The first line you draw is usually the one that costs you

The first level people draw is the deepest low on the screen. It is the easiest thing to see, so the cursor goes there. Between that low and current price sit four or five highs and lows that price has to get through first.

Those skipped obstacles are where trades actually turn. You watch an open profit come back to nothing, and there is no line on the chart that explains it. So the loss gets filed under patience, or nerves, or bad luck.

It was a drawing problem. Price stopped somewhere real that you had never marked. Your entry was fine and your hold was fine. A missing line looks exactly like a discipline problem from the inside. So people spend months fixing the wrong thing.

Put your cursor on the candle price is trading in right now. Look up and find the first high above it. That high is the next obstacle, so mark it and move on.

From there, ask the same question again. What is the next high above the one you just marked? Mark that one too. Keep going until you have three destinations above price, then run the same walk downward through the lows.

Say the stock trades at 100.00. The candle two bars back topped at 100.35, an older one at 100.80, and a third at 101.40. Those are your three, in that order. The 103 high that jumps out at you sits behind all of them, so it changes nothing today.

The rule that makes this work is the dull one. Do not skip candles. Every candle has a high and a low. Each one is a price where somebody already turned the tape.

Three timeframes carry levels: the daily, the four hour and the one hour. The five minute chart is for timing an entry later. It prints new shapes constantly, and few of them still matter an hour later.

Switch the chart to regular session data before you start. Overnight candles trade thin and leave wicks that nobody defends the next day. Futures are the exception there, because the overnight tape is the tape.

Then zoom in. With a year of history on screen, every obstacle within a dollar of price is invisible. So you draw the far ones by default. Fill the screen with the last few sessions around current price instead.

Turn the indicators off while you draw. They hand you a reason to keep a line you could not otherwise justify. Bring them back afterwards if you want a second opinion on a thesis you already have.

Three supports and three resistances is the cap, counted across all three timeframes together. A single line, a merged zone and a gap box each count as one of the six. Past that, price is always near something, so every setup looks confirmed and nothing is filtered.

Levels sitting close together become one zone. On a large, high priced name the working merge distance is about a dollar. Scale it tighter for a cheap stock and wider for a fast one. Nobody has ever pinned that distance to a formula, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. It is a judgement call tied to how far your instrument moves in an hour.

Once a zone exists, delete the lines inside it. Two levels fifteen cents apart cannot both be traded. Your entry and your stop end up on top of each other. Treat the zone as a place you do nothing until price is clearly above it or clearly below it.

Run this before the session, then again on the hour if you are trading intraday. It gets quick once you stop hunting for the pretty levels.