[DbPhoenix]

	Quote:	rodney
	First, in what specific ways are you " monitoring traders' behavior when those keys levels are approached." ? Second, if I hear you correctly, you choose again and again to focus on market flow, and not dwell on a particular bar interval or bar close. That makes sense. If I interpret VSA correctly and can oversimplify VSA, then "market flow" is composed of a balanced interpretation of what is happening in the background as compared to what is happening as the current bar forms. Can you elaborate some more on how you read "market flow" as price approaches support and resistance?

The whole VSA thing has become much too complicated what with TG and SMI and so forth, so I'll just set all that off to the side and leave it to someone else to sort out.

People hate it when I suggest they go read something, but for five days I posted my prep and my post-analysis to my Blog. Perhaps all of that will help you. Otherwise, I determine potential S&R beforehand, then I watch how traders behave when those levels are approached. Is price driven down rapidly to support where it then makes a single print and bounces violently? Does it glide in to support and bounce gently along? Does it hammer away at it again and again as if trying to break through a door? And what's the TICKQ doing all this time? What's going on with volume? Is there a classic decline on the retest, if any? Do buyers pile in as expected, or do we begin a search for a new equilibrium (or "value") level? And sometimes, nobody shows his hand, and the only thing to do is wait until somebody does, then look for an opportunity to enter, usually that first pause after the excitement begins (which one will likely miss if he's looking at a too-large bar interval).

	Quote:
	I don't want to over complicate this. On the other hand, I don't want to miss what you are saying. As you approach a "decision point," is there some over-riding anchor point from which you are interpreting this constant flow of new price information? When you say to yourself, - based on this new flow of information - my earlier expectation is not developing. Or when you say to yourself, my earlier expectation is developing. What are the decision-time "signs of flow" that you are looking at ? Are there specific signs that must be in place? Is your "decision time" interpretation of flow any different than the classic VSA signals - such as volume, range, close, prior swing highs, etc that are discussed so much on this board?

I probably don't understand what you're asking since I can't think of anything to add to what I said above. If support is not found where I expected it to be found, then I wait for the market to tell me where it is. But rarely is it in a much different place than I thought it would be.

As for the "classic VSA signals", assuming you mean VSA rather than TG-VSA, whatever has to do with a bar is not all that important to me, much less where it closes. Once one gets into all that, he may as well trade candle patterns and save everybody a lot of time. Nor do I buy into the conspiracy-manipulation attitude. That can easily put one into a self-defeating mindset in which every aggressive move may be a trap of some sort, and by the time he figures it out, the opportunity is past.

Buying pressure and selling pressure -- or demand and supply, if you will -- are continuous. The balance between them is dynamic and never-ending. One can partition all of this into bars and try to determine where the imbalances between buying pressure and selling pressure lie within a particular bar, or even a series of bars, but so what? What is important is the flow, the waves of buying and selling pressure, the waves of rising and falling support and resistance. I could try to copy out some of what Wyckoff says about all of this from his tape reading course, but really the best way to understand it is to create a chart with no more than a 1m interval and just watch it as it moves back and forth between support and resistance. And by "just watch it", I mean just that. Don't worry about what you're going to do about whatever it is you're looking at. Don't worry about where you'd enter or where you'd exit or how much money you'd make or whether you'd have been right or wrong to do whatever. Just watch. Like fish in an aquarium. If that seems only slightly less exciting than watching concrete harden, then collect the data and replay it later at five or ten times normal speed. You can do an entire day in little more than half an hour.

None of which may have anything to do with "classic VSA", of course, but I didn't want to ignore your question. On the other hand, if one wants to understand the "background" and whether it signals strength or weakness, I can't think of a better way of doing it. And it won't cost you anything.

And one more thing. Learning while doing if "doing" means doing with real money is not an absolute good. If you don't have a consistently profitable strategy and you're not limiting yourself to the setups within that strategy, then you're not trading, you're gambling, and the longer you "work" this way, the longer it will take. If you don't have all of this yet, then stop. Put your money back in your pants and learn your business. There's plenty of time. The market will be there long after you're dead.