hypo - I can relate, and not. You are trading with the immediate trend, and trying to catch it as early as possible. 1 minute bars make sense for that. I trade mini-reversals, mostly, in a slightly larger timeframe, or try to catch bigger reversals at highly reliable pivot zones. Example: bring up a five minute chart for today of the QQQ or NQ and overlay a 200 period simple moving average. You should see two major intraday reversals within a few cents/ticks of this resistance line, at about 11:45 and again right at 2PM. These were where I really wanted to go short today, but missed both entries by a tick. I then find myself needing to chase in the direction of the new trend, which I hate to do. With these clearly defined resistance zones, I can put the order in, set a stop a couple points beyond them, and then go have lunch.
You could just as easily trade these zones from an hourly chart, using a 20ema, but the entries won't be as precise as on the five minute chart, so ratcheting down to the smaller time frames for precision entries helps, once you know the lay of the land from a larger perspective. If you live at the 1 minute chart level, you don't know enough about what is going on in the larger world around you to be able to knowledgeably discern the "real" trend.
Throughout the day, I constantly flip from 1 minute charts to 5,10,15,30,60 and daily charts, just so I have the perspective I need for the setups that I like to trade, which are most clearly observable from the 5 minute chart.
Hope this helps.
Phoenix |
