DbPhoenix

What did you read that left this with you?

You make a number of statements but ask only one question, and the answer-- without considering trendlines -- is that there is a selling climax, a technical rally, a test, and a rally above the last swing high. Reverse for a downtrend. I can't apply this to your charts because it's next to impossible for me to see the volume on them, plus they're too scrunched. However, there does appear to be a selling climax on your third chart in March '07.

Rather than use ltg's definitions per se, let's adhere as closely as possible to the source, i.e., Wyckoff: Accumulation: An area where stocks are purchased – or “accumulated” -- with the intention to mark up prices at some later time. Every traded stock is in one of four phases: Accumulation, Mark-up, Distribution, Mark-down. Buying Climax: the opposite of a Selling Climax (see Determining the Trend of the Market by the Daily Vertical Chart, pp. 1, 2). Composite Operator: Wyckoff’s name for the total sum of forces, including the public, that move the market. Demand: Buying power, buying pressure. Distribution: An area where stocks are sold with the intention to mark down prices at some later time. Mark-down: The phase of the cycle where prices decline, from the beginning of a bear campaign to its bottom. Mark-up: The phase of the cycle where prices rise, from the beginning of a bull campaign to its top. Rally: A phase in the market that experiences rising prices, that is, higher highs and higher lows. Reaction: A phase in the market that experiences declining prices, that is, lower highs and lower lows. Resistance: An area where selling pressure overwhelms buying pressure. Secondary Reaction: The reaction following a Technical Rally. Selling Climax: A major panic that occurs at the end of a steep decline in prices (see Determining the Trend of the Market by the Daily Vertical Chart, pp. 1, 2). Springboard: A stock (or group or the market as a whole) is on the springboard following a period of preparation for an advance or decline. Stop Loss: An order to exit a trade if the market does something that proves your initial decision to enter the trade as wrong. Supply: Selling power, selling pressure. Support: An area where buying pressure overwhelms selling pressure. Shakeout: A sudden break below a support level followed by a rapid reversal. Technical Rally: The rally that occurs after a Selling Climax. Thrust: A break above a resistance level followed by a rapid reversal. Trading Range: A period of balance between supply and demand forces. Prices move within a range where the bottom represents demand and the top represents supply. Trendlines: Straight lines drawn through the tops or bottoms of the price path established during an upward climb or downward pitch. They “serve to define the stride of the price movement, thereby frequently directing our attention either to possibilities of an approaching change of trend or to an actual reversal.” Volume: Number of units bought and sold, or the quantity of trading.

Clearly, you have put a great deal of thought into this. It shows. And as for the "relatively simple situation", there's nothing wrong with waiting for the relatively simple situation. Would you rather make money the easy way, or try to make it the hard way and coincidentally increase your chances of losing it instead? So, taking this step by step, beginning with the first chart, 1. What does the lack of trading activity on the attempt at 12:15 to break out the range tell you? 2. What does the immediate and indisputable failure on the next bar tell you? 3.What does the continuing lack of trading activity on that bar tell you? 4. What does the increase in trading activity (which is greater than any trading activity up to that point) on the way down toward the 12:30 bar tell you? And you don't need all the lines and indicators to see any of this. In fact, they may prevent you from seeing what might otherwise be plain.

Perhaps if beginning traders weren't in such a rush to place their bets and spin the wheel, they'd have a more thorough and practical understanding of what's realistic. But we're already at the point where people aren't reading the thread but beginning again, so what's being said has been said already, and repetition simply makes the thread longer still. So happy trading, everyone.

If your objective is to balance the probabilities of price moving one way or the other out of a base in an instrument such as a futures contract, then, as I said earlier, fretting about accumulation and distribution isn't going to do you much good because there's no float, and the bar interval -- 5m, 15m, whatever -- is largely irrelevant. You can, however, accomplish much the same thing by detecting and correctly interpreting the springboard activity, if any. Without charts, though, this is all not much more than babble. There must have been at least a few charts that prompted you to ask these questions. Post them and point out those features which interested you. Perhaps the best course is not to worry so much about predicting the direction of the move but to wait for it, then act in whatever way will enable you to take advantage of the move.

