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I never know exactly what people mean by "patterns" and/or what they classify as "patterns".
I trade a lot of "Ross hooks", and similar things, which I think of as patterns, myself (it's a non-indicator-based bar pattern, anyway). So on that basis I'll offer a tentative "yes".
Double bottoms and tops are my favorite setups for /ES as of lately. I always get good 1:2 or 1:3 trades out of them. Chart patterns are subjective and they don't need to be perfect IMO. If I see anything close to a double bottom or top on the high of day, low of day, or any major swing high/low, I take it. Just using dow theory and basic common sense can be successful in /ES depending on your time frame from my experience. You just basically need to determine your financial goals first, and then let that decide what time frame you should trade on. Then look at those intervals and find a consistent pattern. It's always changing and running through cycles. No single setup is guaranteed to work 10 years from now or even 10 weeks from now. The market is always changing and you have to keep learning, developing, and finding new strategies or tweaking your current to keep your edge.
Platform: Sierra Chart, TOS, Tradestation, NinjaTrader
Trading: energy
Posts: 114 since Jul 2012
Thanks Given: 81
Thanks Received: 172
patterns need a context. i find candlestick patterns like three black crows and shooting stars etc to be the least interesting and nor worth any time. Real patterns like higher highers, look left support and resistance, double tops, failed new highs, those work best the most.
I just happen to have an example today of 'real money' trading a pattern. ES had a big down move in the morning and retraced back up. It got stuck at unchanged/yesterdays close. It probed up to the cash open, failed to attract anything but new sellers and then fell back down. The context is what makes this head and shoulders pattern a powerful opportunity. This is the picture i sent to my buddy in realtime.
Here is how it turned out. I did take this trade by selling the closed doji at 95.25, and then covered at the doji at the bottom at 90.50. That's 237$ off a "pattern" i guess. But there is a lot more than just seeing the setup. the narrative of the days price action, the weakness on the first shoulder, the failed probe above cash open, all part of reasons why the patterns look the way they do, and behave the way the usually do. I entered my trades on doji patterns because they showed on my timeframe that there was agreement on value, or failure to followthrough. My exit had a context beyond just that doji, in that it hit yesterdays low, which i believe was the first area of support.
Thanks for all the comments so far. Before posting this thread i looked through old threads and seen differing opinion on patterns in trading. Some say it works others say it doesn't, some books say it doesn't work and is too subjective then give you nothing that does work lol (something has to be successful if you're not successful i don't want to read your book).
I just want this thread to be for people who have made real money trading patterns or lost real money trading patterns, no theory.
I didn't read the question in a way that restricts this conversation to chart patterns, so I'll offer my 2 cents.
I consider a pattern to be a series of events that occur in a reasonably predictable order. So I trade a pattern such as this:
100 contracts sell, price ticks down
100 contracts sell, price ticks down
sellers keep hitting the new bid
offers as price ticks down inflate quickly to at least half of the average offer for the closest 10 prices
This is generally a pattern I sell. The 100 contracts part is just a place-holder, the actual contract being traded really dictates this (CL could be less, ES could be more).
The missing part of this is where this pattern occurs, just like a double top in the charting world needs to occur at the top of an upward trend, this order flow pattern has to occur in the right context to be valid.
To me, the elements of the context are:
where does this occur on the volume histogram?
how did price rise just before it started to fall?
what are correlated markets doing?
I think a more interesting question may be 'Anyone have success NOT trading patterns?'
I think i get what you're trying to say. Are you saying that in a way nobody trades successfully without patterns? Because so many things can be a pattern. Unless someone just randomly decides he is going to execute a put or call for no reason and have a 1:3 or 1:2 risk reward or whatever with stop loss and take profit and is successful with it lol...
This question reminds me a little of a trading experiment reported in Van Tharp's Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom (of which I can't remember the precise details, and haven't now got the book here to check them) in which two traders simultaneously entered positions (one always long, the other always short) at multiple, randomly determined times, with set trade management parameters which - as I remember - were rather more complicated than just R:R and a stop-loss: both were profitable, just about. It was one of the things that prompted me to realise that good trade management is more important than exact entry-timing.