Quill,
With beginning investors in mind, I’ve been experimenting with charts using daily vs weekly vs monthly bars on the theory that, since market-time is fractal, it shouldn’t make any difference in results over “the long haul”.
E.g., chart the slave camp manager and CIA collaborator, AAPL, and plot a 3-year chart with weekly bars. A person would have had to have held from Aug '20 to June '21, not making a penny, as the stock went sideways. Talk about “watching paint dry and grass grow”. That’s just crazy. An “investor” would have died of boredom and/or found another hobby long ago. Meanwhile, a “trader” could have zipped in and out and banked money.
At the other end of the charting/time-frame spectrum is the intraday stuff with 1-minute bars or 5-minute bars or even tick charts and holding-periods of a couple of minutes to maybe an hour or so. Those charts make sense to me, and that kind of trading is fun. But that’s clearly ‘trading’ --not ‘investing’-- and nothing a beginning investor with a day job should attempt.
The obvious compromise I keep coming back to is charts with daily bars and a 1-month lookback. (Not 2 months or 3 months as you prefer.) That template makes for clean, uncluttered, easy-to-read charts. But the downside is this. Using them is not weekend gig. If entries and exits are to be crisp and timely, the charts have to be reviewed nightly, so orders can be set up for the next day, though there is one workaround, which is to base one’s investing on mutual funds instead of stocks and ETFs where their EOD pricing means one just has to review charts and get orders in before market close, which is something a worker with a day job could do on his/her lunch hour.
There are about 137 mutual funds that can be traded daily without paying a short-term penalty, and some of them have no minimum, initial-purchase amounts. So, I need to do the write-up I’ve been putting off. (Yeah, yeah, I know. You hate mutual funds. But I’ve made serious money trading them, and they do provide beginning investors with a low-cost, low-effort way to gain market experience.)
Arindam