Question: "What charts do you use when trading?"

There are really only two charts I pay close attention to while I'm trading. The first chart that I'll pull up when looking at a ticker for the first time is a daily chart. I typically pull up a daily chart for the past year, but I tend to care more about the recent history and when the volume really started to pick up on the chart. Once I've seen the daily chart and have an idea of what the big picture looks like, I then look at a one-minute chart for the current trading day and make my decisions based off that (all the while remembering where the daily chart is). Let me use HEMP the day I shorted as an example:

Going into the day, as always, the first thing I looked at was the daily chart. Yes, HEMP was only trading at $0.30 entering the day, but that doesn't mean it was "cheap." The FIRST thing I notice when I pull up the chart is the volume. The volume was MUCH heavier over the past month, especially in the last few days. The next thing I noticed is that we clearly have a parabolic daily chart. In three days the stock had gone from $0.10 to a high of $0.34. Another detail I noticed is that during this three-day parabolic, the stock had never gone red on the day, meaning the price never dipped below the previous day's closing price. So, as the trading day began, I switched over to a one minute chart but remembered the "big picture" of where the daily chart was.

The line drawn above on the one-minute chart reflects the previous closing price. Entering Thursday morning, HEMP did gap up a little bit, from $0.30 to $0.3125. When the morning spike failed, however, I started into a short sell position. The stock could not break past $0.32 in the first few minutes, and I knew that even if it did, there was still resistance at the $0.34 high from the previous day. Then the price began to drop. When HEMP broke below that $0.30 mark, I added to my short sale position. I did this because it was the first time in four days that HEMP had gone "red" on the day, which made a panic likely since, "big picture," the daily chart was so overextended. While this doesn't work EVERY time, it's a high-odds trading setup and as you can see on the chart below, it worked out great in this case as I covered into the morning panic:

This is just one example of how I will use daily charts and one-minute charts in combination. Of course, the daily setup could be completely different, and that would change my plan and my bias when trading the intraday chart. Hopefully this gives you an idea of how I use charts to my advantage. As always, please email me if you have any further questions!