Adrian Reid explains his strong preference for daily (and sometimes weekly) chart timeframes over very short-term charts (1-, 5-, or tick charts). He argues daily charts allow trades to capture larger moves, fit into everyday life with minimal screen time, reduce trade count and monitoring burden, and often lead to better long-term returns for trend-following systems.
I can't think of anything worse than looking at a five minute chart. Actually I can, I lie looking at a 1 minute chart or looking at a tick chart, they're definitely worse. I, I, my, my personal preference is the daily time frame. I also have systems on weekly charts, but I think far too many traders try and focus on very short term time frames. And it's interesting, right? I think the psychology of this is that many people seem to think that if I look at very short term charts, five minutes or half hour or whatever, that you can make better decisions, you can have lower risk and you can make more money. And it's just not true. In trading, a lot of things that work are counterintuitive. And one of the things that works is you need time in the market, you need to let your trades grow and the smaller your time frame, the shorter term your trades, the smaller your moves. If you trade on a five minute chart, there is no way you're going to have a stock that goes up 100, 300, 500, a thousand percent. But if you trade on daily charts with a long term trend following system, you can, doesn't happen all the time, but you can. I really like the daily time frame because all the reasons I just described, plus most people can fit it into their life. I don't want to stare at the screen all day. That's horrible. I also don't want thousands of trades every week that I have to reconcile and monitor and track that. That's horrible. What I like is a small amount of activity each day that I can do after hours in 10, 20 minutes and make money. That's what I like. So daily is the short answer. All of that was the long answ.
Sam.
