fade or follow? the argument is really about regime

[Shadow Trader]

Every scalping forum has this argument. One side fades: price stretches, snaps back, take 4 pips and go home. The other follows: price breaks, keeps going, ride it while it's cheap.

Both are right, in the right conditions. Mean reversion pays in rotating, range-bound tape, common in the Asian session and in the lull between London lunch and the New York open. Momentum pays when real order flow arrives, like the London open or a data release. Run the wrong one in the wrong tape and every loss is bigger than every win.

That makes regime detection the real skill, and nobody has a perfect method. Common attempts: ATR now versus its recent average, an efficiency ratio (net move divided by the sum of all the small moves), how often price has crossed a moving average in the last 20 bars, or just the time of day.

All of them lag. By the time a filter says "trend", a good chunk of the move is gone. By the time it says "range", the breakout may be starting.

The fade camp gets hurt by trend days that start quietly. The momentum camp gets chopped up by fake breakouts in thin hours, and each stop-out is cheap alone but they add up.

Which camp are you in, and what, if anything, tells you which regime is running right now: a number, a time window, or a feel for it?