It takes literally thousands of hours to feel confident in doing this and even then one will be thrown a curly. I think one can obtain an 85% success rate here given time and in real time full time management so if something changes one can get out fast 9/10 times.
I look at it his way, i have around 4k worth of hours up ATM and am amazed at what I didn't understand 3k hours ago, for sure I still have a long way still to go.
Anyway I consider the market a crowd of thousands of people, one cannot know every one of them personally well enough to be on pesonal speaking terms so one must employ a process to cull the chaff from the wheat....then once the interesting individuals who have a story and some sort of interesting life are identified one must then set about learning as much about them and only them with the aim of being on personal speaking terms.
of those new lot you will find character flaws and can cull further, you will also find while learning about them they will give away hints to other interesting individuals that you can learn about.
In the end you will have your own little crowd of interesting individuals all doing something but not every one at the same time....still this doesn't matter because you know each of them personally now like you know your relatives, each will hold their good and their bad points and you can in an educated way predict their behavior under most circumstances - utilizing technical and fundamental analysis to help.
So strangely said above and it takes one heck of a lot of hours of mind numbing fundamental analysis reading and technical analysis in culling and personal discovery of each.
Hint: head back 2 weeks in the daytrading thread and read forward till today and write a list of every stock each time mentioned against the name of who mentioned it and a short note on what they said. This will give you your first cull in a faster way. In 2 weeks time this list might be largely redundant, the list will morph through time keeping you very busy indeed if your serious.
When you understand why through your 'personal like' investigation of these stocks they did what they did you will be ready to pick their lows to a better degree, only time will improve on this skill.
