Quote from amg:
Today, vol on the ES up close bars gave the trend away, no doubt. Even so, I found it difficult to focus on staying with it because the stairsteps (great description for today) were, on the whole, small. Also, for me anyway, I never "felt" a sense of strong momentum, it was almost creeping up. That pace is also what stopped me from shorting, lol. This is looking at 3m and 15m charts.
Part of my bias, in looking back, was the 45m chart showed diminishing volume on this recent rise, despite buyers seeming to be in control of the 3m, and to a somewhat lesser extent, the 15m. Mind you, 45m may be too large a time screen and perhaps I shouldn't go beyond a 15m chart for day-trades. Nevertheless, as a result, I brought into my mind an overly cautious outlook, which clouded my interpretation the actual price action in the intraday timeframe I was trying to trade.
I noticed you brought in a Daily marker to your chart. I'll often put in my own markers (such as gaps) off a higher time frame. I suppose there are *some* things from the bigger picture that add value, so perhaps it's somewhat subjective. I'm certainly open to ideas!
As time goes by and you get used to this, you'll find yourself sloughing off what's extraneous and getting closer and closer to what matters. Unfortunately, you're going to have to decide for yourself what's extraneous to you.
Focusing on price and volume doesn't mean analyzing every single bar pair. Nor does it mean obsessing over the volume trend. A lot of people, for example, think that volume has to be consistently rising in an uptrend, but as I pointed out in Demand/Supply, that's not the case. As long as price is rising, the demand/supply equation is working in your favor, regardless of what the volume is doing. It's only when you begin to see shorter bars and longer tails and little TL breaks that you need to become concerned. And if volume doesn't come in accompanied by a higher price, then you may have a problem. If volume does come in and price just sits there, then you're looking at distribution, and you may want to say bye.
Therefore, volume was, in a sense, today irrelevant. What mattered was where we began, at the PDH. Then that we stayed there. Then the volume rolled in, resulting in dojis and a big honking shooting star (the blended bar), all signs of trouble.
But then volume came back even stronger, resulting in a hammer. We tapped our feet for a while, creating another hammer in the meantime, then, 40m later, up pops a marubozu. And that, given where we were, is the charting equivalent of a cannon. When price comes back on light volume, stays in the upper half of the marubozu, and no selling pressure is to be found anywhere, there should be no equivocating about what to do. Anything else is really just distraction.
Perhaps the best advice I can give to you is that, when you're doing your daily trade analysis, think about what helped you make the right decisions and what was of little or no help at all. If instead you made bad decisions, what were the enablers? And if they're enablers, why do you have them?
As for the "daily marker", I only mention it if it looks like it will be important. I've posted daily charts of the NQ showing the demand/supply lines and the "channel" they form. Unless you're approaching one end or the other, they're not particularly relevant except to note price's position in them. As for the gap, I actually didn't pay any attention to it until I saw price stall, and I looked back before the previous day to see if there was some important congestion zone somewhere. The gap seemed a likely suspect, though it really didn't matter what it was since the price never closed below the LSL.
As for an elaborate chart display, I've never had the need to actually see a variety of bar intervals. Therefore, I have 1m, 5m, and daily (which I consult only pre-market). If I need to see today in a context, I'll zoom out, but I don't need to see individual bars, just S/R and the "wave".