Are you trying to trade or are you trying to predict? This is a serious question and there is no intent to troll or bait into an argument, but to actually help.

For instance, if you have a level you want to trade, such as an upside pullback, are you just stepping out and buying as the market pulls back to your level (regardless of the selling pressure) or do you wait for some kind of confirmation before you go long? In this question, it may almost seem as if I am asking the same thing but there is a very big difference. One type is stepping in front of trains, the other is going with momentum.

S/R, breakouts, trendlines, pivots, magic levels, whatever... they all work. BUT your method has to be consistent and systematic or else there is too much room to sabotage yourself. You also cannot just blindly place your orders in front of the market hoping and praying your magic line will stop the market. You want to see the market stopping at your level or at the very least slowing down BEFORE you enter the continuation play for the pullback. This is what "trade what you see, not what you think" really means. I hope this helps.

Thanks for the advice! I never try to pick the tops and bottoms, I normally wait for it to move in that direction but it seems it'll go my way for a couple of ticks max then quickly revert and stop me out every time. Doing a little better this morning but still down overall.

If it's doing the exact opposite of what you expect every time, you need to try doing the opposite. Consistently getting stopped out is almost as difficult as consistently hitting profit targets. The solution may be as simple as not doing what everyone else is doing and trading against the retail masses.

Trading is just a professional version of rock/paper/scissors or some variation of it. If you see a very obvious level of support that has been tested repeatedly (rock), then you and everyone in the world can see it and the assumption can be made there are stops on the other side of that level. You need to play the break of the level (paper) as people get stopped out. As the level breaks, there will be times where a momentum dies out or someone with deeper pockets than you stops the market and a fake out occurs (scissors) as the market moves back into the original level and the breakout traders (paper) get stopped out. It is just a never ending game of fish eating smaller fish and those fish getting eaten by bigger fish. It is your job to recognize who is eating who and to go with it.

Funnily enough, this is analogy makes the most sense.. I've now somewhat changed my strategy and am using a 750 tick chart to get the overall picture and major areas of S/R and a 150 tick chart for entries. I'm looking for key areas and patterns (wedges etc) and trying to buy and sell within the range and eventually ride the breakout.. fingers crossed I can get this down.

Changing the tick size/timeframe could fit better the ratio of your strategy/edge but if you don't understand the structure of the market and the context of price and volume, imho, you will never get over your struggle.
If you understand context every edge, including the most ... ehm .. funny, like EW, works, becouse you will clearly understand when and why it will work and, more importante when and why it will not work; the funny thing is that if you understand the context you are trading, you will soon discover how unhelpful EW or similar stuff are.

check out @Feibel treadh to understand the basics of PA/Volume, @DionysusToast stuff and webinars to understand the structure of the market

good luck

I think you've hit the nail on the head... there are literally countless ways of doing this, but everyone who is making it happen has pretty much developed their strategy by culling bits and pieces of various methodologies and their own insights until it becomes their own. What makes sense to one trader might not work for another.

I struggled with this for a while; I erroneously thought that if I could only copy what was working for someone else that I would be on my way... and got torn up LOL I got past that pretty quickly, realizing that I was going to have to put in the time and effort to find out what works for me.

And for me, it's price action, structure and building my knowledge and intuition about market participants. I discovered that Wyckoff and VSA resonate with me. Mechanical systems, Fibs, Elliot waves, insert method here... none of those made sense to me, just not in my blood, but people can and do make those things work for them.

Whatever you end up with will likely be an amalgamation of a few different approaches that make sense to you... let the homework begin! Good luck!

Also, the fact that every futures trader I chatted to, read about, listened to all talk about market participants and learning when the big players are in control tells me I need to try and work this out..

Alright team,

Staying on the topic of "needing guidance", can someone tell me if this is a correct Wyckoff setup?

1. Accumulation in the range.
2. Shake out of stop losses
3. Spring (?)
4. Gearing towards a breakout?

... or have I got this concept completely wrong??