Why I'm building another chart app

I trade gold; naturally not as a source of income, nowhere near that, but I still find myself in front of an M5 chart on most evenings and it has turned into a routine. I open the terminal at eight because “I’ll just have a look at how things are going” and then I end up there until ten.

What irritates me is not the trading itself but the charting. Every session I go through this-scrolling back a few hundred candles and trying to draw the levels, picking out three or perhaps four highs and pulling a line across them-and then I realise one of them was off by something like eight pips or thereabouts and I have to begin again. I repeat the process with the lows. Once I’ve spent twenty minutes on it, what I end up with is essentially identical to the chart from yesterday, except that it has consumed twenty minutes of my evening and I feel foolish.

I have been doing this for quite some time now-certainly hundreds of times, if not more. And yet I still cannot articulate the rule. To give an example, if someone were to ask me why I had placed that line there instead of one pip lower, I would have to look at the chart for a while and then say “I don’t know, it simply looked correct.” And that is not a rule; it is precisely the absence of a clear rule which has finally pushed me to do something about it.

Right now I am gathering the data on my own, pulling it straight from the terminal, a single instrument at a time, second by second or whatever. I am building something of a preliminary version that merely draws the levels first. It places lines where it considers they ought to be and then tallies how many times the price actually touched each one. That is all it does at present. It does not tell me to buy and it never fires off a signal at 3 a.m. that I had not requested.

The genuine test - the only one that matters to me - is when I look at what it has drawn and either think “alright, that is roughly where I would have placed them” or think “no, that is incorrect”. If it is the first response, well, perhaps it is worth something; but if it is the second, then at least I have found out that my “intuition” is in fact something else and I will need to work out what it actually is.

I have no notion which one it is going to be; I am genuinely not certain at all. Which is precisely why I am building it rather than just… continuing to think about it for another six months.