I don't know of any substitute for watching the market. When you take your eye off, you might as well be unconscious. But with 24 hour markets, this is not easy. Picking your hours of alert watching is an important choice. You have to decide what you can live with. Some people only look once a week, trading from the weekly charts. Some try to watch every tick for 10 hours in 15 markets simultaneously.
Being committed to certain markets is an important key. My current thinking is that I need to watch 4 to 6 markets intensely from about 6AM EST to around 3PM, with glances at a bunch of others. I give my most intense attention to oil, namely the July Crude Oil Futures contract and the USD/CAD forex pair. My next favorite are the Treasury Bond and 10-year Treasury Note markets. Then comes S&P500 e-mini and a few others.
The commitment is to a continuous monitoring of the market. For me there are emotional reasons why I find this difficult. When I trade, I am emotionally involved. When I close a position there is a kind of emotional disconnect that occurs. Especially if I have a losing trade. I stop watching. But the battle still rages.
Watching the market has to be your number one commitment. Without that, you miss the moves. Orienting yourself to the trend must be a second important duty.
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