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With price dropping past the mean of the daily trending range and struggling at this point to get back, would the most probable outcome be a visit to the lower extreme of the channel? Price still has to sustain a move beyond June's low, if it cant it still gives us a 170 point range to work with.
Maybe getting ahead of myself with the 60 minute, but, time will tell.
With price failing to make a concerted effort beyond the range extreme would one consider this overbought? Or should the range be amended to take in the new information? Or we could go sideways for a bit.
You guys are getting back into the (bad) habit of over-lining. Probably because you're bored.
The limits of the range were determined by lajax' 5m hinge, 40 to 25. Yes, one could have entered all sorts of places, including a break below 25. Depends on how wide a stop one is willing to risk. 10pts seems about right.
This won't go on forever.
Of course, if one had entered where Gozilla pointed out the failure to make a new high . . .
This is where the neophyte trader begins. He has little or no understanding of market structure. He has no concept of the interrelationship among markets, much less between markets and the economy. Price charts are a meaningless mish-mash of colored lines and squiggles that look more like a painting from the MOMA than anything that contains information. Anyone who can make even a guess about price direction based on this tangle must be using black magic, or voodoo.
But those ads on TV are so persuasive. Earn $100,000 A Week In Your Spare Time. At Your Kitchen Table. In Your Bathrobe. All one has to do is buy Hidden Secrets of Market Wizards Revealed! (plus shipping and handling). Or that software with the red and green arrows (how hard can it be?).
So you open an account, subscribe to Level II, install your charting software, and are absolutely mesmerized by all the flashing lights and colors. DOM? You bet! And all you have to do to participate is . . . click.
Before you’ve lost all your money, the thought that you haven’t the least idea what you’re doing may prevent you from blowing your account entirely. You realize now that this is not easy, it’s hard, it’s work, but rather than chuck it, you elect instead to take the subject “seriously”. You locate your library card and/or shop Amazon. You check out -- or take much of what you have left and buy -- all the “recommended reading”. You take the courses. You attend the seminars (box lunch included). You subscribe to the chatrooms and websites and newsletters. How-To book or notes in hand, you scan the markets every day. After a while (sometimes a good long while), you notice a particular phenomenon which pops up regularly and seems to "work" pretty well. You focus on this pattern. You begin to find more and more instances of it and all of them work! It’s all true! It Works! Your confidence in the pattern grows and you decide to take it the very next time it appears. You take it, and almost immediately your stop is hit, and you're underwater for the total amount of your stoploss.
So you back off and study this pattern further. You go back to the books, back to your notes. And the very next time it appears, it works. And again. And yet again. So you decide to try again. And you take the full hit on your stoploss.
Practically everyone goes through this, but few understand that this is all part of the win-lose cycle. They do not yet understand that loss is an inevitable part of any system/strategy/method/whathaveyou, that is, there is no such thing as a 100% win approach. When they gauge the success of a particular pattern or setup, they get caught up in the win cycle. They don't wait for the "lose" cycle to see how long it lasts or what the win/lose pattern is. Instead, they keep touching the pot and getting burned, never understanding that it's not the pot (pattern/setup) that's the problem, but a failure on their part to understand that it's the heat from the stove (the market) that they're paying no attention to whatsoever. So instead of trying to understand the nature of thermal transfer (the market), they avoid the pot (the pattern), moving on to another pattern/setup without bothering to find out whether or not the stove is on.
You've studied so hard and put so much effort into your trading, and this universal failure in the patterns only when you take them causes you to feel betrayed by the market and the books and materials and gurus you tried to learn from. Everybody claims their ideas lead to profitability, but every time you take a trade, it's a loser, even though the setups all worked perfectly before you played them. And since one of the most painful experiences is to fail when success looks easy, this embarrassment is transformed into anger: anger at the gurus, anger at the vendors, anger at the writers, the seminars, the courses, the brokers, the market makers, the specialists, the "manipulators". What's the point in trying to analyze and improve your own trading when there are so many dark forces out to get you?
This excuse-driven blame game is a dead-end viewpoint, and explains a lot of what you find on message boards. Those who can't pull themselves out of it will quit.
