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DbPhoenix
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Everything posted by DbPhoenix
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- Regarding my comments above, this may or may not help:
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- Each succeeding wave gets shorter, putting us in hinge territory:
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- Time to check on potential obstacles in the road ahead:
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- Buying and selling waves become equivalent at the open. The trader can either wait it out to see who wins, or exit and re-enter. Incidentally, the 15m bar interval is used purely for illustration as anything smaller would be next to impossible to read in a message board post unless it were formatted in Cinemascope. -
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- At the moment, the buyside has a very slight advantage.
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- Seems that change in the support level that I mentioned two days ago has prompted a BO to the upside, and, as Niko points out, we may be in the middle of a RET. Support amounts to a zone.
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The market decides whether it is going to go up or down, but the trader decides what he's going to do about it. In any case, a Wyckoff trader would not short an uptrend because of what he thought or felt or believed; he'd short only when the market (price) told him to. Which may sound snooty, but that's a large part of what distinguishes the Wyckoff approach from most else. It is what it is.
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Just click "Quote" If you want to participate in the thread, that's great. Note, however, that it's about "trading". So how would you trade this? What if price rejects the previous high? What if it doesn't? If price falls from here, what will you do and when and why? As for the retest, what you believe is not pertinent since price doesn't care. What will you do if the retest succeeds? If it fails?
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"Surfing" is just a term that I use for tracking and trading price at the tick level, which is what W's Studies in Tape Reading and Part 2 of his course are all about, partly because it's compatible with W's current-and-eddy metaphors and partly because I need the shorthand. And anyone who's observed a 1t chart for a minute or so will understand what it's all about. But to answer your first question, none. A 20pt range at the tick level is as wide as the Grand Canyon. But if one is talking about a 20pt range at the daily level, it's the same drill: wait until price nears or hits an extreme, then enter based on the smallest interval possible (if one is experimenting using online free charts, that will be 1m). If price is not near either of the extremes AND has shown no inclination to respect any other prior S/R, then one has to look for whatever S/R and/or patterns present themselves within the range. These can't be foreseen, but that's often the nature of intraday trading. For example, if you look at what price did after I closed up shop yesterday, it neared the top of the daily range at the end of the trading session, then drifted sideways for several hours, displaying very minor "waves" until midnight, when it entered the resistance zone. When it did so, the subsequent selling wave was considerably longer than the buying wave. The subsequent buying wave was (1) shorter, (2) could not reclaim half the downdraft, and (3) appeared to find R at the level of the base which had formed the previous afternoon/evening. If one weren't there to take the short, then those levels are irrelevant to any subsequent trades unless price returns to those levels. The long is taken at 0400 not because price has reached the midpoint of the range -- though that may be a factor -- but because the waves show that the downmove is done. Price can therefore move either sideways or up. As we then near the open, one might notice that price is approaching the 0700 swing high. If he isn't already long, he can pretend that he is. When price then hits this level at the open and forms a selling wave that is shorter than the buying wave but followed by a buying wave that is shorter still, creating a lower high, he can then exit his long, if he has one, or just go short, at around 39. Support and resistance do play a role, then, but they won't necessarily be found until one has gone through the looking glass into the midst of the trading day. Probably. If it isn't acting as S/R, then there's no reason to classify it as S/R. -
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I don't know that reading the thread is going to be of much if any benefit to you unless you've read the course, or at least the part of the course I've designated as Wyckoff Lite. To begin with, the markets are not fractal (and trendlines don't act as support or resistance, but then neither do MAs). Beyond that, however, Wyckoff's approach is based on price movement. If one is focused on bars, whether they be tick bars or volume bars or price bars or whatever, then he is not focused on price movement. That's why a tick chart or a T&S display (with price, time, and volume only) is necessary to understand the context (a 1m chart can be used in a pinch if one is watching the price move in real time; otherwise, one is watching price move up and down within a bar, like a bird whistle). If one doesn't want to study price in this way, then he won't be successful with this approach. It's easy to overlook the fact that there were no intraday bars until fairly recently. There were ticks. And the total of these tick movements from the open to the close made up a daily bar. If one understands how this bar was created and that it did not spring fully-formed from some sort of pod, he sees it differently and interprets it differently. If he doesn't, then it becomes just a bar, and candles and color-coding become reasonable, even though they have little to nothing to do with price movement. If none of this makes any sense, I suggest you scroll back and look at the charts I posted yesterday. One of the most common problems I've found amongst traders, beginning and otherwise, is that they can't tell up from down. This is particularly true amongst those who focus on "order flow". If the trader can't tell up from down without the use of indicators or some other extraneous aid, then his profit potential will most likely be limited.
