DbPhoenix

You don't, though I assume that since this is intraday he was following the tape and making his calculation in real time. He would therefore be able to pick up the strain from the demand side. You'd be able to do the same if you were watching streaming data. However, if you have some reason to believe that price is going to fail and make a lower high, you can place your short stop just below H. If price does fail, you're in. If it instead rallies and makes a new high, your entry is never triggered.

Because H is not higher than F. Regardless of pace or duration, price isn't even reaching H, much less exceeding it. Therefore, buyers are no longer in the driver's seat.

Why not just ask them here? At least you'll get more than one side.

I don't see anything remarkable. Buyers have supported price at 95 but have been uninterested in pushing it past 98. Today, of course, is another matter, but volume did not foretell it.

The Era of Giant Chain Stores Is Over Back in the day when big box retail started to explode upon the American landscape like a raging economic scrofula, I attended many a town planning board meeting where the pro and con factions faced off over the permitting hurdle. The meetings were often raucous and wrathful and almost all the time the pro forces won -- for the excellent reason that they were funded and organized by the chain stores themselves (in an early demonstration of the new axioms that money-is-speech and corporations are people, too!). The chain stores won not only because they flung money around -- sometimes directly into the wallets of public officials -- but because a sizeable chunk of every local population longed for the dazzling new mode of commerce. "We Want Bargain Shopping" was their rallying cry. The unintended consequence of their victories through the 1970s and beyond was the total destruction of local economic networks, that is, Main Streets and downtowns, in effect destroying many of their own livelihoods. Wasn't that a bargain, though? Despite the obvious damage now visible in the entropic desolation of every American home town, WalMart managed to install itself in the pantheon of American Dream icons, along with apple pie, motherhood, and Coca Cola. In most of the country there is no other place to buy goods (and no other place to get a paycheck, scant and demeaning as it may be). America made itself hostage to bargain shopping and then committed suicide. Here we find another axiom of human affairs at work: People get what they deserve, not what they expect. Life is tragic. The older generations responsible for all that may be done for, but the momentum has now turned in the opposite direction. Though the public hasn't groked it yet, Wal-Mart and its kindred malignant organisms have entered their own yeast-overgrowth death spiral. In a now permanently contracting economy the big box model fails spectacularly. Every element of economic reality is now poised to squash them. Diesel fuel prices are heading well north of $4 again. If they push toward $5 this year you can say goodbye to the "warehouse on wheels" distribution method. (The truckers, who are mostly independent contractors, can say hello to the repo men come to take possession of their mortgaged rigs.) Global currency wars (competitive devaluations) are about to destroy trade relationships. Say goodbye to the 12,000 mile supply chain from Guangzhou to Hackensack. Say goodbye to the growth financing model in which it becomes necessary to open dozens of new stores every year to keep the credit revolving. Then there is the matter of the American customers themselves. The Wal-Mart shoppers are exactly the demographic that is getting squashed in the contraction of this phony-baloney corporate buccaneer parasite revolving credit crony capital economy. Unlike the Federal Reserve, Wal-Mart shoppers can't print their own money, and they can't bundle their MasterCard and Visa debts into CDOs to be fobbed off on Scandinavian pension funds for quick profits. They have only one real choice: buy less stuff, especially the stuff of leisure, comfort, and convenience. The potential for all sorts of economic hardship is obvious in this burgeoning dynamic. But the coming implosion of big box retail implies tremendous opportunities for young people to make a livelihood in the imperative rebuilding of local economies. At this stage it is probably discouraging for them, because all their life programming has conditioned them to be hostages of giant corporations and so to feel helpless. In a town like the old factory village I live in (population 2,500) few of the few remaining young adults might venture to open a retail operation in one of the dozen-odd vacant storefronts on Main Street. The presence of K-Mart, Tractor Supply, and Radio Shack a quarter mile west in the strip mall would seem to mock their dim inklings that something is in the wind. But K-Mart will close over 200 boxes this year, and Radio Shack is committed to shutter around 500 stores. They could be gone in this town well before Santa Claus starts checking his lists. If they go down, opportunities will blossom. There will be no new chain store brands to replace the dying ones. That phase of our history is over. What we're on the brink of is scale implosion. Everything gigantic in American life is about to get smaller or die. Everything that we do to support economic activities at gigantic scale is going to hamper our journey into the new reality. The campaign to sustain the unsustainable, which is the official policy of U.S. leadership, will only produce deeper whirls of entropy. I hope young people recognize this and can marshal their enthusiasm to get to work. It's already happening in the local farming scene; now it needs to happen in a commercial economy that will support local agriculture. The additional tragedy of the big box saga is that it scuttled social roles and social relations in every American community. On top of the insult of destroying the geographic places we call home, the chain stores also destroyed people's place in the order of daily life, including the duties, responsibilities, obligations, and ceremonies that prompt citizens to care for each other. We can get that all back, but it won't be a bargain. This post originally appeared on Business Insider.

