomes a novice(meaning he is independantly operational on a basic level). How does he become effective and efficient after that? That is beyond ET at this time as we see.
A novice has to grasp what is going on to apply his beginner knowledge, skills and limited experience. This singular need to know what is going on is found in the "context" of where he is making money.
Money is made NOW. The future flows into the present (NOW) and becomes the past. We are in a boat that floats in a"context"
Intraday floats in short term (position) which floats in IT which floats in LT. SCT is intraday for indexes. SCT is short term for equities. Both these operating points allow money to be shoveled (the term for effectiveness at high efficiency) out of highly leveraged profits into larger markets. 100,000 share limited streams in short term trading can be paralleled to quite a breadth before additional markets must be used from those available (prepare to go 24/7 global). It is not possible to pool large sums of capital and make money as we all see by the "bigger is better" continuing demonstration of failure. SS makes 1% a year before inflation. Wider is better as the only thing that works. We need to plan for a wide context with our boats sitting in boats sitting in boats.
You are asking how the boats work. We fractal on up and apply SCT principles.
For ES it goes this way. Chart using EOD on the daily fractal. Quarterly roll over is handled because the commercials and producers set a boundary for us. The cash index offset tells you the quarterly direction that is potentially a difficulty. Now we have opposition between the charts and the offset. Charts prevail.
Draw the LT for the Q. Extrapolate from the past Q.
The IT fits in the LT. to leave the LT with an extension of any given IT takes "more". "More" is volume.
IT's traverse the LT. IT's are 5 to 8 days long and come in three sizes: up down and lateral. Laterals only occur on the R and S (LT channel usually). Intradays (H/L's) traverse the IT's.
When you trade overnight just to make money, do it in the IT direction even though it will go both ways it just nets out in the IT direction.
You need to regard two parts of trends: the ends and the runs.
You are chosing to trade in a place where there is slower action and not faster action. Usually people choose to trade to make more money.
All novices should go through the process of seeing what can be made where. A graph of this is nice to have on the wall. ET people are not into this thinking because it is related to maximizing and minimizing and optimizing. This thread of yours actually introduces these things. To prepare a graph, it is a good idea to make a spread sheet to find out what is what.
My detractors usually directly or by inference tell us their troubles. None of them so far can do the above mentioned graph nor spread sheet. This is the FAQ, quack, snake, slither, and crap they see instead. If they could garner a context of the market and it's possibilities, then they would have something to spend time working on to get rich instead.
Consider the following. Look at the market and look at your operating level. The market tells you what is there for the taking. Your operating level tells you how well you take that which is there to take. In music terms, we often decide where we can play and be on the beat or ahead of it. We choose not to play where the beat is too fast and the music looks too hard to read and translate into playing.
A solution not often used nor considered, is to sit in where the money can REALLY be made but to ONLY play when the sheet music is easy to read. It is a question of when to sideline and when to play. No band wants such musicians, but we could care less about "being in the band". "Being in the band" is the stuff you read here about how "hot$hit" a trader says he is. It is the BS about competition with others. Nobody is competing with anyone. It is not a possiblility in trading at any time whatsoever.
The deal is to make it when you are capable, sit out and learn when it is tough. This is the alternative to going to a slower fractal for the action there.
