DbPhoenix

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Don't lose sight of the fact that you're ranging in stages within an overall uptrend. If you include the uptrend in your calculations, you'll improve your timing.

Why resort to trust? Just test out whatever they say and see if it holds water. If it does, what difference does it make whether they are active traders or not? If it doesn't, what difference does it make whether they are active traders or not? Unless, of course, one is too lazy to do the testing. Then it would be much easier and far more efficient to collect all one's money into a pile and set it on fire.

Gold breaking out nicely. We'll see how it fares by the end of RTH. But it's ten points in profit so far.

For a beginning, you won't be able to do better than O'Neil, at least if you stick with his original book (in later days, he became a lot more interested in selling newspapers and went off track). You may also want to develop a more thorough grounding in fundamental analysis, but (a) it's unlikely that whatever benefit you derive will be worth the amount of work involved and (b) it's too easy when becoming immersed in fundamental to talk yourself into believing that the stock is better than it is (see "The Motley Fool", particularly in 2000). Where O'Neil falls short is the technical end. What he presents you must take on faith, at face value, since he does not explain just why a Cup With Handle is worth trading, nor a High Tight Flag, nor most of the other patterns he endorses. Maybe he doesn't think it's necessary to go into the why. Maybe he doesn't know. In any case, if you want to know the why (e.g., why buying a breakout from a base is preferable to jumping in whenever the mood strikes you), then you'll want to study Wyckoff, which is where all of this started. Fortunately, the only Wyckoff Forum online is here at TL, so you needn't go far to get the information.

RULE #26: Don't take the game personally. The poker gods are not out to destroy you personally (although it may sometimes seem that way). The game itself is as neutral and mechanical as a roulette wheel, a church raffle, or a lottery ball drawing... To repeat: players often think that elaborate steps are needed - great straining, striving steps, complex steps. The ordinary way of Zen dispels this. In modern life, as in poker, we often find ourselves tangled in frantic activity, trying to force events to our will, to make them happen. The actual answer is much simpler and involves a more natural approach. This sort of simplicity has been described in Zen literature in the following way: "When hungry, eat, when tired, sleep..." The ordinary way is the way.

RULE #25: Develop a true indifference to the game. George Leonard writes in Mastery that mastery's true face is often "relaxed and serene, sometimes faintly smiling." You sometimes see this with good poker players - a kind of smiling, ironic indifference to the vicissitudes of fate and the outcome of hands.

RULE #24: When things start going right for other players and wrong for you, back off... Looking back at the end of the night, however, at how a losing streak was put together, certain things stand out, and this is one of them: we should have caught on a little sooner. It is important that we notice these situations earlier and react accordingly.

It's become necessary to form a Justice League.

What does the 1t have to do with getting in? (see above)

Go ahead and roll over.

Not necessarily wrong, just too abbreviated.

Just that today oil reversed right after 1100 and rose all the way past 92. Since you have these charts, you may want to look at whether or not there is a pattern here. If there is, you'll want to extend your trading day.

Have you kept track of (a) whether or not oil reverses itself decisively at some point during the day and, if so, (b) when?

Man Fatally Crushed In San Francisco Subway Shaft A man was crushed to death in the shaft of a BART elevator at San Francisco's Montgomery station Sunday night, according to transportation officials. A passenger was taking the elevator up one level when he heard "a crunching sound and a man yelp before the elevator stopped," BART Police Lieutenant John Conneely said. The elevator car then stopped and became stuck. The passenger called the police and fire departments for help. After he was successfully released from the elevator, authorities searched the shaft and found a man's body, which was immediately pronounced dead. Conneely said the man may have been sleeping atop the elevator, but it remains unknown as to how he wound up in the shaft or how long he had been inside it. Personal belongings were found on top of the elevator car, and it is uncertain whether they belonged to the man.

Here's one. I'll let somebody else do the other.

To reiterate, the purpose of watching a 1t chart or a T&S display is to develop a sensitivity to price movement. It has nothing to do with developing setups, much less with trading. "Setups" are developed by studying price behavior in hindsight charts using whatever interval one intends to use in his trading, e.g., 1m. Once a potential setup manifests itself, then further backtesting is done in order to determine whether or not (a) the setup can be defined well enough to test it and (b) if it occurs often enough to be of any use. The setup is then forward-tested to see (a) if it can be recognized and (b) if it can be traded profitably. If the setup does not occur often enough or if it is poorly-defined, then it's back to the hindsight charts and further searches for tradeable setups. If you have not yet found anything, then you probably haven't been at it long enough. Or perhaps going backwards will help, e.g., find something that has had a successful breakout, then trace it back to the breakout, study the conditions surrounding the breakout and leading up to it. Then work in reverse, looking for those conditions elsewhere and determining whether or not a breakout eventually took place. If it didn't, why not? If it did, why? If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it? -Albert Einstein

NQ has been a real pain in the ass. It's trending, sort of. But ES is trending as well. Unfortunately, these trends are not always (ever) easy to catch intraday. And even if one does, what does one then do with it? This was the case in 1999, and frustrating for those who didn't want to hold overnight. If you can catch a bounce off a trendline intraday, that can lead to a decent move. But you can just as easily get the feeling of pushing on a string. If so, reread the Zen thread and stop trying so hard. Take your hands off the keyboard, sit back, and watch what traders are doing. If they appear to be confused as well, just bide your time. If you do manage to catch the trend, consider a longer holding time.