The point of this reversion to a larger time interval -- bar, line, whatever -- was/is to focus on a market that one can actually follow. This business of trying to trade small intervals while at work is nonsense. Therefore, if one can follow 30m intervals, fine. If not, switch to an interval that one can follow. One can't trade what one can't follow. There is no more romance in trading a 1m interval than a 60m interval. Therefore, I'll depend on whoever is posting this stuff to be honest about what they're actually following, though I find it extremely unlikely that anyone who has a job can follow anything shorter than a 30m interval and I don't want to enable anyone's self-sabotage. Those who are intent on that will do perfectly well without my help. All that aside, following a larger interval does not mean reverting to Follow The Bar. The price activity that creates the bar is still dynamic, and the "close" is not nearly as important as how price got there, and there's nothing hindsight about opening up that interval to examine what price did during that interval. The chief advantage in focusing on a larger interval is that one has time to do so.

Reminds me of that South Park episode where Cartman goes online saying that he's a young boy looking for mature, older male friends and his screen instantly fills up with response windows. One doesn't need to look for a mentor; all he has to do is stand still. If you literally know nothing, you must first find out how markets operate, i.e., why people buy and sell, why prices go up and down. Then you need to decide what you want from it. Then you need to figure out how you go about getting what you want. This may be of help with regard to determining your objectives. There are also extremely basic books suggested at the end of the first section which will take you by the hand through the shallows. This may also be helpful regarding how and why the markets are what they are. If you decide on futures, check out the CME site, though you may want to make sure you have a bottle of aspirin handy. Avoid brokers for education. Avoid vendors at all costs. Avoid anybody who wants to teach you how they trade, even if they can and are willing to provide irrefutable proof that (a) they actually do trade and (b) they make a living at it. If you've ever been to a bazaar in Marrakech, then you're most likely prepared for the vendor onslaught. If not, guard your wallet as if it were your most cherished possession.

Don't know. However, you can search the site using "replay" and might not get an overwhelming number of hits. Start with the more recent posts since these will more likely be current.

Over time? How 'bout the next day? But seriously, you can replay as many charts as you like and run whatever approach has been working for you and compare the results. You don't have to go wandering off in the dark.

Well, I find futures a hell of a lot easier than stocks. For one thing, you don't have to live in fear of where the thing is going to open the next day. And I avoid forex like the plague. Fortunately, today you can test drive just about anything with all the free trials and you can replay just about anything in order to do whatever backtesting you like to do. Thus you can find something that suits you without risking anything. Of course, there are ETFs, if you get a kick out of watching paint dry.

So I guess the next question is why bother with options? Trade something that makes it much easier for you to succeed.

Having certain requirements for entry, risk management, and trade management does not necessarily make it mechanical. It can mean only that you're taking responsibility for the trade. In any case, I use stop limits for entry. If price reaches my entry point, fine. Otherwise, to hell with it. No juggling required. But then I don't do options.

Actually that wasn't quite my point. Notice that the heaviest days over the past couple of weeks are those in which buyers can't push price higher to close. In some cases, they can't keep it elevated at all. They appear to have a good day on the 6th, but sellers beat the crap out of them the following day. And while they had a good day Friday, they ain't doin' so well today. And price continues to sink lower and lower from day to day. Effort, result, effort, result.

