" The man who has two watches never knows what time it really is."
After putting a lot of energy into trying to make HA Smoothed work for me, I had to admit that it wasn’t. So I scrubbed every chart template from BarChart other than the one below.
The MAs are ‘Triangular’, because I like their graceful “swoopiness”. But MA types are always ‘Chef’s Choice’, as are the parameters used with them.
I use the blue, 3-period line as a ‘heads up’ (that an entry or exit might be coming up). I use the green, 4-period line to define ST Support and Resistance. The red line is my “penalty line”. If I’m long, and if I have let prices close on me below the red line, I have mismanaged the trade badly, and generally for not having trailed a stop as I should have.
The volume bars --which are an important part of Candle Pattern Analysis-- are ‘Open to Close’. (Hence, Dojis show up as blue bars.)
The lookback period is 2 months, which I think is a good compromise between the chart being easy to read and having a sense of what the prior price action has been. But lookback periods and bar aggregation periods (minutes, days, weeks, etc.) are ‘Chef’s Choice’ as well.
This chart template is good for doing analysis when markets are closed. For actually executing trades based on the analysis, that will be an individual matter and will depend on which broker’s platform you intend to use. Same-same for order types, whether you trail stops, etc.
Arindam