Without getting all ethereal about it, you have to trust price to tell you what to do. If one is "looking for trades", it's likely that he's not listening, any more than a guy who's looking for an opportunity to make his move is paying much attention to what the object of his efforts is saying to him. The key, then, is not to look for trades but to listen. The extremes, for example, are only a factor. If one waits until price gets there before he starts to listen, he'll likely misinterpret what's being said once he starts paying attention. What does price do as it approaches the extreme? Does it launch into freefall? Does it hesitate, two steps forward and one step back? What's the level of activity? Buyers stepped up to support Apple as early as November. Did they reverse its decline? No. But they halted it for two months. And if price does make it to support, how does it do it? Does it hit support WHAM! and ricochet off ZOOM! leaving no opportunity to enter (though there's always an opportunity to enter if one looks at a small-enough interval)? Or does it float down, the bars/waves contracting as though they're pulling up their feet? Does it glide in? Or does it hit the ground, bounce, hit the ground again, bounce, skid? And once it does become appropriate for you to do something, do you just jump in and hope for the best? Or do you wait for buyers or sellers to show their cards? This is what comes in part from waiting for a supply or demand line to be broken. One can always look back and think that he could have entered "early" if he hadn't waited, but this is the worst kind of hindsight. At the time there was no "early" since at the time there was nothing to enter. But by waiting for one of those lines to be broken, you're getting at least a glimpse at the other players' hands. Ditto for waiting for price to come to you. With gold, for example, do you buy now in hopes that price will rise? Or do you place a buystop above this mess and force buyers to stop wringing their hands and forge ahead? (And if they wimp out, you're still a bystander.) It is important, however, to rid oneself of the notion that the market is out to trick him. Those who believe this will never be able to trust their perceptions, much less whatever actions they take or are thinking about taking based on them. The market is not out to trick you. It doesn't even know you, much less care about you. Those who believe the market is out to trick them have an exaggerated sense of self-importance, exacerbated by the fact that they don't know how to interpret what's going on in front of them. If one is following price on a 1t chart or a T&S display without "looking for trades", he ought to pick up on this fairly quickly. Otherwise, it may take quite some time. But once he develops a sensitivity to it, he is much less likely to be caught by surprise by whatever traders have in mind. And if one feels that he just isn't getting it, he should remember that traders don't always have anything in mind; they're often just as confused and uncertain as you are. In such cases, recognize the situation and use their confusion against them rather than allow their confusion to infect you.