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I use Firefox.............
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No. More like follow the yellow brick road. It's much more difficult if one is trying to follow "the book" and DOM and indicators and so forth.
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- And to the end of the session: One could call it that: The small buying and selling waves which occur during every stock market session run so many minutes. They are caused largely by the restlessness of active professional traders, much like the ripples produced by the wind upon the ocean. Traders must have activity; they make their livelihood by trading on fluctuations. Therefore, they engage in a ceaseless tug of war, trying to put prices up whenever the condition of the market is favorable, or drive them down when they find that the bulls are weak or have over-extended themselves. The degree of success or failure attending their efforts enables us to determine whether the market is growing stronger or weaker.
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Can the "Likes" tab/button be moved? Currently it is covering the row of page numbers at the top of the page making it impossible to flip back without going to the bottom of the page.
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- Two hours of surfing using the 1m chart: -
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- The bottom of what has acted as a trading range appears to have altered its trajectory. This makes trading support a greater challenge. Therefore, I suggest that, barring a breakout from the top of the range, the trader focus on intraday springboards, whether lateral or triangular, such as the hinge shown in the second chart down. If he prefers and has the skill and psychological fitness, he can also choose to surf (see Trading in 90m).
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If the move out is strong, the dotted lines are more likely the correct range.
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I'm not suggesting that you have to do anything. However, based on your recent posts, you do seem to be in the weeds, which is a place in which we all find ourselves now and then. By focusing on what might happen and where it might happen and when it might happen with regard to multiple levels of potential support and resistance, you're not focusing on what's happening in front of you. You're looking to the future rather than the present. Therefore, if I have anything to suggest, it is that you forget about support and resistance for a while and insinuate yourself into the rhythm of the movement. Are buyers or sellers in charge? For how long? To what extent? If the minor TRs and S/R levels are so minor that they yield little more than ticks, why bother with them? Either surf price or wait for more substantial opportunities. Remember that tiny patterns and tiny movements yield tiny profits, if any. Unless you're trading commission-free, the trades just aren't worth it. We can't always know in advance what we're going to do. There is a TR here between 00+/- and 50. Traders seem to find 30 an attractive level for trading. Beyond that, you may just have to wait until you're ready to open up your screen and wait for whatever opportunities present themselves.
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Which brings us back to your lines. First, support is only support if it provides support. Price has crossed back and forth over 30 repeatedly for two weeks. But even so, if you had taken the short and been stopped out by a rally off 30, what's the worst that could have happened? While you're waiting for opportunities that are in your forecasts, you're ignoring those that are being presented to you in the moment. Forecasts are possibilities, even probabilities. What's in front of you is a certainty.
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Perhaps you're paying too much attention to levels and lines and too little to what traders are doing. The ZigZag in particular is most likely a bad idea in that the point of keeping an eye on the waves is to provide you with a greater sensitivity to the flow, i.e., who's in control. To reach that you needn't draw anything. You can tell by the way the movements look whether buyers or sellers are in control or traders are just "keeping busy" waiting for something to prompt them to act. The range here is 50 to 00. If you didn't short 50, then you're faced either with surfing or with waiting until you see something actionable that you recognize, such as that hinge that formed between 0930 and 1030 this morning. I suggest you get rid of all the lines and zones and so forth and back up to focusing on price movement. If you can't be there to trade the extremes and you don't want to surf and you don't see anything that screams Trade Me, then I suggest you do nothing. The opportunities will come. Your primary task is to stay awake so that you can take advantage of them when they do. Otherwise, when does your trading session begin? end? Are you in front of the screen throughout your trading session?
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This is an example of what I was talking about earlier: looking through the keyhole instead of opening the door. 2728 is the midpoint of the downmove from 2749 to 2706, and if you choose to trade here, you're going to have to use a 1t chart and surf, shooting for ticks. Otherwise you'll get SO again and again and accomplish little except for feeding your frustration. Note also that price is forming a hinge now at exactly this level.
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I suggest that you look also at 15m and 60m bars at least. You may find that you're plop in the middle of a trading range, and that's not the best place to find profitable trades. Trading there means trading chop, and that encourages all sorts of bad habits, not to mention draining the account. Remember that if you trade at the extremes you are far more likely to have power behind whatever move will occur because many more people will see what you see, i.e., the 5m people, the 15m people, even the daily people. The point of using a small bar interval at those levels is that you can see entry ops that others can't: while they're waiting around for confirmation, you've already had yours. Thus when the move occurs, stops are an irrelevance. Too many people who use small bar intervals end up confining their field of view to what amounts to a keyhole. Your task is to open the door and widen your field of view to a much broader context.
