This was posted by vulture in another thread. It was so good, I wanted it here, also. Thank you, oh carrion feeder!!!
"I also trade two separate time frames, although I feel that this is a difficult endeavour...For the most part, I try to separate the days in which I am going to enter a different mindset...If I am planning on entering a swing trade for a minimum profit target of 7-10 handles, I really need to be careful with the manner in which I start scalping...From my experience, swing trading and scalping require two entirely opposite mindsets and if you confuse the two it wreaks havoc on even the most well developed trading plans...
I will try to explain in more detail...To scalp, you basically have to partial out of trades extremely quickly and your reflexes have to be sharp...You do not have the luxury of time because a scalp is basically just trying to extract the minimal amount of profit with the minimal amount of risk exposure...To swing trade, you have to have patience, plain and simple...And not only that you have to increase your pain threshold since your profit/risk objectives are magnified...So, in essence, you are expanding your risk tolerance to allow yourself some wiggle room and to reduce or dampen the effect that the market noise will have on this aspect of the plan...The real problem occurs when your mind is somewhere in between...Like entering a swing trade with a minimum 7 or 10 pt profit objective and instantly finding yourself 3-4 handles ahead and covering...Or on the flipside, entering a scalp and finding yourself 3-4 pts in the hole and letting it run against you...
I say all of this because I honestly believe that I have never found any of the conventional techniques work for trading the indicies...The internet is littered with self described guru's who teach techniques that are basically only accomodating to one aspect of price action...They will post charts with beautiful flowing moving averages and little lines that show where you should have bought or sold...but the majority of it is hogwash...The truth of the matter is that so much of this stuff is adaptive and internalized...I respect some of Lundy;s posts because I feel that what he writes is much closer to the truth...The conviction is what wins in certain time frames...The quickness and agility is what wins in other time frames...Each time frame has a specific skill set that needs to be learned, but not compromised...When one time frame is compromised with the other that is when the errors mount...
So, essentially, what I am saying is that for me I have to know exactly which mindset I am going to be trading in for a specific period of time...When I break this rule I damage my plan...When I take profits too soon in my swing account, I leave big money on the table, money I will need to absorb the movement against when trading on a larger time frame...If and when I do not trade tight in the scalper time frame I am damaging my ability to come back from a series of what should be near scratch trades..."
