There are essential concepts for TradeStation Traders to understand if they expect to be successful at trading. Read through this article for a clear understanding of the 3 vital aspects of trading; price action, volume (time segmented volume), and real time support and resistance. Of these three, price action is the most critical.

Price and time are what creates price action in the form of bars or candlesticks on your trading charts. Understanding price action is critical. If you try to trade against price action, you will lose money. Price is always right, and it never takes your opinion into consideration. Traders will all too often get sidetracked into searching for some magic indicator, many of which have tremendous lag. These typical lagging indicators are too far removed from price action to be the basis for making trading decisions. Traders that primarily use these lagging indicators can end up making correct decisions based on bad indicators which results in losing trades.

The second vital point to consider is volume. Volume is hard to understand if you use the typical volume indicators like average volume. What will often happen, for example in stock trading, is the first thing in the morning there will be a big influx in volume because the market has been closed over night. So in the morning you have this big volume spike that is hard to make any sense out of as it distorts average volume indicators making them inaccurate. During the middle of the day, when most of the floor traders leave for lunch, the volume really dries up and you have the lunch doldrums. Later, at the end of the day, everyone attempts to make their adjustments before the markets closes and there is another big volume spike. All of this distorts average volume indicators.

So, what does "average" mean if you are looking at these big spikes at the beginning and end of the day and this doldrums period during the middle of the day? You wind up getting a distorted view of market volume.

On top of that, if you happen to change the time frame on your chart, the volume will be different because you are looking at different lengths of time and thus different volume. In addition, volume analysis does not exist for most forex traders. Volume also looks very different from one symbol to another symbol since you might go from one symbol that trades 10 million shares a day, to another symbol that trades 10 thousand shares a day. Again, all of this makes volume very difficult to understand.

There is a way to make sense out of volume. If you are trading intra-day, the best volume indicator to use is "time segmented volume." Time segmented volume will take the bar you are looking at and compare it to the prior bars of the exact same time over the past month. For example, if you look at the 9:45 am bar on a 5 minute chart with time segmented volume, it treats every 5 minute bar as an independent time slice and compares the volume on this specific time bar against the same exact time bars over a 21 day period (which is one trading month). It will then display the average percentage of what that current 9:45 bar volume is in relationship to all the other 9:45 bars over the last 21 days. Now you have a true time segmented volume normalized indicator. You read time segmented volume normalized exactly the same across all time frames, all charts (even forex charts), and all symbols. It will look through the volume distortion issues we discussed above and will show you an accurate picture of volume for every single bar. You will see "true" volume without the distortions. Time segmented volume normalized really is the best volume indicator to use if you are trading intra-day.

When you want to analyze time segmented volume, you compare the candlestick bar against the volume bar and look for them to be consistent or divergent. For example, you may have a 200% of normal time segmented volume bar, but you look at the candlestick and notice that it started low and then ran up, say 2 times normal height, but then it pulled back all the way down into the bottom 25% of the bar when it closed. You can still have a small green body, but this pullback into the bottom 25% shows a divergence between the volume bar and the candlestick bar and tells you the volume was bearish volume caused by the bears coming in and reversing the direction of the price action. If you read volume in relationship to price action it will tell you a lot of very useful trading information. This is the key to really understanding volume, comparing the time segmented volume bar vs. the candlestick bar.

It is price action and volume action that creates the price bars on your trading chart and every chart shows support and resistance areas. When price is moving up 4, 5, or 6 bars in a row, and all of sudden it stops moving up, that might be from selling volume pushing the price the other way as the bears take over control. This price action change of direction is a resistance point. Support and resistance really is about where price changes direction.

Most traders only see support and resistance after the fact. It is really easy to look at something after the fact and say, "oh, had I done ‘such and such,’ that would have been a good trade." Hind sight is worthless in trading. The fractal channel displays real time support and resistance and shows in real time where these changes in price action happen, giving you a good visual illustration of where to place your trade entries. For instance; if price is moving down and stops at the fractal channel, meaning stops at a prior level of support, and then starts moving back up, this is a good entry point.

For this example once you are in a long trade, the fractal channel will move up with each new support point that develops, showing a series of higher support points (an up-trend). The fractal channel shows the direction of the trend with a green trend line to display these higher high support points.

Another useful purpose for seeing support and resistance is for proper stop loss placement. Most traders decide where they want to place their stop loss based on some arbitrarily dollar amount of risk. This really makes no sense from a technical trading stand point. What does make good technical sense is for you to place your stop loss underneath a prior support area for a long trade. If the support doesn’t hold, then you want to be out of that trade anyway. That is the proper placement of a stop loss. So the fractal channel becomes very useful not only for entries based on support and resistance, but for stop loss exit management too. The Fractal Channel allows you to place your stop loss based on support and resistance, and as you make profit in your trade, moving your stop as a trailing stop to lock in more profits. This support and resistance approach is an intelligent stop loss placement methodology.

The fractal channel also helps with position sizing. If you plan to make a long trade you know where the support is and your stop loss should be under this area. That distance from the entry price to the stop loss price is the risk per share which is the basis for good position sizing. You calculate your position sizing from using a certain percentage of your account balance divided by the stop loss risk per share amount and you come up with the appropriate position size for that trade entry.

Setting your stop loss below the support area and moving the trailing stop up based on support areas often allows the trade to run for quite a while before you exit the trade, which means more profitable trades. The last thing you want to do is exit a long trade prematurely when the fractal channel is still going up and still showing you are in a long trend. The fractal channel is a great tool in that regard.

The fractal channel assists the trader in all three important areas: trade entry, trade stop loss placement, and position sizing. Since the fractal channel tracks where price changes direction in real time you will see the best points to make your entries. By having real time support and resistance lines available, you can better manage your trade exits and know exactly the best technical placement for your stop loss. The price distance from entry to stop loss placement provides you the risk amount per share so you can properly calculate position sizing for each trade. By managing your trades this way on your TradeStation platform, you will be much more successful at squeezing a lot more profit out of your trades.