If you don't quit, you'll move into the "squiggle trader" phase. Since you failed with patterns and so on, you figure there's some "secret weapon", a "holy grail" that's known to the select few, something that will help you filter out all those bad trades. Once you find this magical key, your profits will explode and you'll achieve every dream you ever had.
You begin an obsessive study of every method and every indicator that is new to you. You buy a whole new series of books, attend new and different courses, sign up for new and different newsletters and advisory services, register for new and different trading websites and chat rooms (you hear this guy really knows his stuff). You buy more elaborate software (100s Of Indicators And Studies!). You buy off-the-shelf systems (Guaranteed Results!). You spend whatever it takes to buy success.
Unfortunately, you stack so much onto your charts that you become paralyzed. With so many inputs, you can't make a decision, particularly as they rarely agree. So you focus on those which agree with the direction of the trade you've taken (or, if you're the fearful sort, you look only for those which will prove to you how much of a loser you think you are).
This is all characteristic of scared money. Without a genuine acceptance of the fact of loss and of the risks involved in trading, you flit around like a butterfly in search of anything or anybody who will tell you that you know what you're doing. This serves two purposes: (1) it transfers to others the responsibility for the trade and (2) it shakes you out of trades as your indicators begin to conflict. The MACD says buy, the sto says sell. The ADX says the market is trending, the OBV says it's overbought. By the end of the day, your brain is jelly.
This process can be useful if the trader learns from it what is popular, i.e., what other traders are doing, and, if he lasts, how to trade traps and panic/euphoria. And even though he may decide that much of it is crap, he will, if he doesn't slip back into the Cynical Skepticism Stage, have a more profound appreciation – achieved through personal experience – of what is sensible and logical and what is nonsense. He might also learn something more about the kind of trader he is, what "style" suits him best, learn to distinguish between what is desirable and what is practical.
But the vast majority of traders never leave this stage. They spend their "careers" searching for the answer, that perfect setting, that ultimate tweak to their backtest, and even though they may eventually achieve piddling profits (if they don't, they will of course eventually no longer be trading), they never become truly successful, and this perpetual not-quite-failure not-quite-success can have debilitating consequences for the psyche.
The trader who is able to pry himself out of Stage Four uses his experiences there productively. The trader learns, as stated earlier, what styles, techniques, tactics are popular. But instead of focusing entirely on what's "out there", he begins to ask himself some questions:
What exactly does he want? What is he trying to accomplish?
What sort of trading makes the most sense to him? Long or intermediate-term trading? Short-term trading? Day-trading? Trend-trading? Scalping? Which is most comfortable?
What instrument -- futures, stocks, ETFs, bonds, options -- provides the range and volatility he requires but is not outside his risk tolerance? Did he learn anything at all about indicators in Stage Four that he might be able to use?
And so he "auditions" all of this in order to determine what suits him, taking all that he has learned so far and experimenting with it.
He begins to incorporate the "scientific method" into his efforts in order to develop a trading plan, including risk management and trade management. He learns the value of curiosity, of detached interest, of persistence and perseverance, of taking bits and pieces from here and there in order to fashion a trading plan and strategy that are uniquely his, one in which he has complete confidence because he has tested it thoroughly and knows from his own simulated trading and real-money experiences that it is consistently profitable. This eventually becomes his “edge”*.
He accepts fully the responsibility for his trades, including the losses, which is to say that he understands that losses are inevitable and unavoidable. Rather than be thrown by them, he accepts them for what they are, a part of the natural course of business. He examines them, of course, in order to determine whether or not some error was made, particularly one that can be corrected, though true trading errors are rare. But, if not, he simply shrugs off the loss and goes on about his business. He understands, after all, that he is in control of his risk in the market.
He doesn't rant about his broker or the specialist or the market maker or that vast conspiracy of everyone who's trying to cheat him out of his money. He doesn't attempt revenge against the market. He doesn't fret. He doesn't fume. He doesn't succumb to hope, fear, greed. Impulsive, emotional trades are gone. Instead, he just trades.
*the knowledge gained through research and testing that a particular market behavior offers an acceptable level of predictability to provide a consistently profitable outcome over time.