Though I take exception to the singling out of the ES, this is good stuff. All beginners should be required to read it.

That was done in order to draw attention to discussions that would not otherwise be noticed by anyone who wasn't already following the Forum anyway. But it didn't accomplish the objective, so I'm going to merge them all into the AMT thread. I'm likewise going to merge PT's thread with this one since they have more or less the same subject.

What is the volume telling you?

A nice antidote to the doom-and-gloomers. Thank you.

Not wrong. Anything but. However, there's a matter of context here. A lower high carries the same message whenever and wherever it occurs: selling pressure is beginning to have greater influence than buying pressure. But a lower high on a 1m chart, for example, does not provide the same result as a lower high on, for example, a daily chart if for no other reason than so fewer people even see it. Similarly, while a lower high at the end of an extended run on, for example, a daily chart might provoke frenzied selling (e.g., AAPL), a lower high after hitting R in a trading range would likely provoke no more than a ho-hum since this is what is expected and has been anticipated ever since price bounced off support.

A point that should not be overlooked. These charts are posted, after all, with the EOD trader in mind. So if price drops below 95 and if there's a RET, the first entry op won't come before Tuesday. The market loves to lure traders into chop.

Not necessarily. Most people trade differently in contests than they do in their own trading, so not only do they not prove anything, they end up doing considerable damage to themselves. And the introduction of ego into the trading equation is never a good thing.

The overriding concern for me is whether or not price is doing what I expect it to do, and this is where focusing on traders rather than price or lines becomes even more important. It is important that price found S at the LSL. But far more important is that it did NOT make a HH. This in and of itself need not be a reason to exit, but if buyers can't hold here above the MP of this little TR between 5 and 8, I'd be out. To do otherwise would be to introduce hope to the equation.

1. Yes. 2. Below which S level do you think shorting a RET would be most successful? There are no "mechanics". There's nothing mechanical about this approach. I'm not channeling Wyckoff. What he would do or not do in any given situation is at best a guess. But he's been dead for 80 years, so the best one an do is study and practice. The principles don't change. Your puzzlements have to do with ignoring context. Trading a daily bar is not the same as trading a 1m bar. The psychology is entirely different. Similarly, a LH after an extended trend is not the same as a LH after finding R at the top of a TR. Since you're not trading daily charts, you have to be careful not to take the wrong lessons out of these charts. Edit: The following chart may help clarify. This chart includes several time segments beginning with the initial hinge. Therefore, it looks far more cluttered than it would if a succession of charts were used. First, the hinge. This is the first signal that a move upward may be imminent. The false "BO" below the hinge supports this hypothesis. Eventually, price breaks above the top of the hinge, further support. Second, price falters at R, coming all the way back to the MP of the hinge. If long, this in and of itself is not cause for concern. If one is looking to go short at R, this is the opportunity to do so. Third, price makes a LH. If price had reached R with no hesitations, this would be a more attractive short than it is otherwise because of all that sellers have to wade through in order to gain any momentum. The midpoint of the last rally, which happened to coincide with the top of the hinge, was one such hurdle. But price still has to work its way through the congestion that created the hinge. In any case, if long, the LH is sufficient justification for exiting, though one might also have exited when price first hit R. Fourth, for a follow-on short, what is far more attractive to me is the relatively clear sailing represented by the blue line. This is a reflection of my conservatism, and not everyone need be as conservative. OTOH, I have a lot more respect for money than most do. On the third hand, I'm still here, and few of those who were here five years ago, much less ten or fifteen, can say the same. Like Jim Rogers, I prefer to wait until I see money in the corner, just waiting for me to walk over and pick it up. The 55pt drop in PL was nice. I'm not eager to give it back. .

Whether you can tolerate the stop or not depends on where you place it. And you're currently sitting at potential support, i.e., the midpoint of the last rally. Not sure what you mean by a "numbers game". It's also dollars and cents. Forgetting that can cause one to blow up his account.

If you can tolerate the stop, sure.

If it hadn't been for the warrants, though, his performance would likely have been pretty ordinary. And, as you say, it was a bull market. I was surprised back at the time that Paul liked it so much, but I didn't say anything. Chacun a son gout.