This is going to be the focus of a lot of posting and suggestions in the new thread coming up for 2007.
As a general comment that backs up what Spyder has said: as you improve and get trades working visa vis the FTT as a starting point, you will feel the necessity to have more tools to further improve your trading.
We do gauge what people are feeling and what they ask for follows a litany that is fairly consistent and great.
What comes of interacting is not going to be a large and pedantic list of mini rules. Instead the tools you have, will just enlarge your understanding of the moment by enabling you to have what what you need to look for. Like adding, a resource for you to see that is available always. Occassionally a tool will b added.
Soon you will see more happened than what you posted.
What is important for you now is to go with what you are seeing. You saw the price get close to the LTL and then.....
After a while you saw volume...... and it was when circumstances changed.
Now, you know, from the experience, to be aware of the interval as price and volume work together near limits of your annotations.
As you debrief in your log, say in another color, you can make additional observations. What they are, is how you now can do your work of trading; the improvement of better seeing the moment.
For doing the trading, the practical matter is this: You take an action and then you have the consequence of the action. You are performing and you are able to continue to take the steps necessary to continue to be in the market and to be in the right place (meaning on the right side). If you cannot see what is the right side at any moment (like you describe), then it is still okay and you will do alright.
On any dominant traverse there are several happenings along the way. The one we like is price continually moving towards the LTL; the others are unsettling, perhaps. All of them go through given tick values more than once. As you connect your observations on volume with these tick excursions, you will come to understand that they fit into the realm of the expected minor fluctuations of things momentarily. Notice that in 10 minutes you donot remember, consciously these little tick excursions.
We are growing into the comfort and understandings of what moves the market for making money and, also, on the other hand, what we go through as an ancillary momentary pertibation which is of lessor stature. Persuasive stuff and ancillary stuff.
NOW looms as important. What else could be important? During NOW, as time passes you will be handling a lot more in NOW.
But for (at) this time, consider looking just as carefully as you can at price and volume, particularly when you feel you need to "know" more. You will experience a repeating litany of sequences. Do be responsive using the routine. No matter how you respond, it will be an improving experience. The reason is that you are handling all the situations one after another and all in their good time.
Hanging with the situation is more important than getting every situation right.
Each time you go through the cycle of "operating", you gain a little more operational skill. You are able to both hear the market and hear what you youself are saying to yourself at the moment.
Here in this post that you composed, you cite two situations. One is the forward proress of trending and the other is from another time, later. The price and volume in each situation are not the same. There was a change from the first to the second.
I am not holding back on a comment to you to answer your question. It may seem that I am. I am asking you to discern that the two situations are different. You do make that distinction. This is the vector nature of what we do. The ability that we are building to see that from a relative viewpoint, there are differences in P and differences in V as each is examined as a before/after change.
It may come to you that P changed and concurretly V changed. In concert they worked to ceate an effect. Draw a conclusioon, then, about the effect. Use the conclusion to make a decision. Act on the decision.
Or you may bethinking first P, V is this an then you see P, V as that. This is not as infomative. And it is great to do as you did, BUT then you have to process the compound element(P, V) as each compares, second to first. Compound change happened. Acctually, you want to know what is about to happen and spyder has mentioned the phantom or virtual hypothesis. here you are near LTL so you have the hypothesis in the picture since it is forced into view.
You do not go through a process, subsequently, to see if you were right or wrong. We are in a different business than the right/wrong business. We are in the business of making money by being on the right side of the market as price changes.
Sometimes price lolly gags around and we have to be patient. Then at this time there is no money to be made so we can't. It will start making money soon enough and we continue our routine and do our part.
It is worth reading this 5 times to get to the place where you see it is important to keep doing the routine and handling whatever comes as a consequence and then continuing to do the routine.
