I have an unintentional mentor who's been teaching me about trend trading for some time now. As a mainly countertrend trader, I've yet to start trading this way, but it's becoming seriously enticing to me.
What I've learned is you can't predict a trend day in advance. What you can do is look for a breakout trigger and trade that signal with a survivable stop in place.
If the breakout is true, the greatest challenge is to ride the trend through to the end.
I very recently began studying ES. Using my mentor's strategy, I got a long signal Thursday @ 954.50. I didn't put on the trade because I'm very new to trend trading and to ES and I still have biases that affect my trading. The reason I didn't take the trade was because @ 954.50 price was too close to major resistance for me to believe it could rally much and I figured I'd end up tossing 3 pts (my stop) down the drain on a pullback, and as a result of my market bias I missed a 20 pt move from my entry price that day!
At the time I got the signal to go long I had no idea if a trend day was about to begin. My job as a trader was to put on the trade, put in my stop, move my stop to break even when the trade became profitable and stay in the trade until price moved to a level that indicated a failed breakout.
The bigger question is: If I;d put on the trade, how long would I have stayed with the trend? There was never a hint of a reversal until the very end of the day, but with my counter trend trading bias, could I have stayed in to the end of the trend?