I recently touched upon this in another article but wanted to expand on it more. 15 minutes or less is all you need to prepare for the entire day of trading. I used to spend hours upon hours of staring at charts, doing calculations, cross analyzing multiple timeframes and multiple markets. It was an all consuming life draining task each night. I knew of a lot of traders who did the same thing. I did not know any better so I thought that is what all professional traders did each night. Of course I also spent the weekends doing even more market prep for the coming week right?
We come to day trading with the expectation of financial rewards and financial freedom so we can enjoy more time with the family and friends. Unfortunately what we end up doing is trading in our job for a ball and chain that looks like a PC and Monitor. We are tied to it all day long, after the close, and on weekends pouring over chart after chart, kidding ourselves that this is what the pros do.
Fortunately for me, I realized that there’s a lot less to trading than most believe. Fewer traders know how to put it in it’s proper perspective. I map out the entire day in 15 minutes or less using 2 simple charts. I am done! I don’t spend hours doing homework. Our levels are spot on each day. When you understand how the markets work it’s a very simple process. You simply keep a notepad next to you during your market prep and write down a few key levels and that’s it.
Static levels come from the longer timeframe, they do not move during the day, they are set in stone prior to the open. The short term levels are dynamic and move throughout the day but are just as easy to find and trade off of around the larger static levels. If you take nothing else from this article, remember this: Trading is about knowing where the big money comes in and then trading around those levels using a shorter timeframe for execution. It’s really that simple. Static and dynamic support and resistance. Once you know how to identify these your trading will take on a whole new dimension and so will your profits.
We do our market prep live in our trading room each day. Nothing after the fact, all levels are posted BEFORE the market opens. Then it is a simple matter of trading toward those intraday targets using high probability setups and limited risk.
Good Trading!
JC
