Al Brooks perhaps unintentionally encourages people to overtrade, because he focuses on one market intraday and he has a number of setups.
I remember he said on some interview it took him about 10 years of backtesting and trading to finally make money doing this. He made the methodology his own and really, really worked on it. That's really what you need to do.
When many people watch Al Brooks and other day traders they think that they should be able to scalp every last point off of the market, and instead of mastering one or two setups they go all over the place. That lack of focus and patience is what kills many people.
Even Brooks tells people they should start trading just one setup like the "major trend reversals" and focus on that exclusively. But of course like all setups, sometimes you get a lot, sometimes you get very few, and when you get none you often get bored and want to 'create' one out of thin air or you just go strategy hopping.
And being in front of the screen for more than the US session (or European session) is just totally unnecessary. Yeah, sometimes something will happen in Europe and US will be dead, more often vice versa, sometimes both sessions have stuff going on, but I'd say you'd be best off spending 6.5 hours at the screen and using the rest of the time for backtesting. And if you don't enjoy the weekends, I have good news for you: it's a great time to backtest. Linda Raschke always suggest people backtest outside of market hours.
One more point about Brooks: he doesn't believe in indicators. For a long time I also bought the machismo of "naked charts". But if Linda Raschke uses them (who actually has a provable track record), what's wrong with them? Yes, some people think indicators do all the work for you, that's totally not true. And some trade well without them. But they're a useful shorthand when analyzing a market, and they help build rules. Thinking flexibly is key when coming up with your own method.