As to accumulation and distribution, I answered this question for you in post 52, but that apparently was not satisfactory. Perhaps someone else would like to give it a try.* As to Wyckoff's use of P&F for intraday trading, see the DayTrader's Bible posted to the Introduction (as a pdf). *Note that you are far more likely to be successful applying Wyckoff's concept of the springboard to futures than you are his approach to accumulation and distribution since futures have no float. If you don't know what a springboard is, do a search using my name or see my blog.

Theoretically. But most beginners will find it difficult to stick with a system that's right only 30% of the time, profitable or not. Which is where discipline becomes an issue. Discipline is far less an issue, if an issue at all, working with a system with a hit rate of 60 or 70% or better.

On the other hand, you've only just begun being mentored in whatever it is you're doing, so perhaps you ought to let all of this percolate for several months before drawing any conclusions. Just a thought.

If that's the case, I'm not surprised that you've "never found anyone" with the necessary discipline.

As I told Flojo when he asked me about this prior to posting, a number of people have expressed interest in this, but few have followed through (and none in this Forum). I don't see the lack of volume (and please, let's not get into the tick volume nonsense again; those who just can't help themselves can peruse this) as an impenetrable barrier. After all, Wyckoff didn't use volume in intraday trading except in the most general way; he used P&F. So if interested individuals want to find some way of making it work, that's perfectly okay by me. All I ask is that VSA be left out of it.

Since on the surface of it your question appears to have been answered in the thread, perhaps you could address a particular post that you believe requires clarification.

It's much less common than the number of people -- including native English speakers -- who still don't know the difference between "loose" and "lose".

As I said, and as I've said a great many times before, a "lot of people" can't buy unless "a lot of people" are also willing to sell. Unless someone is willing to sell and also someone willing to buy, there can be no transaction. If there is no transaction, there is no volume. Your "service" has come up with some half-baked half-truth in order to suck beginners into spending $100 a month. Forget about who's doing what and focus on price. If you're long and demand is driving price higher, that's all you need worry about. When demand can no longer drive price higher (lots of volume, no price progress), then you need to start looking for the exit, if not heading for it.

I had thought it was the opposite. That if price goes up on big volume that institutions are buying. But here they are saying the opposite. Could someone elaborate on this? Thanks! I suggest you forget about institutions and smart money and dumb money and herds and sheep and lemmings. None of it has anything to do with the price action that's in front of you. Volume is trading activity. If there's a lot of trading activity, there's a lot of volume. If there's little or no trading activity, there's little or no volume. Therefore, a lot of "volume" means that there is a lot of trading activity. Who is responsible for the volume is irrelevant. Your concern is the balance between supply and demand, or, if you like, selling pressure and buying pressure. If buying pressure is greater, price will rise. If selling pressure is greater, price will fall. That's it. Fretting about whether the volume is "buying volume" or "selling volume" is an unnecessary distraction since the volume is by its nature both, that is, a lot of "selling volume" has to be matched by an equal amount of "buying volume" or else there won't be any "volume" -- trading activity -- at all. You can pay somebody $100/mo to tell you whether the volume is "buying volume" or "selling volume", but if you can tell up from down you can easily determine this for yourself and do something much more interesting with the hundred dollars. As for bars and candles, these are simply a means of illustrating the price action and I see no reason for people to get snippy about them vs T&S, which is also a means of illustrating price action. In Wyckoff's world, what matters is not how one illustrates the action but the action itself, i.e., the pace and extent and duration of each buying and selling wave. If one has no sense of the continuous ebb and flow of these waves, how he illustrates the price action is of no importance whatsoever.

One could say the same thing about Tharp.....

