What is an expert trader going to do with these first four bars?
See the comments.
You are a beginner and your objective is to get into the market because that ius a requirement to make money.
You did get in today and you entered based on your logging notes after you annotated.
One priority was needed to do the entry: the volume and price had to be corrolated and this means on the same side of the fence. They had to be in agreeement.
How do you get that to happen? This is difficult. A person has to log what is going on according to the PV relationship instead of anything else. The biggest "anything else" is doing what you did in science labs all your life. you recorded data to be able to make a graph of the variables in the experiment.
trading is much easier. The graph is given to you right off and you are assembling the ARGUMENTS TO DO YOUR ANALYSIS AND DRAW THE CONCLUSIONS OF THE EXPERIMENT.
Experiments end with conclusions in the Scientific Method. In trading, however, a person uses conclusions to take ACTIONS to achieve the GOAL of trading which is to make money.
Mandel says, remarkably, that you do not know UP from DOWN. Thank God. He thinks SCT deals with up and down and he thinks making money deals with UP and DOWN.
The question is, however, is price moving away from a RTL and how do you know if it is? Getting a platform to use color to tell you this is a challenge since salesmen sell platforms and programmer create them so salesmen can sell them.
We all have to superseed the present level of that dilemma others have with critical thinking on our part. You are waking up quite rapidly. Extremely rapidly and you do prioritize your requirements for critical thinking. This makes you different than mandel since he is the victim of sales pitches from platform sales people. Too bad for him.
Advanced Experts and experts are entering on non PV data because the PV data said, immediately go to your tape set of non PV data subset collecting places on your display.
advanced Intermediates and Intermediates were using PV and non PV indicators that are leading indicators of ES price and volume.
Beginner internal traders are loking at traverses and the internals of traverses.
Advance beginners are entering easily because they trade traverses and the market, after synch has a traverse (dom or non dom ) sitting there to trade.
You as a beginner, every day see bars of volume that are filling opening orders of the CW world. Every day. You see the volume starting at over twice Extreme and and then within 15 minutes it has dropped all the way down to just under twice the Extreme.
I will post a little block of knowlege color chart of how these guys all stack up and how the learning curve is working for them.
As you begin to note symbolically in V and P what you need to do analysis of the PV relationship, you will also build a vocabulary of the Remarks part of analysis.
I am giving you some observations (monitoring info) that will displace what is now your first recourse (what your mind seemed to percieve) as demonstrated and reported today.
Mandel want me to give you the "what to do now" type answers. What he also wants is to learn how to use what you will be using to change the way he is trading now (See his P and L in the P/L thread everyday).
For now consider black raging volume, All bars trending with HH and HL's, BO's on each bar at the tops and every bar expanding with Volatility Expansion and the tape showing VE as something a beginner can count upon.
If you see it log it. If you logged it, do the MODE and Remarks and put ENT in the D column and fill in the A and the # of contracts. Go back to day 1 and start by pulling the cover from left to right.
Now lets do the Einstein part of trading.
You are freaked out when you enter the market. You leave quite rapidly as we see by between the rows exits. You do not stay in long enough for price to go either against you or for you. You did keep up the pain and suffering for many bars though. Then you concluded that you did not "know that you know".
Make a ratio of the average of the absolute value of your trades and compare it to any channel trip from point 1 to the FTT (the long diagonal of the channel). This is the Einstein part of becoming an SCT beginner. You dump the entry/exit mind set and go to a Hold/Reversal mind set.
Today started with some common sense things that a person can count on.
....black raging volume, All bars trending with HH and HL's, BO's on each bar at the tops and every bar expanding with Volatility Expansion and the tape showing VE .......
I think these little items are all on the same side of the fence.
As a beginner, this is what makes Channel trading from point 1 possible. You, as a beginner, get in the market and you get in on the right side of the market.
As you notice we get the channel set up within 30 to 40 minutes of open. All the time you are annotating and logging and the channel manifests.
NB: What about the raging volume B2B? And no PACE change to get the B2B. I suggest you annotate it, log it and as usual hold through it long as you make money. Where did it come from? the market was doing a raging business and business picked up after the open.
If you can get in the market, then we have to deal with staying in until we get an FTT. you can learn that doing the drills over the weekend.
I want to post a few more helpful things in the meantime.