Starting it off.

Wow, lots of nice work, crew.

MSFT looks like it is getting ready for a 12+ year 'breakout'. MSFT! Give me a break. I guess the market likes all that NSA integration.

PCLN and AZO building up momentum. I watch these high flyers to see how the fast money speculators feel. Right now, they want to spend money.

One of the mistakes I think we make as traders is to not always step back and look at the layout, look at the obvious. We get so caught up in doing our analysis, we don't always take a look to see if the market is doing something obvious. I was 'lucky' enough to see this early because a) I had these sets on my chart already, and b) after the run right to the area I was watching I thought it might run out of gas, and I expected range trading (I just didn't expect any real sellers coming in, at least not right off the area) with stop games.

Take a look:


It's just stayed within those lines, with one bigger stop run, right to an outer division line. Now what? Is it done with this range? What about how it is acting like it is about to explode up and out?


Chart created on QCharts, courtesy eSignal

Jim, thanks for showing these sets.
I think one of my biggest issues is concentrating too much on a single area, without looking at obvious lines providing big picture perspective.

I always step back frequently (literally step back from the computer) and look at a few different timeframe blank charts, to see what I think is happening. Setup work is something I do after I come up with a trading idea.

As an aside, I recently saw a science show on the human brain, and it mentioned how changing distance and angle when viewing a situation/object literally changes the perspective for the brain, and can lead to insights. They were explaining how it is a real phenomenon having to do with how our brain operates.

Anyway, it's 'up against it' here, but it is also time to come out of the range (up or down, I just mean the time is close, statistically), so something should be happening soon, all things being equal. The obvious is the upside breakout and new all-time highs. But, it could fake up, like that down fake, then head down.

The least expected outcome would be to roll to the range bottom, so I am not writing that off just yet.

I call this action a 'sweet roll', but I doubt it will last. I hope it does, but I doubt it. It's such a nice area, too, from many aspects.

And if they gun it back up, this 58.25 area here is where I'd expect it from.

This might sum up trading since '09 as good as anything I have seen. I recall in '99 when I ran into my plumber and he told me he just folded his plumbing business and was now trading full-time. Looking at some of what I am seeing on YouTube I think we are getting there.



Source: http://slopeofhope.com/socialtrade/