rcoolkarni

whats the platform you are using?

Since you want to learn the basics(trust me learning is never ending),please save that hard earned money!! Believe me, you will go trough plenty of losing trades even after you feel you are 'ready' and feel that you got it all 'figured out'. But the difference later would be that you will be able to accept the risk and hence the loss or learn from mistakes (if any). IMHO, you shouldn't start with Forex. There is too much leverage and inevitably most of the new traders end up blowing up accounts ( i learnt it the hard way ) . I know people might suggest that don't use the leverage but when you are just starting out and you think about all the $$ you can make - there is a tendency to ignore risk. There is a very good reason Forex brokers allow you to start with the as little money as possible. Again I might be drawing from my own experience and may be there are other successful Forex traders here who made it big by starting with little amount. If there are any, I hope they will pitch in and guide you in the right direction. Open a demo account in TOS or something similar. I think you can even open a real account and keep it unfunded but you will still get the real time data. With the small amount, i think it is better to trade options rather than out right stocks/forex/futures.

To elaborate more on point 3 - look at the attached screen prints. The first one is YM 150 tick chart as it is happening now (real time) - the up and down gyration (almost cyclical) is most of the time consolidation. Off course this could turn out be a trend but i can only make decision based on whats happening now. The second image is from Friday for ES has 2 markers. 1 st one is again a cyclical gyration (consolidation) where as take a look at the second marker see the difference (reversal). second marker does not have the cyclical gyration.

"usually" - unfortunately not in this case. That's windows for you.

Yes, forgot about http://www.thepatternsite.com/patternz.html. Advantage is that the software is for free. You need to pay ~ 15 0r 20 per year for data. Disadvantage is that it wont run on Win 7. So if you have all Win 7 machines, then you need to somehow install a different OS (using dual boot or using virtual box etc).

I am not sure about the specifics and not sure what is your definition of Trend but here are somethings I can tell you to watch . 1) Where the market internals in line with new trend? 2) Always watch for important price levels ( Previous session high/low, Globex Hi/Lo (in futures)). Most of the time the price retest these levels couple of times (sometimes overshoot a little to take out stops) before starting to moving in other direction. 3) Watch for Price Action. You said up trend - did it have bull candled with large bodies each having low above the previous candle low which represent a trend up? or they were combination of bull/bear/doji candles representing profit taking from previous move rather than representing new trend ? I do not use indicators so cannot talk about that. Above things are not fool proof. It is possible that you looked at all the above things and they all represented that the trend had changed, but even then the price can move in opposite direction because Price can do whatever it wants and that my friend is just part of trading

I have traveled before in this path so thought of giving some options that I have come across. I am not sure which platform you have or if you are already aware of the options listed below. 1) Think or Swim : You can actually sign up for a demo account to download the desktop and check it out. Has an option called 'Prophet' in which you can search for one or many patterns for a given List. For a matching stock, it will show you all the applicable patterns. I have not used it that much, pattern recognition is not that great but as i said none of them are perfect. Available chart patterns :Triangles, Wedges, Pennant, Flags, H&S, Channels etc . There are also different candle stick patterns available. I use Tradestation as brokerage. But I have a ToS account because i like there option platform and also you can listen to free pit noise (tradersaudio). 2) RampRT: Real Time Chart Pattern Recognition Alerts Chart Pattern Recognition Forex and Stock Screener Finds Chart Patterns Fast There are two versions , EOD and Realtime. Realtime is subscription based + needs dat package, where as EOD is one time $99. EOD does not need any data subscription since it takes data from Yahoo or Google. in EOD version you can also run pattern reecho on Weekly charts. You can run search for only one pattern at a time on the list but for the matching stocks, you can save the list and run the next pattern search only on that list. I like this one a lot because it has something called 'Bob charts' which basically shows the channels, trendiness for all the symbols. Chart Patterns: Support Line Touch,Support Line Break,Resistance Line Touch,Resistance Line Break,Fully Automatic Trend Lines,Fibonacci Retracements (any level).Fibonacci Extensions (any level),Linear Regression Channels,Head and Shoulders,Cup and Handles,Confirmed W Bottoms,Early Double Bottoms,Confirmed M Tops,Early Double Tops. You can check out the videos on website, also there is a Trial version which doesn't require any CC info 3) If you are more of a FIb pattern guy, you can check out Scott Carneys website for his software. Its pretty neat in identifying different harmonic patterns ( AB=CD , Bat , Butterfly, Crab & Gartley , etc ) Welcome to Harmonic Trader 4) If you are interested only in ABC pattern and have TradeStation, take a look at the Radar screen ABC pattern reecho from Suri. His Website: suriNotes.com, suriNotes, Stock Research, Futures Trading, Emini Trading, Tradestation, Indicators. This is the best you can get for ABC and it is very robust. You can refer to the website for more details 5) If you interested in Candlestick patterns , check out Stockfetcher.com P.S: I am not recommending any of the above. I am not affiliated with any of the above nor get any commission (I wish I did ). I have TOS, RampRt EOD version, Suris ABC. I had trial version of HarmonicAnalyzer that I did not extend and tried stockfetcher for a while.

You can use the Price-volume histogram from Solidus to get the volume profile on the chart. Its easier to identify the PVP and yes, it matches the matrix: Price-Volume Histogram: https://community.tradestation.com/Discussions/Topic.aspx?Topic_ID=111579&SearchTerm=volume&txtExactMatch=