When i was first looking to get stuck into trading i was trying to dabble into a little bit of everything and i did spend some time using Petefaders VSA method, and had a few successful trades with it. Personally, i see nothing wrong with his method of trading, and he is clearly very good at it and makes consistent money. He has a great way of teaching and the examples posted in the thread are a great way to catch on to the concept if your trying to pick it up on it…
I really can’t fault it if im honest… That said, the reason i strayed away from this method and stumbled across ICT teachings was simply because it became unpractical for me to trade his method since at the time i was working full time. His method says you should basically trade when volatility is highest in the market for the best setups and these occur during the London, London / NY overlap, and London close… This meant for me by the time i got home from work i would only be able to catch anything which occurred at London close time - i felt i missed too many setups. That plus the fact at work i had no access to any volume feeds really restricted my trading time…
ICT’s methods i have found a vast majority of them can be picked up and applied to crappy chart i can find on in the internet which made trading a whole lot more accessible… I still follow Petefaders thread but i’m no longer trading his methods. Its actually quite cool to see them post trades they’ve taken using their method which match some taken here, two completely different ways and reasons for entering a trade, but both wind up in the same trade, at around similar levels…
SanJ, thank you, that is exactly the type of input I was after!
So basically you think the ideas behind VSA are sound but circumstances make it impossible for you trade this way.
I’m lucky in that I work from home and am based in the UK so can trade all the high liquidity times of day.
I will keep up with my research on VSA and see if it offers support for ICT’s methods. If I can see a way of volume supporting OTE entries etc then you’ll be the first to know.
Reason: OTE on the 1H chart.
Bounce on 1.5580 institutional level
Smaller OTE on the 5 min chart
Stochastic divergence
UPDATE: I have closed the trade @ 1.5635. Banked 50 pips, a 1:2,5RR
Reason: Bernanke will have a speech in 15 minutes, and I have a 5% gain in account value, which is sufficient for me
we now have SMT divergence betwtween cable and fiber, I have gone long on the fiber at 1.2225, 25 pip stop, chart below shows SMT. I think the cable is the stronger pair but i’m hoping it wont matter as its a grail pattern on both. Good luck guys. (i’m risking 1%)
Good luck with the trade. I love your analysis with clear screenshots
I’m doing almost everything on iPhone so it’s difficult to post screenshots unfortunately.
I choose the GU pair because that was the first to retrace until the 79% level.
Unfortunately I didn’t have the change to watch the latest video yet (it’s not available for mobile devices), I think I can recognize the grail pattern. You can also see a (reverse) grail setup on the USDCHF pair for example.
What do you think of this possiblility? The first image below is a zoomed out view of the Cable daily chart. Sorry for the shoddy charts as I am not home and just making these from dailyfx while I have some free time at work. This chart we can see that price is in the sweet spot of a daily OTE to enter short (blue lines) as well as at a significant resistance level (black line).
This second image is a more zoomed in view of the daily chart. Here you can more clearly see a “grail” type setup on the daily with price retracing in the OTE sweet spot zone as well as type 2 divergence with the stochastic. In addition if today closes down we will have a fractal high formed with yesterday’s high. In my mind a lot will depend on how today closes, I will be watching…
Hey popinjay,
Check out the usdx as well… Its sitting right on an ote at the moment. People looking to go long on the fiber and cable should be cautious for the next two days…
Hey ScalperEU
You’re right they can pretty much appear all the time and all over the place. They key is to see when it is happening at a KEY S&R level. This alone will filter out a lot of the false signals
i see ya points guys, but is there anything helping me to know if it’s a valid smt?
assuming a bearish smt, fiber higher high, cable lower high. do i have to wait until fiber starts to fall from the higher high and correlation is back in sync?
cheers dude! to be honest i think cable was the better pair to go with. I took off half at 25pips and have let them rest go. Going to see what happens in LO tomorrow and decide if i should take the rest off. I think a few of us caught this trade.
Liftoff’s uncle Ben ;), 3 hour speech reflect
the true US economy, could not pump any fuel
to Dollar. Seems rest few days of the week will
be in favour of Cable & Fiber.
ICT has named the divergence ‘SMT’ for a reason - he calls it a footprint of ‘smart money’, i.e. the banks - hence smart money tool.
When you are looking for divergence see if say fiber is reaching up to a s/r level where there would sit stops, but only fiber is doing this, cable not reacting, usdx not reacting - guess what happens when those stops are sucked in - price goes back into sync.
After a while you will get to anticipate this happening in advance - try to imagine where it could happen, e.g.
look at todays 15 min on both, see how cable is now making an effort to reach the asian high, whereas fiber does’nt have the same legs, so tomorrow morning I’ll watch this, I’ll look for a reach to 1.5690ish -1.5720ish, if it leaves fiber behind then I’ll sell.
This area is also ote sell area on h1 (shrink you chart to see).
I’ll only do this if there is smt div at this point, if time zone is lo or nyo and if I get stoch div on 15min.
