DbPhoenix

Well, assuming that there's no one there who'd be willing to act as a "mentor", much less a coach (even if you'd want that from anybody there), don't be embarrassed to take baby steps. If you're interested in the equities market, at least in part because it appears to behave in a similar fashion to the bond market, then consider an ETF that's equity-based, such as the QQQQ, DIA, or SPY. You won't have to devote your weekends and evenings to stock research, you won't have to sweat out those portions of the day when you can't watch whatever it is you traded (you're going to have difficulty getting a feel for how the market behaves if you're not there), and you can trade any of these just as you'd trade their e-mini equivalents, in the event you ever want to try futures; that is, you can daytrade them (which I do not recommend), swing trade them, or take positions in them. Plus the amount you risk can be much smaller, and you can scale in and out of positions, if that appeals to you.

After reading your initial question and the responses you've so far received, I'm still wondering why you're not trading something you know. Or are you not trading? What exactly do you mean by "work full time on a taxable bond trading desk"?

I heartily agree, though a new thread is not necessary. Any questions directed toward me with regard to trading can be posted to my Blog (see below). I will also be happy to address any questions regarding Wyckoff's Wyckoff as opposed to SMI's or VSA's Wyckoff. At the same time, I ask that neither I nor my trading nor my Blog be discussed here. None of it has anything to do with SMI nor with VSA.

According to Eiger, yes, it is incompatible. Again, if you want to learn VSA, then learn VSA the VSA way.

Yes, I did. But you're clearly having difficulty doing so, and you're not going to get the help you need on a thread whose denizens believe that trading off such an interval is "crazy". Therefore, again, if you want to learn VSA, learn VSA the VSA way, and that includes avoiding the interval that I use.

You're showing me a picture of apples, then asking me to explain the character of oranges. You are also asking me, again, to explain something non-VSA on a VSA thread. I suggest that you go back to post 138 on this thread and collect all the similar posts here and on the RT thread and study them. If you still don't understand what "drying up" at support or resistance means, then I will be happy to try again. But please do not ask me this particular question again on this particular thread.

As I've said several times, the target remains the same. The only difference is where and when one enters. Either one enters at support/resistance or he waits for n minutes for some other signal of some sort. Granted that entering in such a fashion requires a certain sensitivity to the nature of the trading activity and the relationship of that activity to price action, but it is at bottom no different from the relationship using any other temporal reference.

Actually, it's not a matter of semantics but of accuracy. For example, Eiger states that when Wyckoff discussed absorption he did it with daily charts (in caps, as if to emphasize the point), and that's true as far as it goes. However, he also discussed it with regard to intraday activity as well. Wyckoff also provided certain criteria for detecting absorption in real time. With regard to the activity that took place on the 20th, those criteria were not met. Detecting the "absorption" after the fact is as easy as all hindsight analysis (even though it technically was not absorption), but that's not what the blog is about. Similarly, he could not understand why anyone would take a short position on the 19th against a "background of strength", even though the day was worth over 50 ES points on the short side. I don't much care where the analysis comes from either. However, it must be understood that I'm not teaching VSA and that this VSA thread is not teaching Wyckoff. Therefore, when someone posts to this thread that Db says this and Db says that and how do I reconcile that with the content of this thread, then it should come as no surprise that the responses take on the character of Db is wrong about so and so and look at what Db missed. Add to that all the incorrect information regarding Wyckoff which only adds to the confusion. If you want to learn VSA, then I suggest that you focus on VSA. If you focus instead on MP or whatever and then expect someone here to reconcile the two for you, you may not get the hoped-for results, particularly if the individual attempting to explain does not have a thorough understanding of MP. I suggest also that you avoid any chart with a bar interval of less than five minutes. An even longer bar interval may be best for you. You'll just have to experiment. You will learn eventually that there is a great deal of difference between real-time trading and hindsight trading and that a diet of being told what you should have done goes only so far. If you want to learn how to trade in real time, then you're going to have to trade in real time, preferably on paper. Every day. All day. You aren't going to get very many epiphanies from analyses that are all in the past tense.

