The three basic types of trades framework help you understand what you doing when you take a trade. It also gives you a way to frame the supply/demand dynamics of momentum, expanding or reversing markets. As a principle, we can use this framework with swings, gaps, lines or any other relevant marker sloped or horizontal. In this video of the recent NQ, we see a typical pattern of minor swings pushing and then letting all those people go “Taking Out The Cheap Seats” as it expands into a type 2 major swing. Once understood, you can even specialize in the type that resonates with you learning all its nuances or train in all three.
Month: December 2019
Riffing off of One Little Line
This is a clip from a recent Language of Markets Live session. The session was about Press Structures which show an agenda and then a supply/demand imbalance. In the first part of this video, I grab a live GBP/USD chart and show that when we can isolate simple structures on a chart, it can tune us right into how to trade it. These structures show you where an effort is made by buyers/sellers and where that effort can get reversed. Next, I use a mapped CAD/JPY that a member sent in to instruct how to see a swing level press structure and how that gives you a feel for what the buyers and sellers are doing in this market and where they are doing it.
Following Live: Theory Into Practice, December 2019
Last month we mapped and followed an oil and Aussie chart with simple swings and gaps and these are some of the lessons we learned from this: We saw how minor swings can break and expand and into a major leg. I did a recent post on this in “Taking Out the Cheap Seats“. We learned how mapping swings and seeing in swings can take out the intensity of a chart, thus relaxing us and changing our experience of trading.
This month we will map and follow USD/CAD and Gold Futures.
The Tough Love of Markets
After struggling with a period of frustration, a student recently shared a discovery: “Part of my learning is to join the fact that I will never be sure about a trade, that when I’m comfortable with risk and allow myself to be vulnerable and embrace loss, then, and only then, can I fully connect with what’s happening.” This led to her realization that profit is not the target, it’s the end result of joining.
This student’s personal insight is a beautiful example of the trader’s experience in discovering their personal lessons, which are unique to each of us. What’s your experience when you get stopped or are having a hard time trading? If you’re human, you’ll likely either bury the experience or try harder to avoid being wrong or to avoid the uncertainty that is inherent in markets and trading. You might search for a better setup or better lines or a better method or a better teacher. But have you noticed that no matter what you try, you come back full circle? Just like Peanuts’ Pig Pen could never stay clean, his cloud of dust perpetually following him no matter what he did otherwise. Trying harder only keeps you trying harder.
I spent over a decade doing this, all the while thinking I was learning—I’m stubborn that way. It’s all I knew to do. But the market is a patient teacher and will continuously teach us the personal lessons that we need to learn, at the heart of which lie the things that motivate us to try harder to not be wrong or to avoid uncertainty. The trick is not to try harder but to instead reach for and into our experience of frustration and aversion and accommodate it and welcome it as a gift. Because without it, without the frustration, we would not see the lesson in the first place and we would not then learn.