Some pretty good advice here V8. If you can find a good mentor...

Some pretty good advice here V8. If you can find a good mentor it will shorten the learning curve dramatically. I tried one but he was absolutely hopless so choose wisely. Rather than worry about stops you need to learn to recognise settups and only take an entry when you see a settup, then you place stops to get you out when you know the settup has failed and you were wrong. No need to trade every wiggle and if you miss an entry just wait for the next one.

Be warned, the index traders are masters at their game and will run your stops every chance they get. Try pulling up a 2 min chart for XJO/SPI during the day with just price, volume and your fib tool. Don't trade it just watch where the pivots and reversals occur, see what price is doing, see what volume is doing, see what the fib levels are. Pisano Fibonacci is your friend here. Over time you'll see patterns emerge.

Rule No.1 = the trend is your friend. Don't trade against the trend as the surprise big moves are in the direction of the trend. In your NDX example above the dominant trend on the Daily chart is up and has begun to accelerate as you can see in the chart below. I wouldn't be looking to short the bull but would be waiting for long entry settups on the daily. By reversal on this chart I meant a break to the downside of this trend and then a back test to give a lower high before looking for short entry's




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