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This is a preventative maintenance strategy. Instead of imagining trade signals on this Friday afternoon and taking stupid trades which Ill regret later Im going to distract myself by typing this post. Here is an observation from earlier today.
I was watching a video journal and noticed the chap had quite a few different charts open. Tick charts, time charts, volume profiles, lines, indicators. This is all fine if the information gives you an edge but I must say that it is quite taxing on your mind having to continuously process multiple streams of data.
I have tried watching various different things on a single instrument and in my case it was unsuccessful. The problem is that the more you attempt to complement your decision making by using more tools, the harder your brain has to work (not the other way around).
The more confirmation you seek the more conflict you create.
This is entropy. Things are always getting hotter. The more you try and control, the more chaos you create.
There will ALWAYS be something conflicting with your idea and your job is to remove it. Cut it away like ts a cancerous growth on your method. If it works sometimes then bomb it...you don’t need it. You might find that you end up removing everything and relying on one or two simple signals and your own intuition. Thats not a bad thing.
Few comments :
dont change your charts all the time, stick you what you have and only change 1 thing if needed at a time
the setup should be complimentary, looking at a higher time frame is quite common
you can have daily, 5 min, tick bars etc.. you look at it top down, for example the daily you look at
the start of the day and once in a while, it is for the context
what i mean, is if you are all the time in tick charts, you tend to loose the bigger picture
but last but not least important, you should put the charts on YOUR screen that work for YOU
every person has his capability and his way of doing
there is no GOOD or WRONG combination
1) don't change it every other day
2) get used to it.. = many many hours of screen time
Yeah always keep any eye on those higher timeframe charts. Find the levels that everyone sees and be extra careful trading near them (if youre a scalper) because thats where the bigger swings tend to occur, and where you get minced.
Also, if youre on tick charts then your other charts should all compliment each other in a supporting role. Your whole goal is to determine where the trend is and have a plan on how to jump on. This whole story of the market only trend 25% of the time is an excuse for lazy people. There is always a trend somewhere, it might be on another timeframe, or another instrument and your job is to find it. If the market is ranging then jump around the timeframes and figure out the context, or set an alert and go look at a different instrument that you can work with. Keep busy and stay nimble.
Love the idea of writing a thread to distract you from poor trades
I've recently gotten aggressive in simplifying the display. I used to have 4 charts open simultaneously - 1, 5, 15 minute and the fourth would either be daily or hourly. Each one with stochastics, volume and some with a couple SMAs. I'd occasionally look at a volume / price histogram as well. Like you said, there was always conflicting information to be found in one of the charts, but in my case I'm never holding for very long so conflicting info on a larger time frame often just lead to indecision and missing a great short term opportunity.
Now I stick with the 5 minute chart throughout the day. It has volume and an EMA20 - very Al Brooks... I look at the hourly or daily before sitting down, and then again maybe once or twice during the session as a refresher. Much happier this way. When I see some of the charts folks paste into threads my head hurts
My favorite quote is from Leonardo Da Vinci "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication"
Here it is 1.30 pm saturday, I am just having a lunch break from comping out the markets I trade after the O/N close in preparation for mondays' entries of tuesdays' trades, I am already set for monday, during the week I am up at 5am preparing for the 9.50am open. I don't use charts, everything I do is spreadsheet based so I can't comment on the best approach to charting. I find charts to be so far behind the curve as to be almost useless to me. Before one of the fanatically religious chartists jump on me, I said "for me, what anyone else believes is up to them". lol
Ultimately, all I look for is several reliable S/R levels, the predominant trend and and the immediate short term trend, evaluate the risk in order to work out trade sizing and Hail Mary Stops.
What else do you need, during the day trading is a continuous decision making process. It is what we do.
It depends on how much time you have to process the information. A swing trader can integrate more and different types of information whereas a day trader needs to keep a lean method. However, as one gains more experience they can process more information as the expert learns to focus only on the relevant information.
Initially, you should anticipate some decreased performance with any new method but with more experience the results could be different.
The thinking about markets is something I think differentiates the better traders from the average. The question is how do you integrate and use the new information. Do you test it to see if it had relevance in the past or use it to formulate ideas about the future?
Conflict is generally useful when it can be used to make inferences about future market behavior and involves active cognition. Conflict is generally less useful when a singular idea is given excessive weight and becomes static. Information will have different relevance at different time frames and times. As to the answer, if you plan to use the data in a systematic way then you will desire the most predictive information, and you should remove any data that does not contribute an edge. However, information that comes out in irregular, unplanned, or hard to systematize forms may be useful for creating new more complex speculations regarding future market behavior.
As an example of one might combine conflicting information, let us imagine that you are bearish on the market but you have a system that triggers a long on a shorter time frame. Synthesis is the creation of something new from the existing. A superior synthesis could be to take the systematic long trade but to reverse short when it exits the trade. In this way, you are able to make use of all the information.
Just kidding John. We all have our way of doing things and as long as it works wgaf? But I am curious, the hard right of the chart is the very bleeding edge of the market how is that lagging information?
New methods aside, the existing method a trader uses needs to be continuously pruned and maintained to be as streamlined as possible. One problem is feature creep (borrowing from programmer lexicon) and another is overfitting your model. One thing Ive learnt is that I was always trying to find a reason for what I was seeing on the charts and looking for reasons to get into a trade. Having too much information exacerbates this problem.
I completely agree. This is exactly how I use conflicting information. My conflict is different timeframes telling me different stories and I am learning to roll with it. One timeframe might be trending but you can see when exhaustion sets in, then you jump on another timeframe and try to make the most of the pullback or rally and then get out at the earliest signs of a change of behaviour and look for reasons to get back into the bigger trend. Also, what is ranging on a higher timeframe can be amazing trend opportunities on another.
What Im trying to say is that you will always have conflict. Your job is to remove as much as possible and learn to work with what is unavoidable.
Price is history, it is like watching an apple fall from a tree, more important to understand and anticipate the forces that come to bear that cause the apple to fall. Quantify those forces and you will be in front of the price (apple falling)