I have shown that there are 3 basic types of trade options related to market structures or lines. This month in our Language of Markets Live Sessions we put our focus on type 2 trades (Expand then continue). This kind of trade is like sitting outside of the crowd observing all the pushing and shoving and urgency, then calmly seeing where it all lands when the crowd gets confused. All of this is expressed in swings, in this post I use a Gold futures tick chart and a weekly NTES to study some of what makes a swing up, to see how the crowd’s urgency and subsequent confusion is expressed in price action.
Trade Craft
All Things Concerning the Language of Price
Following Live: Theory Into Practice, January 2020
This month we’re going to map and follow the E-mini S&P and EUR/USD with swings. Last month, we mapped Gold Futures and USD/CAD which I review in the video. In the review, we learned a few things that we can begin to take into our experience and future trades. We learned that the Gold landed right into the pocket of our major projected swing with an intense drop. By mapping and seeing the market in swings, the intensity was pulled out and the wave was easy to see. In USD/CAD we learned how the minor swings can pick up speed and the possibility of using gaps for minor entries along the way.
To Push The NQ or Not: The Three Types of Trades
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.
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.
Taking out the Cheap Seats, Minor Expanding Into Major
In previous posts, I showed how to identify swings and then taught how to make a further distinction of minor and major swings. With this understanding, we can come up with various ways to trade and read a market. In this video, I will show how to take advantage of a minor swing expanding into a major swing taking out the momentum players, the cheap seats. You can also see this represented by a Median Line set, like in the 90-minute oil chart from the “Following Live: Theory Into Practice” post.
Map Any Market in Any Time Frame, Part 3 of 3
Changes in price flow are signaled when swings are broken—when a downswing is broken to the upside, for example. Seeing and making these distinctions intimately connects us to the rhythm of a market and offers the trader greater flexibility in trade options. In this last part of our three-part series on mapping markets in any time frame, we look at the anatomy minor swings and Last Swing Broke.
Summing up the series, we learned how to use swings to map any market in any time frame. This is a practical tool that can be readily applied by a trader at any level.
Following Live: Theory into Practice November 2019
Every month I will pick a futures market and a currency market for us to follow. At the end of each month, I will review these markets to see what we can learn and pick 2 more to follow for the next month. This is where we take theory and ground it into practice. This month’s charts will be Oil Futures and AUS/USD. I had done some previous posts: Map Any Market in Any Time Frame and Do It With Gaps, so we will use these basic methods for structuring our markets.
How you approach this or any exercise determines what you will get out of it. My objectives for this exercise are: to train in isolating relative structures, learn to set myself aside and follow price, learn to change with change as the market flows, learn to learn from price flow itself. I will put this Following Live segment into our newsletter every month, so subscribe if you’re not already on the list and want updates on these posts.
Map Any Market in Any Time Frame, Part 2 of 3
This is the second of our three-part series on Mapping Any Market in Any Time Frame. In Part I, we learned how to structure markets using only swings. Simple enough, but markets are not static. They are dynamic systems. This means any effort at mapping market structure has to also be dynamic. This is price flow. So we follow and, in following, we develop a connection to a market’s rhythms and learn to change with change. This is fundamentally one of the most important lessons in a trader’s education.
In this video, I introduce the practice of following live markets and highlight the basic tools for developing this practice.