Any trader will tell you that patience is paramount if you want to be successful in this business. But that is always where the insight ends. And, frankly, it’s not that useful of an observation. I think when most traders talk about patience, they’re talking about having the patience to wait for your idea to play out perfectly, and entering at precisely the right time. Not a second before or a second after: like a lion stalking a gazelle. And yes, that’s a part of it. but it isn’t the part that is actually hard.

When we are switching our charts between timeframes, we technically understand that each bar now represents a different amount of time. But it is really hard for our mind to grasp how it also requires a completely different approach. The 1m moves are going to be insanely fast – especially on the open. When you then switch to the 2m or 5m chart after the first 15/30 minutes of the regular session, now things feel insanely slow compared to the action you were just watching on the 1m. Your mind needs to adjust to the new timeframe and slow itself down in order to stop you from jumping the gun on your 5m ideas.

In the last week, we’ve had a huge rally in the markets, primarily buoyed by the QQQ and tech. Look at this Hourly chart of QQQ. You can see that any dip to the 12 EMA (blue line) and 26 EMA (brown line) were bought. If you look at any of the Beta tech stocks, you’ll find the exact same thing to be true.

All you had to do was watch the hourly chart for a dip to the supporting MA, and you pretty much always had a great entry. It didn’t really matter when the touches happened: premarket, after hours, morning, afternoon – whatever – They always worked. But think about your mindset at those times! During after hours you’re not thinking about trading. You’re thinking about dinner, or what to watch on Netflix, or whatever you are interested in outside of trading. Premarket you’re thinking about waking up and doing your morning routine. During the first hour of trading you’re amped and thinking about positions you’re in / profit taking. You’re thinking about where the ideal entries might be. And you might even have some awareness of the hourly MAs that have been “supporting” price so well. But if that’s not where price is right now, you’re thinking about how & where you can get into positions!

“I’m trading right now“, you say to yourself, “I know that those MAs are great support, but I think this level / pattern I’m looking at is *also* a great entry.”

And maybe on the lower timeframes it is a great entry. But it might not be a great entry on the hourly timeframe. So now, whether you realize it or not, you’re making a choice to not be patient. You’re making a choice that allows you to trade right now, because it is the time you had allotted yourself to do some trading.

And let’s say you win some trades, and lose some trades. And then you go back to the charts after the markets are closed and you review them again and you notice those supporting hourly MAs. And you say to yourself, “Damn. I should have just traded those dip buys. That’s what I’m going to do next time!”

But you’re looking at the hourly timeframe. It requires a completely different level of patience that goes way outside the boundaries you’ve put in place for work (n hours per day between x am and y pm). And right now the market could be topping, about to roll over into daily consolidation. Who knows when these conditions will present themselves again after that happens: it could be days, or weeks, or months! Will you even remember what to do when that happens?

This larger timeframe requires more than patience. It requires diligence. The cognitive shift between the 1m and the 5m is a challenge. But from the 5m to Hourly to Daily is insanely difficult in comparison. Going from there to the weekly or monthly charts can seem herculean.

That is why patience is so important. It is so much more than just stalking a trade. It requires understanding that the rules for how you play have completely changed underneath you when you switch timeframes, and the idea that you can clearly see right now will be so far gone from your mind by the time that it plays out, you won’t even remember you had it. So you need to adopt a strategy of tracking those ideas and monitoring them over time using both Patience and Diligence.

Therein lies the crux of trading, and it crystalizes so well why people fall into the buckets of “Scalper” or “Day Trader” or “Swing Trader” or “Investor”: Learning how to trade in all of those ways at the same time is incredibly difficult. Most people just aren’t capable of achieving it. I believe that the really great traders focus on one type of trading, but use their understandings of all types to inform their decisions each day. My theory is that mastery is found in the spaces between the timeframes. By that I mean: having the ability to grasp, and maintain an awareness of the timeframes above and below the ones where you actively trade – Having the patience to identify the larger trade happening above you, track the madness happening under you, and then remaining calm and patient for the opportunity to arrive right in front of you.