I wouldn't be trading index futures if I hadn't read
John Carter's
Mastering the Trade. It's one of the best books written about the fundamentals of day trading futures, trader psychology and developing a thorough and professional trading plan. Carter is a very successful and seasoned trader and he knows his stuff.
Every trader wonders if there is a better method or technique to trading out there than he or she is using, and Carter does provide several trading "setups" (as he calls them) to consider and study. After studying these setups and writing or obtaining the indicators necessary to apply them (Carter oddly doesn't provide the code for the indicators) it seems that these setups are not that reliable. In fact, none of them seem any more reliable than, say, a basic moving average crossover system. I reproduced the three-bar-reversal indicator for tick bar range trading and it was amazing how many three-bar signals appeared when the run was ending, not beginning. The squeeze indicator produces so many false signals it was laughable.
Now this realization can either be disconcerting or encouraging. If Carter can become successful using lame setups like these, then perhaps setups in general are less important than we might think. Or perhaps Carter is using more filtering for these signals than he let's on. Either way, he doesn't tell us.