Here is my trade today, 15M structure and 1M trigger. It didn't workout so good.

very difficult to short these days...the setup has to be more than convincing.

Well, here's the thing on this. I can see all sorts of things that deviate from how I might apply the methodology, but this is the stuff I cover in detail in one-on-one work. It's not that it is 'secret' or not mostly in the books, it's that it is detailed and this is a very poor medium to go through it, even if I did have the time and energy. I'm not looking for additional students when I say this, only pointing out that doing a detailed analysis of people's chartwork is not possible in here, even a very cursory approach is more time than I have. (Of course, that shouldn't preclude anyone from posting as iso has done here, and it may draw some helpful responses from other members, I'm only saying I can't do many critiques myself.)

That being said, here are some glaring issues I can see here.

This is a 60-min setup. With that I see two options that I would be looking at. The 60-min setup, which I would only take if I thought this could make it to the 1.272 off that whole run up, which would hopefully line up near the lower //. On a 60-min setup most of the entry techniques from the book are applied on a 15-min, with the 'specialized' techniques, the twice lower techniques, being applied on the 3 to 5-min. The 1-min is way, way too fine for this setup. If I wanted to use this area for a very quick daytrade, essentially using the area for bias, then I would be using a much finer trigger, with a much smaller premise. For this, my trigger hit at 1002, with another at 1001.75, well before the 1-min trigger. I think the 1-min trigger here was too far away and wasn't a good trigger in this case, based on the price action. Using the trigger I chose, this was up 2.50-2.75 points before reversing, and it gave a clear price action clue that it was likely over near the scratch area.

'Context' was clearly telling me 'up' here. Betting on this area is a way of saying this was the 'lower high' W2, and the top was in for now. Based on the price action and this thing coming off a big ABCD, it was corrective down and impulsive up. It was a clear 5 waves into this area, off an ABCD. I can't make any of those premises fit a short here. Maybe I could play for an intraday reaction for a scalp, but that's not the methodology.

Where's the pattern? The ABCD is the hub of the wheel, the starting point. I don't play just lines. If I play outside the ABCD structure, which is something I do sometimes (but suggest students stick with ABCD's), it is because I am using other complex premises based on a lot of intraday factors like POC, VAH and VAL, DP, IB, GLOBEX levels, and many other things, and not just as price levels, as specific techniques I've developed in conjunction with the methodology.

On the GLOBEX chart, this blew out a sweet-looking bearish DB ABCD to the upside (look at the 60-min all sessions). This has me strongly bullish biased at the point of your setup, or at the least not bearish.

Overall this is not to say this couldn't roll over in here, it says that I'd need some heavy duty, time appropriate confirmation to get on the down side. In the meantime, I look for setups lower down to ride with the trend. Once a new trend is established, I then look to find setups lined up with that.

I hope this helps not only iso, but the rest of the readers. There is a lot, lot more I could say, but this has taken me like twenty minutes to pull together, check my numbers and notes on premises and such at that time, all during market hours. I can do this once here, but that's about it. It is for this very reason, the issues people struggle with, that I created the one-on-one. There is so much minutiae to the methodology it just isn't easy to explain what I've learned in 32,000 hours of work in a few lines...

caught you in a lame trading session :). joke aside, great explanation. Everybody should nail this to their foreheads.

Thanks. The sad part is that it is only a tiny fraction of what I see. It's so frustrating to me that there is so much to show, and so little medium to do it. And the medium isn't the issue, it's having people to work with who have done, or are willing to do, the tens of thousands of hours of work. And those are few and far between, and hence I must tailor what I do individually, for each person at their own stage of progress, with their own unique needs. No matter what I try, I always wind up right back to the approach I have right now...

Oops, and forgot to mention this hit at 10:00 AM, which was a big report time today. Many times, too, you will see an initial reaction off the reports, and especially if this is a bearish reaction in this current manipulated environment, they will come in strong right after that initial reaction and reverse it up. I generally don't hold through a significant report, one occasional exception being if I already have a lot of cushion and I am very strongly biased towards more continuation, and I'm willing to risk most or all of the gains, I might consider holding over. Overall, I think it is too risky, though.

Thanks for the reply's

Attached are the patterns

Blue is a 78.6 ABCD

Red is wave 1 displaced to the wave 4 low

and 2 more lines

Yes, but the methodology very emphatically only uses ABCD's as corrections to existing trends, and avoids the 'dacharts' and some 5-point pattern trader's approach of ABCD's with a trend like they were the plague. As I always drill into my students by repeating until they can't stand it anymore: "Where's the trend, where's the correction to that trend, where's the trend, where's the correction to that trend..."

Yeah, I have a lot of trouble trying to figure that out

Well, I know this sounds like an infomercial, but given how many hours I intensely work one-on-one with a student, you have to figure there must be a lot of detail to cover. This is one of the primary things we start on. Some students, the 'select handful', have done the equivalent of perhaps four or five full mentorships with me. If there wasn't material and concepts to cover that needed that much work, I don't think they'd keep working with me. Like any set of skills, let's say med school, it's one thing to buy all the books you need for the degree, and another thing to attend all the classes, take notes, ask questions, pass all the tests, and then do an intership and residency. Then all you are is a fledgling doctor with basically no experience on your own. Compare that to a doctor with decades of experience. So, as with trading, there is a lot to figure out, it should take years and years at best, and most traders try to reinvent the wheel instead of cutting down the learning curve as much as possible. Again, I don't want to convince a bunch of people to train with me, then I'd just have to tell them I don't have the time to take on any more students, but I want it to be clear that if one is making the same mistakes or not applying a methodology as it was designed, all that may do is ingrain those habits more deeply. A little bit of coaching may go a long way.

I have watched Tim a couple of times in seminars and trade shows and it seemed to me that he just enjoys teaching immensely. Maybe that's the motivation. I don't know. Maybe there are people behind him who are handling the whole marketing machine and are also invested in this. Tim can show some really great stuff as we all know. For me there isn't enough detail like in Jim's work for example.