Pivots, Patterns, and Intraday Swing Trades: Derivatives Analysis with the E-mini and Russell Futures Contracts, + Website

APPENDIX E

Screen Capturing an Event Library

If you are a Trader, you are a student. The condition is perpetual. The best place for your education will always be from these two sources, in the order of their appearance: the market itself, and then your trading decisions regarding it. Each day I record the market action in snapshots. I use a free downloadable software tool for this called 20/20, from By Light Technologies. You'll have to do an Internet search for it by company name in order to find a safe download link. Freeware links are frequently hijacked by malicious malware and adware sites.

The 20/20 tool is a screen-capture and image-editor device, and can run in the background with timed captures. More sophisticated screen-capture software exists, such as Snagit from TechSmith. But the auto-capture feature in Snagit disconnects if you make a manual capture that interrupts its auto-schedule.

My main desktop window contains at least three of the main stock index futures contracts in equally shared vertical panes, somewhat like what is shown in Figure 5.1 of Chapter 5. In this way, it is easy to view the disparities and confluence of technical signals simultaneously. Since the screen capture is set to about once in four minutes, the chances of capturing the markets during one of its key reversal or breakout moments during the day are very high. At the end of the day, you can flip through the subdirectory where these snapshots have been auto-stored and study those times for ...