There are several schools of thoughts on this. Those who continually analyze the market to find opportunities and determine a reason to enter or stay out of the market, and those who look for methodical pre-defined patterns to enter the market. You should tread carefully, as I believe needing to always have a reason for why the market moved from A to B, or needing a reason for why a trade worked of failed, may lead to some psychological traps. This may be a sign that you need to be right about the market. You need to be careful not to get in that frame of mind. What is important is that when you are right, you make more money then you lose, when you are wrong overall. Plenty of traders are successful, even though they are wrong more times then they are right.

Personally, beyond basic market fundamentals, I think the reasons why a market does what it does is immaterial to me. What is important, is that it does what it does cyclically, continually, and repeatedly, with a signature that can recognize, measure and act upon. I let the pundits on CNBC pontificate as to the reasons why.

Thanks. My approach is to try to understand the underlying dynamics of the price movement. I want to understand how the market gets moved and what the real life events are that move price. It may be a fool's errand - it may, in fact, be better to not try to understand anything and just keep buying pullbacks until it stops working - but my opinion is that to gain a durable edge one must strive to have some insight into the actuality of "why" a trade worked or "why" it didn't. Thus my question about opinions of what happened ...