Smart post, CW. But with regard to your third point, I'd like to amplify it a bit by adding that there are several types of risk. Mamis enumerated three: price risk (which is the one most people think of first), information risk, and time risk. The first two have an inverse relationship, i.e., the less price risk one wants to assume, the more information risk he must assume in the bargain. In other words, if one wants the best price, he's going to have to forego the comfort of having all the information he wants regarding whether or not the price is in fact the best one. If he waits for more information, he by definition will not get that best price. For example, if price bounces off support and one waits five or fifteen or sixty minutes to buy, he will not get the same price he would have gotten if he had bought when price bounced off support in the first place. If one wants another example over a longer timeframe, many people apparently are still waiting for confirmation of a bear market before selling their stocks, even though the market topped out long ago. The confusion over "signals" on a smaller-interval chart remains and is likely a Gordian Knot. For some people, any hesitation is a sign of weakness, much less a retracement, even if the retracement is only a tick or so. But over the years I've found as much confusion over the difference between a retracement and a reversal regarding daily and weekly charts as I have intraday charts.

Be happy to. If Eiger hadn't brought my blog into it, I wouldn't have made the post. In any case, if Eiger wants to provide real time VSA commentary on ES in this thread, that's great. As I said, that would be of great benefit to those who are interested in learning how to apply VSA in real time. Whether it takes place in a blog or a thread is not important.

Given your references to "the blog", and given that my blog is the one you're referring to, I feel compelled to respond to some of these remarks. What Sebastian does or does not say -- or anyone else, for that matter -- is not particularly relevant to the content of my blog since I make no effort to teach "VSA". It is only logical that one misses what he doesn't see, and one misses a great deal by focusing on summary bars, and the longer the interval of the bar, the more he misses. But, again, whatever bar interval one chooses is entirely up to him. First, "absorption" was not missed on the "small time frame" (which is distinct from a short bar interval) chart. I'm more interested in addressing what's happening in the chart, not what buzz word to call it. And unless I'm mistaken, you didn't bring it up at all until after the fact. This is of no benefit to anyone having to make a RT decision. Second, Wyckoff for intraday trading used a tape reading notation system, a form of P&F, the interval being determined by price behavior. He did not use 5m charts or 15m charts or 60m charts. In fact, unless one considers his intraday notation system to be a chart, he did not use intraday charts at all. What he was focused on was buying and selling waves, not bars. No, because short off an upwave to resistance and long off a downwave off support is the nature of intraday trading, a central tenet of Wyckoff's. As for making the point "later", I said at the time that I was stopping for the day because I had other things to do. I also pointed out in my commentary IN CAPS that the comments made for the period of my absence were hindsight remarks. Your "spring" (not a Wyckoff term) began on the 17th. Of what relevance was it to intraday trading on the 19th? You are again confusing a small bar interval with scalping. Again, the small bar interval enables a more precise entry, assuming that one has done his homework with regard to support and resistance, and the position is held until the wave ends, whether that occurs in minutes or in hours. You're once again confusing intraday trading with EOD trading. Wyckoff's intraday trading was via the tape. He read the flow continuously since the flow is itself continuous. And you apparently missed the "spring" in both the ES and the NQ that occurred shortly after the open yesterday and which resulted in a 40pt move in the NQ. Though perhaps you posted your notice of it somewhere else. Clearly you don't understand the point of my blog, which is to call attention to the features of the territory so that whoever is trying to draw an accurate map can do so. It is not to make calls or to tell people where to enter or where to exit or what their targets should be or otherwise teach How I Trade. Most of all, it is not hindsight quarterbacking, telling them what they should have done or ought to have done, what was "classic" or "textbook" or "obvious". Given my general lack of interest in VSA and your devotion to it, I am sure that those who are equally interested in VSA and in learning how to implement it would greatly appreciate your opening up a blog yourself and explaining to interested traders what is going on in VSA terms throughout the day in real time.

While this may be true in a general sense, it is not true when one gets down to specifics. There are important differences between Wyckoff and Williams, though there may be fewer differences between SMI and Williams (which makes sense given that Williams took the SMI course). And the differences between Wyckoff and Williams are important enough to make them practically distinct. Therefore, anyone who reads Undeclared Secrets or any of the material put out by TG should not assume that it all comes from Wyckoff. Only in the most very general way does any of it come from there.

Of course one can. Just zoom out.

Don't worry, I'm not confusing anything. But debating volume on a thread that's devoted to it is probably not the most polite course to follow.