First, keep in mind that, beyond the superficial, VSA and Wyckoff have very little to do with each other, so any reply that I make will have to do with Wyckoff. If you have questions about VSA, you'll have to ask them on one of the VSA threads. So..... How can you distinguish fairly lenghty accumulative base ? Am I understanding good than accumulative base is that after price rise up ??? In the charts are a lot bases but after some price declines and some price rises . I red your e-book but I can not find in answer in my question. Or something I miss ??? Or please could you recommend good sources (books...) Assuming that you understand the purpose of accumulation (you say you have the book, so review "Stalking the Wild Equity"),whether the accumulative base is long enough depends on the float. If the stock has a very large float, then whoever is planning to advance the stock will require more time to accumulate enough of it to (a) make the advance work and (b) make it worthwhile. Some people gauge this by determining the volume each day and comparing that to the float. Once an amount equivalent to the float has turned over, then the accumulation process may be at or near an end. But I haven't investigated any of this, so I have nothing to offer on the idea. As to the volume pattern, volume has to be generally quiet except when price is approaching or reaching the limits of the range. If price is reaching one of these extremes, trading activity (volume) may increase to bring price back into the range (whoever is accumulating the stock doesn't want it leaving the range before preparations are complete). You have to think about this in terms of traders and trades and traders' objectives before it will make any sense. If you view it in terms of bars and patterns and rising and falling, then it will more likely be visual gibberish. As for the other post, I don't get into the "smart money" business. That's a VSA thing. I stand by my response to the post made there, but I don't want to transplant the discussion here, and I've been asked not to post further there. So that's that. If you want to involve yourself in the smart money/dumb money thing, you will find many people to accompany you. For me, however, it's a complete waste of time. If you put yourself in a place where somebody -- or everybody -- is out to get you, then you will trade very differently -- and probably much more inefficiently, from what I've observed -- than if you do not.

To the OP: An edge is the knowledge proved through research that a particular price pattern or market behavior offers an acceptable level of predictability and risk to reward to provide a consistently profitable outcome over time. If, as I said in the previous thread, one does not have evidence of a consistently profitable trading strategy, then his problem is not "psychology". It is not "discipline". It is not ego or greed or fear. His problem is that he doesn't have a consistently profitable trading strategy. Until he does, he can be mental health poster child with the strictest discipline on the planet and he won't be profitable. He has to have a consistently profitable trading strategy.

FWIW, we recently completed a 150-post thread on the subject of S&R: http://www.traderslaboratory.com/forums/f34/support-and-resistance-4171.html You may find it helpful.

What if one were to use "Ignore This Thread"? That works on other types of threads.

Perhaps it's a matter of creds. I'm not a fan of JR by any means, but I'm not about to squawk about a post or two, any more than I'd squawk about posts from LBR. But so many new traders (not referring to anyone in particular) "discover" what's already known by most of those with more experience, add a little of their own jargon, then decide to share their epiphanies for money. This is in stark contrast to those who've been around the block more than a few times and give away an enormous amount of information for nothing (Steenbarger, for example). JR has also given away a great deal for nothing, and a trader with intelligence ought to be able to put together the rest of it by himself.

Actually, it wouldn't, and that's my point. This sort of calculated misrepresentation has no place on TL, and discussion of the volume indicator can go on without any reference to it.

Again, the "track record" is not a track record, listed or otherwise. It is nothing more than a series of potential trades that are alledgedly prompted by your approach. If you continue to insist that what you provide is a genuine track record, then this thread will more likely focus on your marketing skills than on the ideas which you're advancing.

While I see no reason not to discuss this "paradigm" (even though there's nothing particularly new here), I do wish that mention of "trade results" and "track record" would stop. There is no "track record", at least not in the generally-accepted sense of the term. Nor are there any "trade results". There may not even be any trades (i.e., actual trades that a real person took), which may help to explain why the "course" is being marketed and sold. It may be that EMC is as sincere as Valentine's Day. Or it may be that this is one of the more clever marketing schemes I've encountered over the past twenty years. Either way, I again strongly suggest that discussion be limited to ideas and that the hindsight and possibly fictitious trades be recognized for what they are.

Understanding how price moves is separate from determining how to profit from it. If you don't focus on the former first, the latter will take far longer than necessary.