gold, page-22939

"Yes i once watched candlesticks closely , about 2 years . I found shooting stars and hanging men of some help at times."

Hi @obladiblada01 @AverageJoe
My sympathies are with you. I also know what it likes to lose a lot of money, be it huge unrealized paper losses or real capital (specifically the market crash of 2000 in USA after the biggest equities market mania in US market history). I mean, like hundreds of thousands of (US) dollars.
Yes, do take a break and regroup.

I was looking at @AverageJoe 's response to you, and your reply , and I think you may have missed his key point. So let me offer my 2 cents, and a few extra thoughts, which some might find useful.

I've mentioned here before that I lived and worked in NYC for almost 25 years until 2009, and had many opportunities to do things one doesn't have in Oz, such as to learn directly from sources not readily available here. For example, I attended a 4 week Class given by Steve Nison on Japanese Candlestick Charting in August 2001, and yes, it included those formations you mentioned above, and dozens more. (Nison of course introduced candlesticks to the West while working at Merrill Lynch, where I also worked, but I was in IT...never a banker / trader - sadly).

Another (more) important - and more difficult - one was trading psychology given by Mark Douglas, RIP, much more useful than the former...if you can adhere to it...which you (me, everyone ) must.

It's my experience that while some of this Japanese Candlestick Analysis may be useful, in commodities and currency trading these are generally *not* widely used, not by "big money".
I think I have a recollection of asking you what method etc. you did use, but don't recall the answer.

It's my pretty clear understanding that the method used by Pros is what is commonly called "Price Action Trading", a point AJ has made more than once (I follow him on HC), and also in his Post to you, I believe, either explicitly, or implicitly, whihc might have been missed.
This term has a very precise meaning in trading, thought it sounds generic, almost meaningless.
I just Googled the term for a laugh, and got: "About 463,000 results (0.28 seconds)"

So this is not a secret, I'm not making this up, and that would be my recommendation, if and as you regroup. I'm trying to follow my own advice (see below)
It will take much more than a few weeks, unless you have other techniques that work profitably for you consistently. If so, i.e. you do have other techniques, it would appear that something went wrong here in the area of Money Management { a separate but kernel discussion}, not whether you bought or sold at the wrong level, misread the market, whatever, which we all do.

By the way, those are of course Elder's famous three legs of the Trading stool (I'm sure you know this) - Psychology, Money Management and one's "edge", however formulated (the recommendation being understanding Price Action, on bare charts with no indicators, none). Alternatively: Mind, Method and Money, perhaps easier to remember. Use only two legs, the stool will collapse....actually, far worse than that.
To the three legged stool above, we should also add Trade Management (trade however understood, from intraday to, say, yearly or even longer - no put in bottom drawer and forget about it).

Most retailers immediately focus on the "edge" because it's the easiest - dealing with numbers of some kind, tangible....(while Psychology is really the most important and the most difficult, and generally ignored, or given a back seat): find some price derivative technical indicator(s), get a magic signal, make the trade, and there you go. If it doesn't work, find another, or many, mix them up, tweak the default parameters, optimize the mix of indicators to produce the desired result, maybe even backtest it over years of past data .... I don't believe that, but most do.

We see lot of these on HC - I've seen a Poster (a Heart) with perhaps a dozen indicators below the chart...and the Chart itself overlaid with MA's, pitchforks, Channels, trend lines, and more.
This looks more "scientific", but it's not. To say "cluttered" would be too polite. It's useless. Not to mention that none of it helps you with Risk Management, Stop Size (two sides of same coin), Potential Reward of the trade, Trade Management when in play, Exit Strategy and Risk Mitigation (booking profits as the market makes them available etc..). None of these indicators help with these points, none of them.
I said jokingly to the Heart - "I think you're missing the CCI (Commodity Channel Index)", and got the reply "You're right, let me add it" and he did.

I think you know all of this, but some who are new here might not, I don't mean to be condescending to you. I know you're experienced.

I also believe this (Price Action), and am indeed brushing up on my limited expertise in this right now, as I prepare myself to once again enter the highly predatory shark-infested waters of Commodities / Currency Trading in due course (I did play CME Futures in in the early 2000's after the crash - gold, oil, currencies - running totally blind - and ended up throwing in the towel for a very long time: out of markets for 10 years).

Back to candles: In the end the key candle patterns that count are very, very few (like, 2 or 3), are not necessarily Japanese in orientation (i.e don't have the exotic names), and are of course really only important at so-called "key levels" - typically old-fashioned Support and Resistance where one expects a greater probability of potential reversal - which Nison said, very clearly, are the most powerful feature of candles.
Interestingly, when some of these key candle patterns are "merged" or "blended" together, they dissolve into a handful of patterns which are reversal signals (and I don't mean Chart Patterns, nor do I mean Japanese Candlestick Patterns like a 3 candle Morning Star formation etc.).
In fact, maybe even as few as one key pattern / signal.
100 shares of NST to those who can guess what the pattern is! Ooops...that belongs on Betting Forum

I'm no expert, always trying to learn more, to practise what I've just preached above...it's an ongoing process. It's easier to say than it is to do....We all stray......
GLTAH
wombat53