@Nebuchadnezzar_II You told me I didn’t know what I was talking about, then admitted you didn’t understand what I meant by market structure. I’ve been studying and trading for ten years. That doesn’t make me infallible, but you could have asked what I meant before dismissing the explanation.
There’s a process behind what I was describing:
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Start with the weekly chart. Identify the significant swing highs and lows. Higher highs and higher lows indicate an uptrend; lower highs and lower lows indicate a downtrend. Mark the major support and resistance zones associated with meaningful reactions, rather than every little fluctuation.
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Move to the daily, then the four-hour. Refine those zones and examine how the smaller structure fits within the larger one. Is price continuing the broader trend, correcting within it, or showing evidence of reversal? A four-hour decline can exist inside a weekly uptrend. That context matters when interpreting a smaller move.
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Wait for price to reach a relevant area. Support isn’t an automatic buy, and resistance isn’t an automatic sell. Watch whether price rejects the zone, consolidates around it, or breaks through. A marked zone gives you somewhere to watch for a setup.
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Wait for confirmation before entering. For example, at resistance you might see a shooting star with a long upper wick and a close near its low, or a bearish engulfing candle whose body engulfs the preceding bullish body. At support, a hammer with a long lower wick or a bullish engulfing candle can provide a potential signal. These need context and a completed candle; a pattern forming halfway through the candle can disappear before it closes.
Confirmation can also come through structure: price breaks a relevant swing low, rebounds into the broken area, fails to reclaim it, and turns down from a lower high. The bullish equivalent is a break above a relevant swing high followed by a pullback that holds and renewed buying. Define which signal and timeframe your strategy requires. None guarantees the outcome.
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Establish the risk before executing. Identify what invalidates the setup, where the planned stop belongs, and where the next relevant zone could limit the target. Calculate position size around the loss you’re prepared to accept, allowing for costs and possible slippage. If the confirmed entry offers too little potential reward for the risk, pass. You don’t have to chase every move.
Afterward, record and review the results. One winner doesn’t prove a method works, and one loser doesn’t prove it fails. You evaluate the process across trades, including costs.
That’s the basic framework I was getting at. The swing points establish structure, the zones identify relevant areas, and the price action supplies a possible entry trigger. Drawing another hundred parallel lines doesn’t explain how you’re making those decisions.
You were free to criticize the instructor’s marketing. I recommended tutorials I found useful because they taught foundational concepts that are important to serious traders like always having a record of your psychology in a hand written journal. I didn’t endorse every sales claim on his website. You still needed to address what I actually explained.
I laughed at the charts I saw in the other thread, and that clearly rubbed you the wrong way, but being offended doesn’t establish that I don’t know what I’m talking about especially when you admitted you didn’t understand the concept you were dismissing.