Price reigns. If "professional" money is buying, price will rise. Eventually. If it's selling, price will fall. The amount of trading activity (volume) can be irrelevant. For example, if price hits support or retests support after what appears to be a selling climax, volume can be huge and price doesn't fall, or volume can be slight and price doesn't fall. What matters is that price doesn't fall, i.e., selling pressure isn't there, or it's countered by a more-or-less equal amount of buying pressure. "Volume" bars can actually be a distraction if one attaches too much importance to them. At best they are a measure of participation. What is more important is the behavior of price. If this presents what appears to be an insurmountable obstacle, take volume off your charts for a while. Forex traders, after all, have to do without it entirely. To say that on a VSA thread, though, is probably heresy . . .

Your question may not be answerable with regard to VSA since VSA doesn't address support and resistance -- other than in a general way -- except with regard to trendlines, and whether trendlines provide support and resistance or not is debatable. But if you're asking about RT trading with the bars and bar signals, then, yes, that would be interesting to see.

Rather than take the thread off topic again, I'll suggest that you look over the running commentaries I've been making regarding each day's trading in the Dailies section of my Blog (there are only eight of them). This will enable both of us to be specific about what and where and when rather than end up with the usual bumper-sticker response.

What interests me is the pre-planning, not the "call". Eiger, for example, makes a tentative effort in this direction in his last post, regarding the supposed "spring". However, it's not "just for fun". Or shouldn't be. This is the business of trading. One has to look not only at one possible scenario but all possible scenarios AND decide in advance what he will do in the event of each. It would also be helpful to read what principles are illustrated by each scenario. This is how one learns the principles. Or one can wait (and I'm not referring to anyone in particular) until it's all over and say Ah! Here's what I did based on one of the possible scenarios (which I didn't happen to address at the time). The last is common amongst those who sell services of one sort or another. Incidentally, from a Wyckoff viewpoint, one would have gone long two days ago.

Though I haven't read the first thread (sorry), it appears that the locus of interest is the software rather than VSA itself. Even so, VSA appears to be much more interested in bars than in flow, which is perhaps what distinguishes it most from Wyckoff's emphasis. So I'm not surprised that there's not more interest. It is, after all, off-topic.

This thread is about VSA, not about How I Trade, and your post is even more off-topic than my response to Rodney. Remember that we got here due to a point that I made to Eiger regarding the strength that he missed due to the bar interval he chose. So the arc did begin in VSA-land, even though it took an off-ramp somewhere along the way. So please address all this in my Blog. For now, I will point out again that it all depends on support and resistance. These are the same regardless of the bar interval chosen. There may be "loads" of signals of one sort or another, but if they don't occur at support and resistance, i.e., those levels which "big money" themselves have created, then just ignore them.

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). 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.

Actually, there's no "evidence" that I'm doing it either. Unless one hires a mentor who will sit with him day after day and show him how to trade one on one and stay with him until he has demonstrated that he can do it on his own, then there's really no other way to learn it than through the principles demonstrated through hindsight analysis. Hindsight analysis is great for learning principles. That's pretty much what books are all about, whether the subject is trading or something else. And hindsight analysis is fine for backtesting, either manual or computerized. But at some point, one has to test forward, one has to implement these principles in some sort of trading, preferably simtrading first, then real trading. He then learns whether the principles are theoretically true but practically -- at least for him -- crap. And if no one can demonstrate that these principles are in fact useful and useable, then he can assume that the "principles" are crap in the absolute. So when someone can do nothing more than tell you what you should have done, you have every reason to be skeptical, just as when someone is vague and general and tapdances a lot. It has to make sense. It has to be logical. If it isn't, and it doesn't, then avoid resorting to faith, keep your wallet in your pocket, and continue searching.

I won't argue the point. But whatever is "on average" is of no relevance to one's success in overcoming these tendencies unless one uses it an excuse not to try. Again, a "small" bar interval does not necessarily demand a small target and small profits. The task is to buy support and sell resistance unless something intervenes that forces one to change his tactics. If one grabs small profits, it will have to be because he wants to and not because he has to or because everybody does it.

The process of making the most of a given move may not necessarily be easy, simple though it may be. However, whatever personal idiosyncracies prompt one to take only a portion of the profits available have nothing to do with what profit opportunities the market provides.

After twenty years at this, I no longer have anything to prove. But those who want to play have my best wishes. Or condolences, as the case may be.