I guess I need to keep the “how I trade” post at the top of the site and put in in flashing lights or something. I wrote that post to answer 95% of the email I recieve yet I still get the same questions over & over. I ‘d better hurry up and make a FAQ or something. Here’s the latest email:

Mike,

I read with interest your post from tonight. I have a question, if you don’t mind: how are you able to monitor so many stocks? Could you please describe the process a little bit? Do you use just the watchlist from briefing.com that you post each morning? And then do you manually scroll through the charts every 30 min. or do you have other fancier scans (cybertrader?, trade-ideas?) that monitor the narrow bars for you and alert you?

Thanks a bunch and great job today! Keep up the good work (and the blog)!

I’m pretty sure all of those questions are answered in my “Tools of the Trade — How I Work” post. The only thing that’s changed since I wrote that is that I’ve switched from 15-minute candles to 30-minute candles. I still use 5 and 10 period EMAs on the charts.

The short answer is that I load what I think are the most promising stocks into eSignal so I can easily track them. I also enter all the stocks of interest (gappers and others with *big* news) from Briefing.com into CyberTrader watchlists. The nice thing about 30 and even 15-minute candles is that they give you time to actually think and to look at a bunch of charts to find the good ones. You should read what Trader X has to say about timeframes. Here’s a snippet:

Maybe it’s a reflection of the me generation – gotta have it, gotta have it now! I am getting a lot of emails about trading with 15-minute and 5-minute charts. People don’t seem to have the patience for 30-minute charts.

I will repeat what I said earlier – a chart is a chart is a chart. A quality set-up will appear on all timeframes. But, you have to realize that trading on a 5-minute chart is different than trading on a 30-minute chart, even if you are looking for the exact same set-up.

First and most importantly, things unfold very fast. You have to be quick to analyze and pull the trigger. And, if you are looking at a watchlist of 20+ charts every 5-minutes, you are going to make A LOT of mistakes. You will take sub-par set-ups, you will miss really good set-ups, and you will probably neglect managing your open positions properly – which will cause you to give back gains, miss stops, and miss profit targets.

I highly recommend reading the whole article.

As I was saying… So during the first hour of the day I’m just looking through all the stocks on the watchlists and those which are popping up on the scanners. Trade-Ideas is invaluable for finding narrow-range bars. If that’s your goal you really need to take a look at their NR7 alert. It alerts you to any stock that passes your filter that’s making a NR7 bar on a 15 minute chart. So every 15 minutes I look at trade-ideas to see what it’s spitting out. You may also want to check out their consolidation alerts. As I find setups that I like I set alerts for them in CyberTrader.