Trading is a lot like poker. You're trying to made smart decisions under great levels of uncertainty with imperfect information.
That has been the case since the beginning of speculation. In many bubbles and manias, there sometimes isn't any fundamental information that's worth knowing. In that regard, you have to trade against the crowd or herd.
Chart reading as a skill is lot like trying to understand spanglish. Most of it is about interpretation.
You need to automate your data scanning asap to make things easier on you. Not doing so will exhaust you over time. I know it might be fun to scan the markets by hand, but you're going to find that you can't compete with a computer and a scanning service.
The downside of doing things by hand is that after a great deal of manual scanning with no results, you become desperate in thinking that you are missing out because "the markets are moving."
If you're a directional trader, volatility does not equal opportunity. If you're putting "today's big movers" on your screen - what are you looking for? A clue on how you could have gotten in before the move?
Don't be a piker - automating your rules is the first step to avoiding that scenario. No pro is "doing it by hand" - that's how retail traders do it because they don't know any better and they've bought into their trading platform's features as being benefits. They are not.
A good tool to use is called "Unfair Advantage" by CSI Data. It's a premium service, but I've used it myself and I vouch. I don't benefit financially for saying so.
Forget the charting, UA has a built-in portfolio manager and a correlation study and these tools are much more valuable to help you make decisions based upon expected values than looking at charts.
