Why Intraday Bends to the Big Picture

The further down the ladder you go, the more the market looks like it has no direction at all.

On a five-minute chart, price does not trend. It jitters. It runs for twenty minutes, reverses for fifteen, stalls, runs again. There are patterns in it — the eye finds patterns in anything — but they resolve as often as they fail, and a trader who lives there quickly develops the sense that the market is random and the only edge is speed.

It is not random. It is small. And small boxes, given enough time, bend toward the box they are in.