[Nick1984]

Hey Timokrates welcome to the forum.

First question I'd ask you is what itme frame are you looking to trade? You say that you're not fully comfortable waiting for a trade setup to present itself at a pivot etc so maybe you are more of a scalper?

Anyhow what I have found through a bit of bad luck on my part on a search for a decent charting program was to not even use things such as TICK, P/C Ratios, TRIN etc. Those market internal tools I think should help to confirm your decision whether to go long or short.

Why don't you just paper trade for a long time and get used to the markets. See how they move and start to identify patterns that occur over and over. Maybe you notice that on Mondays after a strong sell off last friday into the close for the first 15-20 minutes prices gap down and keep going down only to turn around quickly for a gap fill etc... Maybe you feel comfortable using fib retracements from swing high to swing low in the intraday cycle or even if you want to scalp a few points by retracing the most recent up or down trend.

I started out with stocks myself and am still learning how to find my feet with futures. I saw the videos on this site and I thought to myself "you bloody ripper" and I could just copy Soul's setups and it would be all sweet. After paper trading for a few weeks I realised that I trade differently from Soul.

I trade off pivots myself but also off visual support and resistance levels (see Walters "flip trade" thread its fantastic). I've been keeping a journal of my trades and seeing where I went wrong.

Use the videos here to learn how to use various techniques but don't addopt them as 100% carbon copies because you'll forever be thinking "what would Soul do?" when you're trading and thats highly self destructive.

In terms of actually building your repitoire of set ups just start simple and define maybe 3 setups that you can trade. Start to take these setups on paper when they occur and then keep records on how successful win/loss they are and also how proiftable they are. There's absolutely nothing wrong with having a set up that wins only 40% of the time if it's payoff is many times your risk tollerances. If you can strictly take a loss like a man and suck it up, then your winners will more than offset your losses on those types of trades.

As time goes by you'll start to fine tune your setups and you may add in several more setups to cope with different conditions such as trending/momentum conditions, or cyclical conditions etc... You need to structure your system just as if you were building a lego castle. One set up at a time brick by brick.

Come back to the forum on a regular basis and see how other people cope with trading. There's a wealth of information here to absorb but be selective what you take in! Not everything will apply to your trading style.

Good luck and best of trading.