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In order to profit from trading price and volume alone, one must forget nearly all of what he thought was true, and that presents an insurmountable obstacle to a great many people. If, for example, one insists on focusing on how he can make it "work" with mathematically-derived indicators (stochastics, MACD, CCI, OBV, blah blah blah), then he blocks the process through which he would otherwise understand it and profit from it. If he focuses on where and how to make mechanical entries and exits rather than understand the dynamics of demand and supply, then he blocks the process through which he would otherwise understand it and profit from it. If he focuses on setups and patterns as gimmicks rather than as manifestations of changes in the balance of buying and selling pressure, then he blocks the process through which he would otherwise understand it and profit from it. Hire yourself to do a job The job is just to sit there and watch price move, to watch the buying and selling waves, the pokes and prods and feelers cast by buyers and sellers looking for a trade, not to create or test a strategy, not to make money, not to learn the "secrets" or the "tricks", just to develop a sensitivity to buying and selling pressure. No indicators, no MAs, no nothing but price bars/points and volume bars. This is analogous to meditation in that if one finds himself thinking about entries rather than focusing on price behavior, he should start over from the beginning. Eventually he will get tired of doing this and focus on the behavior in order to get through it. Make notes of what you see and what you think you see Don't rush to draw conclusions. Throw away your crutches and focus on what the auction market is really all about. The market is not out to get you. The market is not out to trick you. Buying pressure is buying pressure. It lasts as long as it lasts according to who wants what. Ditto for selling pressure. Rather than focusing on avoiding getting screwed, focus on the pressures and the imbalances between them. Don't trade. Don't conclude. Just watch. When you get tired, stop. Come back. Begin again. When you're done, review your notes. Look for those areas in which change took place. Formulate some hypotheses as to why those changes took place in those areas and not others. Don't force the Ah-Ha. Just let it come. Begin with what appears to apply to whatever market you're trading. If it's in a trend, focus on retracements and continuations (a continuation being the logical result of a successful retracement). If it's in a trading range, focus on reversals. And so on. Develop the strategy thoroughly, with all the accompanying tactics. Test it via replay, "reading" the chart from left to right. If your suppositions don't pan out, then go back to observation. If they do pan out, move on to simtrading. Trade it But understand always that whatever you're doing may not apply to every trading day. If you decide to focus on breakouts, for example, and the entire day is range-bound, then you're very likely going to have nothing to do. This is not your problem. Use the time for something else. But don't force trades. Don't see what isn't there (many novices fall into this trap when they've been working on reversals and insist on seeing reversal setups where none exist, e.g., on trend days). In time, you'll have a variety of strategies to cover most situations. But the key words here are "in time". There is no inconsistency between tuning in to the buying/selling dynamic and defining setups with specific entry and exit points. A lower high, for example, says something about the balance of buying and selling pressure. Now at what point does the probability of a reversal become sufficiently higher than that of a continuation that the trader will go short instead of long (or vice-versa)? A drop of so many ticks? A break of a TL? A break of an MA of some sort (if he just has to use one)? And once one has determined that, how far does he allow the price to go against him -- if it does -- before he bails? And what is a reasonable target? And where is my pastrami on rye? Changes in the balance between buying and selling pressure manifest themselves in recognizable and repeated ways, e.g., double bottoms, lower highs, bull/bear spikes (hammers et al,, if one is into that), but whether any of these are worth taking will depend on the context, what one wants, what one is willing to settle for, how much risk he's willing to assume, whether or not he's willing and ready to fade himself, etc. Sometimes the changes in balance are so rapid and so violent that the trader might think that only a loon would get involved. And sometimes the changes are so subtle and so quiet that waiting for the trade to resolve itself would put most people to sleep. Therefore, the trader has to decide under what conditions he's going to trade and during what portions of the day (or year) -- if not the entire day (or year) -- he's going to trade. Which may be why so many beginners prefer just to buy when the green line crosses the red line and sell when the red line crosses the green line. The degree to which one experiences anxiety before and during the trade is in direct inverse proportion to the amount of preparation he has done; in other words, the less prepared you are, the more anxious you will be (many people start the day anxious and stay that way until the final bell). Trading according to buying and selling pressure entails looking for those areas which are most likely to attract attention and activity, which is why understanding the nature of support and resistance is important. Those areas where the most people traded the most shares/whatever in the past are most likely to ignite activity again, partly because all those people have something to gain or lose at those levels, but also because even those who did not trade at those levels or in those areas can see that those levels and areas attracted the business of others at the time and may do so again. Some of these levels or areas or zones – if one is trading stocks or ETFs – include the previous day's (week's, month's, year's) high and low, and if one does nothing but sit idly by until those areas are tested, he will likely save himself a lot of money. The opening high and low can also be a rich source of opportunity. I say "can" because one must also consider volume: if there's lots of activity, there's likely to be lots of opportunity. Targeting these opportunities in advance is simple. Sitting on your hands until the opportunities actually present themselves is considerably more difficult. But if one knows well in advance what he's going to do and where he's going to do it, and has some understanding of the nature of probability, he has nothing to be anxious about. A great many traders just cannot reconcile the facts that each moment is unique and the outcome of any given trade unknowable with the idea of determining the probabilities of success of a particular "set-up", or cluster of behaviors. One must know what he's looking for and what to do with it if he finds it, which are the purposes of backtesting and forwardtesting. But he cannot trade successfully by staring into the rearview mirror. He must look forward, armed with his knowledge of how likely it is that his trades will succeed, and trade in the moment. Otherwise he can literally spend years examining charts and dwelling on couldawouldashoulda. A good friend of mine, Julian Snyder, wrote a book for traders called The Way of the Hunter Warrior. Recently I asked him about the use of such a metaphor for trading, and he conceded that it's total nonsense in the light of what he now knows. "You have to trade without ego, and any contest elevates ego," he said. I like to think of trading as sailing. Here you harness the forces that are there. You take into account the wind direction and velocity, the currents, and your destination. You've got your charts to guide you and you constantly adjust to nature's forces, sometimes pointing into the wind, sometimes running before the wind, sometimes tacking, but always in partnership with your boat, your crew, the wind, and the currents. Sure, storms can come up, but you can always let down the sail and anchor and wait out the storm. You work with the forces that are there, the forces that are much bigger than you, but you enjoy the journey, the day, the sport, and you're confident you can get to your destination, your port, your safe harbor. Ruth Barrons Roosevelt

I don't understand your question. But there is no "ice" in Wyckoff.

I suggest you read this thread

I'm not a fan of forex, but then I'm nobody's mother. I suggest you read this post and decide for yourself.

All right, let's leave it at that for the time being. Remember, though, that these are not arithmetic problems and bars; they're traders. They have agendas. If you can't get into their heads and imagine what their agendas are and how they plan on going about bringing those agendas to fruition, then understanding accumulation will be the least of your worries. Where does accumulation take place?