Annotating who defended the level
A simple journal habit for market participation: name the defender, the abandoner, and the evidence.
Participation language collapses when journals say “buyers stepped in” without evidence. We ask trainees to write three short lines whenever a level holds or breaks.
The three lines
- Defender claim — who you think is active (for example, responsive sellers at prior day high).
- Evidence — volume relative to the five-bar average, location of the close, and whether progress matched effort.
- Abandon condition — what would show that defender left (such as a wide-range bar through the level on expanding volume with a close beyond).
Why it slows you down usefully
The abandon condition prevents you from clinging to a broken story. If that condition prints, you update the journal instead of inventing a new hero for the same level.
Classroom friction
New students often over-specify (“pension fund desk”). We prefer coarser labels: responsive, initiating, thin, mixed. Precision comes from the volume evidence, not from guessing the institution’s name.