No RSI. No MACD. No moving averages (except perhaps a 20-period exponential moving average as a reference). Brooks argues that all information—fear, greed, accumulation, distribution—is already in the price action. Specifically, he focuses on the close of every single bar (usually 5-minute bars on the E-mini S&P 500).
The blog is a relentless daily drill. It forces you to look at the market not as a story of hope or fear, but as a simple algorithm of buyers versus sellers. He is rarely wrong about what happened , and his analysis of why a breakout failed is usually flawless.
If you have ever visited the blog, you know the drill: screenshots of E-mini S&P 500 futures (primarily) covered in horizontal red, green, and yellow lines, with paragraphs of text breaking down every single bar into "buying pressure" or "selling pressure." al brooks trading blog
The blog is not actionable for casual traders. If you read it without having studied his 1,200+ page textbook series, you will likely lose money. He rarely uses future tense. He analyzes the past to train pattern recognition, not to give "signals." The "Second Leg" Problem: Why Beginners Hate It The most common critique of the Al Brooks Trading Blog is that it is retrospective perfectionism . Critics argue that he can identify every turning point after it happens because he draws lines for every possible scenario.
He will teach you to see the market as a series of probabilities. He will teach you that every breakout has a 50% chance of failing. And he will annoy you by drawing ten lines on a chart where you only see noise. No RSI
If you survive the first 100 posts, you will never look at a candlestick chart the same way again. If you don't, you will join the chorus of traders complaining that "Al Brooks sees patterns that don't exist."
For example, Brooks frequently discusses the "second leg up" or "second leg down." A bear trend might end, but he will warn that the "first leg up" is likely to fail, and that the real buy signal comes after a "higher low." This is logical, but in real time, distinguishing a "higher low" from a "bear flag" is incredibly difficult. It forces you to look at the market
The truth is, he sees patterns you haven't trained your eyes to see yet.