"ah ha" moments 17,678 and 17.679

Before I get started, I made up those numbers.  Thats way too many "ah ha" moments to keep track of although I have had quite a few.  I've been studying a new book on trading.  One of the things discussed is swing highs and how to use them.  Much more detail than that sentence but maybe my charts will help explain it a bit.  Note:  I will use a few 1 minute charts in here for simplicity, but no I do not trade of the 1 minute time frame.

So it is easy to see that for the first 30 minutes or so Facebook was in a down trend.  One of the concepts in this book is about changing trend and what to look for to confirm that.  This is explained thru new swing highs or new swing lows.  Well what do we see on this chart.  The white lines I drew represented in my mind swing highs.  As you can see the 2nd one was higher than the first.  This got me interested in a long.  I waited for a slight pullback and when I saw a wick to trade against, I bought.  Very simple and an easy $1 gain on 15 cents of risk.  

Next is Netflix 

In this example, each swing high was higher than the last.  Although these flags are not the prettiest, they provided me with all that I need to trade, 1. a clear bias (once a new swing high is made, it represents a difference in trend) so I am only looking to long the stock, and 2. a wick or candle to trade against.  

It's that simple.  Well nothing is ever that simple in trading.  It's only ever easy in hindsight.  But to me, this represents my style and strategy to a T.