Previous day, week and month levels, plotting them automatically vs marking by hand

[Fairman]

Previous day, week and month levels, plotting them automatically vs marking by hand

I used to draw previous day high and low by hand every morning, and I'd sometimes forget or get it slightly wrong. So I tried an indicator that plots them automatically, along with the previous week's high and low and the monthly open, and I've been comparing the two approaches.

The upside of the automatic one is consistency. It doesn't forget, it's the same every day, and it shows levels I wouldn't bother to draw. The downside is that it can clutter the chart and make every level feel important. A lot of those lines are irrelevant to a scalp on M5.

What I do now is let the indicator plot everything but hide the ones I don't use. I keep the previous day high and low, the weekly high and low, and the daily open. Anything else I add manually if it looks like price is reacting to it. Also, check the time zone the indicator uses for the day's open and close. If it's using server time with a different cut off than yours, the previous day high might not be what you think.

The important bit is knowing which levels you've actually tested and found useful.

[Fairman]

On the time zone point, I had this exact problem. My broker's server runs on a different offset, so the indicator was drawing the previous day high from a cut off that included part of the Asian session I did not count as yesterday. The levels were slightly off compared with what I saw on another platform. Most of these indicators have a setting to shift the day start. Setting it to match the New York close fixed it and the levels now line up with everyone else's.

[Fairman]

One thing I like about letting the indicator draw everything is that it shows me levels I would not have bothered with, and over time I can check which ones price actually reacts to. I kept a simple tally for a few weeks of whether price paused at each level type when it got there. The daily open and previous day levels earned their place. The monthly ones rarely mattered on M5, so I hid them, which made the chart a lot cleaner.