[DbPhoenix]

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	It's easy to say that this or that bar is "no demand" or a "test" in hindsight. But when the market is open there can be conflicting signals and I don't yet completely understand how a trader can identify the right spikes in volume as demand/supply/etc, especially on such a low timeframe as the 1-min charts that have been posted here.

That's why I've come to rely more heavily on support and resistance and what happens there and pay less if any attention to what may or may not be signals that happen elsewhere. For a long time, I thought of the lower timeframes -- particularly the 1m and lower charts -- as being "noise" because everybody said so. And they certainly seemed so. But then I realized that they seemed to be noise only because those -- including me -- who thought so weren't listening (sort of like the alien languages on Star Trek that sound like white noise on a radio). Then someone -- I forget who -- stated that, as far as the markets were concerned, there was no such thing as noise. It all contained information. That one may not recognize it, or understand it, was beside the point.

If you're going to have important S/R on the weekly at 1800, it's going to be there in every other timeframe as well. Other S/R levels will reveal themselves as one travels down through the timeframes, but he isn't required to trade every last one of them.

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	Quote: Note that the selling climax does not exactly jump out at you. If you didn't have support drawn at 1765, you might not even notice it. But there or nearby is the place to enter, if you're going to enter at all. In you chart from post #138, could you not draw resistance at 1778? It looks like there was a slight volume spike around 13:09 immediately followed by a downbar, isn't this a rejection? It looks like price found resistance on the previous day there too. And it is around that 'special' 1780 level that you've talked about too...

Sure. 1780 has been important for both S & R for some time now, as has 1800. But that wasn't germane to the question or to my answer, so I didn't get into it.

As to the rejection, there's another one at the far left, but I was already short, so I didn't particularly care. The short had taken its own sweet time to pay off that morning, so I mostly just wanted the trade to be over.

You'll find many of these rejections throughout a day, but are there enough traders involved to make the rejection important enough for you to profit from it, or are they just looking for something to do until Happy Hour?

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	Quote: Beginning at the end of the day on the 21st, then tested twice on the 25th. It didn't seem to be more than minor support for pre-planning, but price didn't think of it as minor when it was reached for the second time that day. That entire zone from 1760 to 1770 established on the 19th and 20th offered potential support, of course, but 1765 became a kind of fine-tuning. But how do you know if support from a previous day or week will still be important? If you look at a chart and you can point out where support is, do you take note of that level? I mean the next day it might be breached and so you think it's incorrect. But the day after that it may be tested. Is support from two weeks ago as important as from two days ago? I find it hard to reconciliate all these different support levels from various days and various different timeframes... It looks like support (or resistance) is all over the place all of the time

Nobody said it was easy (except the people selling courses and software).

I start with the macro, as I show on p 50 and following in the PVSR pdf I posted to my Blog. Then I work my way down to the more minor S&R levels. On my chart, I use lines of three different thicknesses, the thickest being reserved for major S/R that's lasted for weeks or even months, the next for S/R that's not quite so important, then the thinnest for what has been S/R only now and then and hasn't been terribly reliable but has also provided some excellent entry/exit signals (most often I find that what looks like minor S/R is actually something more major that I just overlooked; if I go ahead and plot the line, I'll notice other consistent levels over past days that just never registered with me). I also use three different colors for support, resistance, and the midpoint (what Wyckoff calls the equilibrium level [similar to what MP calls the POC]). This may seem to others like unnecessary busy-ness, but it helps me to see at a glance where I am while also avoiding a double-think at a time when I don't need to be doing that.

And, yes, S/R is all over the place all the time. And a scalper is likely to be concerned about those minor levels because he wants a reliable entry that results in a quick profit. But I prefer to make one or two trades a day and ride them, so I wait for tests of the more important levels. If price never gets there, I don't trade that day.

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	Quote: I hesitate even to bring up S/R since the behavioral dynamic driving price here may not even lend itself to trading ranges, or at least not the pretty kind one finds in futures. So are you saying that FX moves are less "clean" than those in futures? May I ask if there is any reason in particular you are trading the Nasdaq? Over at ET a lot of people are trading the S&P. Do you think the Nasdaq is less choppier?

I haven't studied FX so I don't understand it particularly well, nor do I understand the people who trade it. Without any of that, I'm flying blind, and why bother? And not having volume doesn't make things any easier. But if someone else wants to give it a shot, what business is it of mine?

As for the NQ, I played with the NQ, ES, YM and ER for quite a while, but I understood the NQ better. It appeared to provide more reliable S/R than the others, it had a wide enough range to offer decent trading opportunities (especially after the extraordinarily long dry spell of tight ranges in all the index futures), there was a lot of volume in it, and because of its constituents, it moved a little differently, often leading the others, generally acting independently. The ES has always reminded me of an old lady. The NQ is something more of a hell-raiser. The YM is something of a new guy who's trying to become one of the cool kids, but they haven't reached the point of letting him sit at their table at lunch. The ER is something of a toddler who can't make it from one end of the room to the other without banging into everything along the way.

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	Quote: I'm not ignoring you. I have a very difficult time dealing with all the layers and layers of overcomplication and nonsense jargon that have been laid over what are essentially basic and really very simple concepts. Wyckoff founded the SMI in Phoenix? Wyckoff died in 1934. A final question, I looked at your "recommended literature", but there seems to be nothing relating to Wyckoff about it. I have already read the Day Traders Bible in the past, but to be honest it didn't really help me understand the markets better, there are little charts in it too. So perhaps somebody could point me in the right direction and tell me where to find all these Wyckoff gems?

Depends on what you mean by "related to Wyckoff". It's all related to Wyckoff's concepts in one way or another, but it's true that the meat of it all is Wyckoff's original course. Unfortunately, SMI holds the copyright and won't make the course available unless you plunk down $950 for the whole package, including the original course and all the mucking about they've done with it. Someone gave me the course as a thank-you for what he said he learned from me, and I took what to me was most pertinent to modern trading, added what I'd learned from others of similar mind and from my own trading, and created my own book.

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	Quote: Here's a simple, straightforward example. There are many others in the material in my blog. Support is at 1800. I doubt there's anything new here, whether one follows VSA or Wyckoff or SMI. But when I see the retest of support with far less trading activity, that says to me "We're done". And I know they're not lying because of what happens to price. Effort, result. It certainly "looks" simple and easy, but one man's exit signal can be another man's entry signal. I mean why did you not go long where you closed out? You said support was at 1800, so would this not be a valid entry then?

Yes, it would be. I didn't because I was tired. When I get tired, I tend to do stupid things. I don't have to make the maximum number of points every time I trade. The market's there every day.

As for my "homepage", I don't have one. Home is wherever my stuff is, and at the moment, my stuff is here in my Blog. I'll look into whatever I posted in my profile, though.