Mark support and resistance before you add anything else

Crowded charts usually start with a good eye and no stopping rule. A learner sees a turn, marks it, sees another, and twenty minutes later the page is a fence. The next session they cannot tell which line they trusted.

At the desk the order is stubborn. Swing highs and swing lows go on first, and only the obvious ones. On a daily chart that often means two levels, sometimes three. A line earns a place when you can point to the turns with the pencil and say, in one sentence, why those turns belong together.

Support and resistance, in this room, are those horizontal marks. They are not a cloud of zones drawn until every past price is explained. If price sat near a number and nothing in the swings agrees, the number waits.

Volume comes second, and only beside a level already drawn. A tall volume bar in the middle of an empty range is a note, not a new line. A trendline comes third, and only when the swings actually line up. Many weeks, the trendline never arrives. That is a finished page, not a failed one.

The pencil rule used in week two of Desk Routine Coaching: if you cannot explain a line in one sentence, erase it before you stand up. Erasing is part of the sitting. Learners who hate the look of a rubbed-out page are usually protecting a mark they cannot defend.

Take a chart you marked last month and cover the page so only the horizontal levels show. If you still know what you meant, the page was honest. If you need the rest of the ink to remember, the rest of the ink was doing the thinking for you.