3D Trading

I've been a fan of three-dimensional trading for quite some time.  3D trading involves using three different timeframes such as the combination of 30min, 5min, and 1min charts.

There's a few ways to do it to suit your own style, but since I'm a Price Action guy... I'll show you how I do it.

I take a top down approach.  Start with the longest time frame.

Long term chart - 30 minute chart

This is the chart I use to look for significant levels in price.  It shows the history of the battles between bulls and bears.  It shows emotional inflection points where more people are likely involved.  Regardless of what the reason behind it may be, it shows support and resistance levels that I care about.

Here we can see CL action from today.  We'll make an example of what price did as it entered the support level that price had reacted to four times prevously (blue boxes).

Now we go to our main trading timeframe, the 5min chart.  

We're looking to see what price does as it enters this support level.  We can see that, on this timeframe, price forms a three-bar stall at the level.  There are also some longer wicks to the downside, which generally signal strong buying stepping in.  OK, we found a significant level on the higher timeframe, and we've confirmed that we're getting a stall here on our trading timeframe.  Let's look to the lower timeframe to get a microscopic view of the price action.

We're now viewing the lower timeframe (1 minute chart here). 

We first have a strong push down into and slightly past the level.  Buyers step in and price isn't able to maintain below.  The bears step in and again, and we get to see what they've got.  As you can see from the arrows, the second push down was super weak relative to the first, and price again came back up above the level.  You can choose an exact entry however you like; the precise entry is not even close to the most important thing when you get the analysis right.