Levels shmevels

As I sit here listening to Celine Dion ‘my heart will go on’, I cant help but draw a parallel between the movie and the sinking feeling I get when my carefully thought out levels are completely disrespected by the collective market consciousness.

Heres how it goes:

This one time price didn’t reach my level but reversed and went on a merry little trend with me left behind holding my bags waving goodbye to a lost opportunity.

This other time I thought I would outsmart price and move my entry up just in front of my level. That time, price didn’t even stop at the station but tore through my entry brutishly rampaging over my stop A trade that lasted mere seconds.

Then this one time I thought Id be clever and wait and see first what the market decided to do. And it co-operated beautifully...at first. It entered my zone, I got a signal, entered but stopped out shortly later, enter again in the opposite direction..Stopped out. After a few of these, my patience tattered and flapping in the wind, I step away from the obvious chop I had been caught in. Only for price to proceed leisurely into another fine trend with me looking on in exasperation feeling like I had just been pick pocketed.

So that’s it with levels. They work sometimes. But what do you mean they ‘work’? What work does a level do? Not sure, but if I remove my levels and all the other things I use to provide structure to this unstructured beast, a curious thing emerges. I don’t need this line/pitchfork/moving average/trend indicator/volume profile etc to tell me when something is happening because something is always happening. Everywhere.

Everything I put on my chart is really just a security blanket because I need some level of certainty even though I know deep down its just pretend.
Ive got to a stage now where I have no fixed levels; they are all dynamic as price unfolds on my timeframe which means my levels are dynamic and always changing. When a level has been ‘used’ more than twice it is reclassified as damaged goods and I wont go near it until the collective pushes price somewhere else. Its the chauvinist in me.

Those are my random Friday thoughts. Have a good weekend.