*** What would you prefer ? Long term trading or short term trading as it is not really matter what you target because its approach that matters a lot and the reason is whatever you prefer should be profitable for you. State of mind and performance pressure really let you put in lot of stress and you keep changing your mind again and again, But price will react the same way which ever method your prefer.
***Many of you are familiar with concepts of «overbought» and «oversold» market. Conventionally, if price is going up and momentum is slowing down, we see signs of overbought market, and, the opposite – when price is going down and momentum is slowing down, we see oversold market.***
Reason I am pointing out these facts because it is the way we always use to approach the market and such overbought/oversold situation occurs only when market is dominated by short-term traders. But let’s first get familiar with concept of domination. What doest it mean, that market is dominated by short-term traders? It does not mean that nobody is there except short-term traders, it means that they are the driving force for the market.
*** By the way, short-term trader does not necessarily mean lack of money on deposit. It only means that horizon of a trader is relatively small. In most cases, it’s short term traders who are responsible for initiative and liquidation breaks. ***
If you we see movement that is going to be highly volatile and starting from inside of the trading range, it’s probably a «cascading effect» - something that is created by «fear of missing out» - many traders are chasing this movement and will lead to fast auction, raising prices higher and higher. In auction market theory it’s called "initiative break", it means that something is happening very quickly, with significant expansion in volatility, and maybe – volumes. But volumes can be not interpreted easily in this case. When volume is increasing (or decreasing) inside of the trading range, this information can be misleading, because there are too many types of traders participating inside of the trading range – from algos to scalpers, and increased volume can be a result of those guys’ over-trading
*** What about "liquidation break"? This is the opposite to "initiative break". It occurs when traders who have been involved in the action (during initiative break) are closing their positions. Usually, volatility is also increasing, traders are scared due to some news announcement or they simply put their stops below similar levels again causing cascading effect. Really, there’s nothing new under the moon – traders often act like a herd, and they rarely try to find their own particular niche and instead do what is comfortable and conventional – say, buying on the moving market and selling on the falling market.
***Now, what if market makes quick break from outside of the range of the day? It is called «responsive break». More often than not, responsive breaks represent activity of other timeframe traders who are building their positions using high prices (of course, short positions). We should take into consideration that other timeframe traders are not too urgent – they don’t want to push price down here and now, they understand that market has opportunity to go down in medium term time perspective and they want to be in this movement, but they are interested to accumulate inventory before the rally, that’s why they are acting upon a good price, but not expecting to get good timing for their trades.
