Quote from Technician:
hi guys please throw some scraps to a noobie. can you point me in the right direction? what kind of time frame/strategies should I be thinking about?
There is a simple starting point for answering this pertinent question.
Potential traders do not have the mental resourses to pace the market's activity. They cannot keep up mentally.
The solution is to use a display that can be completely annotated faster than the market moves.
For making money as soon as you begin to use charts, I recommend using a chart that forms bars slower than you can think at this time.
The five minute chart is a good one for teenagers on up. ES is fun to begin with.
Here you can annotated three fractals of trends.
Make a heirarchy of the three fractals by using the fastest fractal to build the middle fractal. Similarly, use the middel fractal to build the slower fractal. Annotate bar to bar as the fastest fractal. Always treat internal bar pairs and laterals as one bar when annotating the fastest fractal.
Plan on trading the trend moves on the middle fractal.
Fortunately, price lags volume. Because of this you can discern a trade coming up well before the moment of the trade. Annotate volume so you can discern dominant and non dominat moves.
I recommend that you just trade dominant trends on the middle fractal until you triple your money in two weeks or so. This way you can catch up with your annotating between dominant moves and be ready when each dominant move begins.
Using this as a beginning you will avoid whipsaw and you will learn to dicern a retrace from a reversal right at the beginning of each. You will not trade retraces and you will trade reversals.
By beginning in this manner, you will not be encountering losses.
Some handy notes:
Dominant trends begin with volume troughs.
Dominant trends end with peaking volume
Holding a dominant trend is done by observing that volume is always increasing.
To "see" volume you need to have a Pro Rata Volume "shadow" showing behind the forming actual volume. PRV is the volume height that will be reached by the end of the bar.
For example, you know a price extreme is occurring 5 minutes before the end of that bar. Sometime during the bar formation the price extreme will occur. This allows you to be a more steady trader since you are looking to see the price extreme just before you know it will occur.
There are no trades at the end of any bar. Extremes occur as bars form.
After a while, you can consider "acceleration" and "deceleration" of volume to be able to put a finer edge on carving the turns.
Just start slowly with dominant only trading and triple your account every two weeks or so. In this way you will have more contracts to trader sooner.
As you see, this is a simple automated trading setup. It is just on an entry/exit new beginner orientation. To begin to use a hold/reversal level of advanced beginner will take a few more weeks. You also do not get stuck in the PA beginner level of trading from which PA traders do not emerge.
