Okay - first and foremost we must understand where we are in structure - both (candlestick and institutional) on all timeframes. This might be a long post so bear with me.
Monthly - Trend up
Cam, what the hell does a monthly chart have to do with trading the 5 minute time frame you might say - everything. All analysis should work top down. We can see here that on the long term monthly chart we are in an up trend. However, intermediary structure on the monthly has shifted bearish. What do we need to look for? We need to look for the last unmitigated down move before the up move that broke structure - marked with the blue box. This would be my longer term bearish target.
Weekly - Trend down
We can now refine our monthly demand zone to the down move before the up move on the weekly that has not been mitigated. You can see it marked blue in the weekly chart below.
Take very careful notice that the low of that last down candle liquidated the lows of the 3 prior candles. This is the composite man liquidating all the 'dumb money' that FOMO'd into buys too early before taking price significantly higher.
Daily - Trend down
Daily in a down trend as well. Again, we can refine our demand zone which I have done.
4 hour - Trend down
We have broken structure and the trend is clearly down here, but we have been chopping sideways. Hard to have a tradeable shorter term bias using this specific timeframe. We need more data. 1 hour chart.
1 hour - trend down/sideways chop
This is where things start to get exciting for me. Because the edge that we have in these markets is our understanding of institutional order flow, candlestick structure and where liquidity lies in the markets.
Stanley Druckenmiller once said that 'It's liquidity that moves markets', and I didn't understand this statement for the longest time. However, once I got my head around institutional order flow and where liquidity lies in the markets that the composite man needs to target - my trading just exploded.
So what I see here is a break of structure and then liquidity being created above each of those swing highs ready for the composite man to run. On this timeframe you can see the up move before the down move that has not been mitigated is highlighted in green.
30 minute
The purpose of this chart is simply to show the further refinement down to the last up move that I like. I usually only like to refine my supply and demand zones to the 30 or 60 minute charts. Keep in mind that the lower the timeframe you refine down to, the lower the probability that price will trade into it. You can also see that there is an up move above the one I have marked - however the reason I don't use it is because it has been mitigated by the up wicks of the candles in the zone I am using.
4 minute
On this 4 minute chart you can see that we broke structure to the upside which was created by the unmitigated down move shown marked in the darker shade of blue - then what happens? Price pulls back into where? The last down move that created the new structural high on this timeframe - why? To mitigate the sell orders used by the composite man to fill their buy orders and take prices significantly higher.
What am I looking for now? The same thing. A structural break to the upside, then a pull back to the last unmitigated down move that initiated the structural break to the upside - marked in the light blue box. Here I would be looking to enter with the expectation that the composite man will then eventually want to run the liquidity points that can be seen on the 30 minute chart into the next supply zone (also on the 30 minute) before we see some kind of Wyckoff distribution schematic to take price significantly lower - where exactly? Well, firstly the structural low on the 30 or 60 minute chart and then eventually to the unmitigated demand zone marked on the daily chart.