I thought that the mistakes I make (like doubling down on VTSS rather than accepting the judgment of the chart) and the penalty i pay when making such mistakes were hard enough... The hardest thing, however, is to look in the mirror, and say plainly "Mr. you are an idiot and you fucked up this play, get out and take your lumps". The truth must b said, however, that when you get a string in which you got the flow of the MM's intentions nailed down (like with IDPH earlier this week), I will send a wink to myself in the mirror... (g).
To do this, you must have the soul of a mathematicians, look at these charts as wave functions and try and determine if you can spot the first derivatives as they form, typically there are two main forms, the stall and the spike (it works both at the top and at the bottoms of trading ranges), the spike is often preannounced by an overwhelming imbalance between the bid and ask, the stall by a period of narrow price churning, sometimes with quite a high volume (both at ops and bottoms). When these points correspond to an established box, you got you play made easy, when not, I only guess the next box from prior history or earlier projections (I had QLGC eventually reaching $28 since May this year).
But frankly, there are literally tens of patterns that stock follow during the day and different stocks follow different patterns (and some are related to the general market and some are counter the general market, so it is impossible to "teach" this unless I sat down and wrote a 300 pages document describing the various patterns. Even if I did that, those patterns are dynamic and change with time in the life of a stock (look at ELX, its trading pattern in the last two months has been impossible).
Zeev
Zeev
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