Turn a daily lean into specific levels: where price has reacted before, and the level that says the read is wrong. This free lesson covers: Why drop to 1H, Zones, not lines, Name it, Where a zone comes from, Which level is worth marking?, The invalidation level, Name it, Wick through, or close beyond?, When levels agree, Put it together.
The Top-Down Method · Learn · Step 1 of 10
The daily gives direction. It does not give you anywhere to act. The 1H is where the lean becomes specific: a handful of levels worth watching, and one that voids the idea.
The aim is a chart with three or four marks on it, not thirty. If everything is a level, nothing is.
Going deeper
The 1H timeframe is a compromise: fine enough to give actionable levels, coarse enough that the levels are not noise. Which intermediate timeframe you use matters less than using one consistently.
Zone width is a judgement call. Too narrow and you are back to lines; too wide and everything is "in the zone". Twenty to thirty points is a common starting point on US30, adjusted for how volatile the session is.
Wide enough to contain the wicks of the reactions that created it. On US30 that is often twenty to thirty points, but it should come from the chart rather than a fixed rule.
Until it is decisively broken, or until enough time passes that the participants who created it are gone. Levels from months ago on an intraday chart are rarely worth keeping.
Two independent reasons pointing at the same area — a 1H zone landing on a prior session low, for instance. Six correlated indicators agreeing is not confluence, it is one reason counted six times.