{"id":5073,"date":"2010-05-29T12:29:34","date_gmt":"2010-05-29T16:29:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.smbtraining.com\/blog\/?p=5073"},"modified":"2023-06-13T09:15:43","modified_gmt":"2023-06-13T13:15:43","slug":"going-old-school-the-value-of-keeping-charts-by-hand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.smbtraining.com\/blog\/going-old-school-the-value-of-keeping-charts-by-hand","title":{"rendered":"Embracing the Value of Keeping Charts by Hand"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I am going to suggest something today that will probably make 98% of our readers think I am completely insane\u2026 and the other 2% will only think I <em>might<\/em> be insane. Still, this one thing has done more to advance my chart reading than anything else I have done in 15 years of trading. Though it is time consuming and is probably one of the oldest of the \u201cold school\u201d practices, I have found great value in keeping price charts by hand.<\/p>\n<p>When I started trading, I didn\u2019t use a chart service or a computer program. There certainly were charts available, I just didn\u2019t know enough to know I needed them or even where to find them. Instead, I had a newspaper and graph paper and every day I would add one price bar to my charts for coffee, sugar, grains, meats and metal futures. After doing this for a while, I did eventually get a charting service, but I am sure those first few months of charting by hand laid the foundation for understanding the action behind the charts.<\/p>\n<p>Several years later, I had made the transition to daytrading S&amp;P futures and was struggling to make it work. My mentor at the time suggested I take a step back and start keeping a five-minute swing chart of the ES futures by hand every day, and so it began. For the next year and a half, I graphed every single move of the market by hand. This required complete focus, and, most importantly, me sitting at the desk every minute the market was open paying attention to prices on the screen. What began on a single piece of graph paper grew, after much taping and stapling, into a leviathan monster that coiled multiple times around the walls of my home office. (It helps to have an understanding family if you are going to try a stunt like this!)<\/p>\n<p>The specifics don\u2019t matter, but you must have a consistent methodology for defining the swings. (There\u2019s that word \u201cconsistent\u201d again\u2026 interesting it keeps showing up in these posts, isn\u2019t it?) For the charts I was drawing at the time, I was defining a swing as a move a certain percentage of intraday ATR off a swing high and low. So, for instance, once the market came off a high by a distance equal to 3 average bar ranges, I would draw a line on the chart and then wait for price to bounce three ranges off a low point to draw the next line. If you choose to try this, you can use a system like this, but it is just as useful to keep simple bar charts or point and figure charts.<\/p>\n<p>Why in the world would anyone do this? Well, first of all, electronic charts make life too easy. It&#8217;s too easy to look at thousands of price bars a day on your screen and simply accept them for what they are, scanning for heads and shoulders or whatever pattern you want to give a shot this week. Pretty soon, your eyes just glaze over. Drawing lines by hand forces you to think about the buying and selling that is behind each move in the market. The act of picking up a pencil engages a different part of the brain and makes learning faster and more complete. This makes you <em>pay attention<\/em> in a deep, almost Zen, sense of the word. It is not enough that you are at your desk. You must really focus and be in the moment while you are trading. Keeping charts by hand encourages this state and enforces the kind of discipline needed for top-notch trading.<\/p>\n<p>I am not saying this is the solution to all your trading problems, but I believe doing this taught me to read charts better than anything else I have done. At the very least, it\u2019s a different perspective on the learning process\u2014in the year 2010 you won\u2019t hear many other people tell you to sit down at your computer and break out the graph paper! Enjoy the holiday weekend. We\u2019ll return to the trend line posts in the middle of the week.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.smbtraining.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/05\/HandChart.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-5078\" title=\"HandChart\" src=\"http:\/\/www.smbtraining.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/05\/HandChart.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"600\" height=\"450\" srcset=\"\/\/www.smbtraining.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/05\/HandChart.jpg 1000w, \/\/www.smbtraining.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/05\/HandChart-300x225.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Keeping price charts by hand can shorten your learning curve.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":388,"featured_media":5078,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[943,1,3,456],"tags":[1031,1033,1030,1034],"class_list":["post-5073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-adam-grimess-blogs","category-general-comments-2","category-technical_plays","category-trader_development","tag-charts","tag-hand","tag-keeping","tag-old-school"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.1.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The Value of Keeping Charts by Hand | SMB Training<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Discover the value of keeping charts by hand and how it can improve your trading skills.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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