It depends. I'm going to use a one-minute chart if the instruments I'm relying on to trade US Indices are index derivatives via NADEX knock-outs because just a
small move can amount to as much $50 to $100 dollars, and while I
hate finding myself in the midst of a drawdown, I
especially dislike it when it puts me that much in the red. And the only way for me to maximize the odds of avoiding such situations is to take advantage of the precision offered by one minute charts. (I also use them when trading the back end of NADEX two-hour Forex derivative binary options.)
A lot of people say that when you trade in this environment, all you are doing is trading noise, but I don't see it that way. This may be in part because I don't see a trend as a line so much as I see them as channels—breadths of values constituting belts that choose to move with directional tendency. Consequently, it's not enough for me to simply enter a position in the direction of the trend. I find that it's
just as important for me to know
where within these swaths of area comprising each spectrum of values I should pull the trigger. For example, this one-minute chart I've pasted below doesn't look like noise to me at all...
View attachment 325833
I would also use a one-minute chart for trading 15-minute binary options via Deriv.com, but I wouldn't be surprise if none of the traders on ET who advised you happen to even trade binary options, or perhaps some even consider every single binary option outfit on the planet to be a bucket shop.
When trading such vehicles, I want an 85% to 100% daily success rate, as I did when I was guerrilla trading for 3 to 10 pip's worth of profit at a time (which I no longer do), and to attain this goal (which it seems to me many ET contributors consider to be impossible, if not utter nonsense to even talk about) I find it necessary to trade using one-minute charts.
Another factor is that I believe there are specific moving averages that are superior to all others for shadowing the trend in each time frame, a contention on which possibly everyone in the world disagrees with me; and that not only is it ideal to trade with the right ones, but to also do so with an awareness of what their
temporal values are, a characteristic of moving averages that, as far as I know, is attributed to them by no other sane human being anywhere (assuming I'm not out of my mind).
One last precise measurement that only one-minute charts can offer me at the most minute level has to do with rates of change. According to Investopedia, ROC
"can be used to spot divergences, overbought and oversold conditions, and centerline crossovers." However, I have no interest in using ROC in any of these ways at all. It seems to me that the best way that
I might make use of this indicator is to measure the
strength of a given trend, seeing as how I imagine that I have somehow identified which moving averages best convey the direction in which price is ultimately headed within each of the various time frames.
You can see that I've plotted these threshold levels for each of the two ROC histograms included in the lower panel above.
However, when I'm trying to generate returns of at least 10 to 30 pips at a time, I too tend to use five-minute charts and above. When this is my goal, one-minute charts are simply unable to capture enough of the entire landscape to be all that helpful.
