The list below shows how we are doing so far and a simple explanation of what we’re doing to improve things further.

Trading the lower timeframe intraday charts have been a necessary route for us. It has provided lots of chart time and many trade opportunities on an almost daily basis.

However, it is time now to increase the fund at a higher rate by taking the significant lessons learnt from day trading and move to the higher inter-day chart levels. (Rather than trades being open for a few minutes to a few hours, with the necessary stops and targets that represent that timeframe, we will be trading wider, and therefore a trade could be open from an hour up to a few days).

Most traders cannot trade lower timeframe charts successfully. Very few that I can see make it into a highly profitable enterprise. Why is this?

There are several reasons. The obvious is that with such charts a trader is more vulnerable to short term, and occasionally unexpected, news releases.

Secondly, markets spread can have an inordinate effect on a traders account when trading in the lower dimension.

Thirdly, and a reason that is not immediately obvious to most day traders is that the size of individual bars relative to spread invalidates many opportunities to use measured move targets.

As a discretionary swing trader, that final reason is more significant than I could have envisioned.

To try to illustrate the point the following is an excerpt from a trade taken yesterday and published as it occurs on Skype.

“The 4 hr and even the 1 hr allow measured move trades of a single bar.

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A live example (not crucial if you like the price action or not at this stage).
Using the ruler or the fib tool, we have a potential stop and target.

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However, if we copy the fib and move it up to match an improved stop position, we get our revised entry point. The stop in this example is just slightly above the high of the relevant range; this works even better on the 4 hr, but I have the 1 hr as a template too.

I would trade the 1 hr on the same markets as the 5 min. I am expanding the possible range of markets only on the 4 hr.

There are many ways to approach the measured move; this is simply how I went about trading this one.

To complete this train of thought. On the 4 hr and often the 1 hr a measured move can be a single bar or multiple bars. It can be a measure of the wick to wick, wick to close or close to close. With enough practise the best solution becomes apparent with a reasonable degree of confidence.

Of course, a measured move relies on the set-up.”

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Target reached for a 1.3R. (R means reward/risk, and in this case, the target was 1.3 times the stop position)