DislikedTicker came closest to it most recently with his comment about finding them at the extreme end of a trend... I fully agree but what's usually missing in these discussions is the relevant TF for the things, and then what to expect out of them for a target range and why. Obviously most of the institutional traders are likely trading much higher TF's and so why would they care about a 50-150 pip reversal on the 15m or 1hr Trend when they're looking for the 1000 or 2500 pip reversal on the daily, weekly, or monthly...Ignored
Rogers retired at age 37 from the Quantum Fund with George Soros but when he looked at getting back into the market and start the Rogers International Commodities Index, he was getting ready to go in his Mercedes to drive around the world.
If you think it's hard to keep up with your trades when your high speed internet connection goes down for 2 hours, try to do it when you're driving in the middle of Africa where you're lucky to have AM radio nevermind a 16k dialup connection.
To summarize, he didn't have time to d!ck around monitoring his trades every day. That's where larger time frames come in.
Institutional traders are doing the same thing. They have a choice to either stayed glued to their screens on a 15 minutes time frame or trade a larger time frame and have time to focus on something else.
In my first business venture, I had a partner who was really acting as my mentor. What he drilled into me was "If you want to be as big as the big guys, you have to do what the big guys do".
My choice is pretty clear.
Not all sins are created equal