Brooks builds a full vocabulary for reading five-minute bar charts, bar by bar, and centers it on one repeatable shape: a spike that starts a trend, then a channel that either extends it or fails it. The vocabulary is genuinely useful. Turning it into a repeatable, testable trading decision is left entirely to the reader.
The one idea
Brooks treats every bar as a vote between bulls and bears and argues the only question that matters, tick by tick, is whether the market is trending or stuck in a trading range. His core structural claim is that almost every trend, in any market and any time frame, is a spike and channel: a fast, low-overlap move (the spike) that establishes what he calls the always-in direction, followed by a slower, two-sided pullback phase (the channel) that either resumes the trend or rolls into a reversal.
On top of that shape he layers a counting system for entries during the channel: high 1, high 2, high 3, high 4 in a bull pullback (low 1 through low 4 in a bear pullback), where each number marks a bar whose high (or low) breaks the prior bar's high (or low) after a stall. A high 2 or low 2 is his most reliable with-trend entry; a high 4 or low 4 that fails is treated as a warning the trend may be ending. He pairs this with a running checklist of what a strong trend looks like: little bar overlap, small and infrequent pullbacks, five or more bars without a pullback, no trend channel line overshoots, pullback signal bars that are strong (or, in the strongest trends, deliberately weak, so late traders keep chasing).
The probability language throughout is loose by design. Brooks repeatedly says the market is close to 50-50 most of the day, that a strong spike might run 70 percent in your favor for a few bars, and that a competent discretionary trader might win 60 percent of trades. None of these numbers come from a backtest inside the book; they are stated as his working estimates from years of screen time, and the book never asks the reader to verify them.
What it actually teaches
Brooks' trend trade follows the same rough sequence across the hundreds of chart examples in the book.
IDENTIFY THE SPIKE
Look for a fast run of one or more trend bars with little overlap, usually within the first hour, that breaks out of the prior trading range with urgency. Brooks calls this the always-in move: once it happens, he says to stop looking for reasons to fade it and start looking only for with-trend entries.
WAIT FOR THE FIRST PULLBACK, THE GAP TEST
The spike ends at the first pause or pullback, which can be as short as one bar or run a dozen or more. Brooks treats the spike as a gap and this pullback as the test of that gap. If the pullback runs past about 10 bars without resuming, he reclassifies the day as a trading range rather than a spike and channel.
COUNT THE PULLBACK LEGS: HIGH 1, HIGH 2, LOW 1, LOW 2
In a bull trend, the first bar whose high exceeds the prior bar's high ends leg one (high 1); if price keeps stalling, the next such bar is high 2, and so on to high 3 (usually a wedge-shaped bull flag) and high 4. A high 2 is Brooks' preferred with-trend buy; the mirror sequence (low 1 through low 4) is used for bear pullbacks. A failed high 4 or low 4, where price breaks back past the signal bar, is flagged as a sign control may be shifting.
TRADE THE CHANNEL AS A TRENDING RANGE
Once the channel is underway, buy below the low of the prior bar in a bull channel (or sell above the prior bar's high in a bear channel) and hold part of the position for a further swing. Countertrend trades are treated only as scalps against traders who will soon be forced to exit at a loss, never as the primary trade.
TARGET THE MEASURED MOVE, WATCH FOR THE THIRD PUSH
Two profit targets recur throughout the book: project the height of the spike from the end of the pullback (a 1:1 measured move), or apply a leg-1-equals-leg-2 projection using the spike as leg one and the channel as leg two. A three-push wedge shape in the channel, where the third push overshoots the trend channel line and reverses on a strong signal bar, is called the cleanest reversal setup; Brooks says most reversals are messier and are better traded as a breakout-pullback instead.
What it looks like Monday morning
A reader who takes this seriously starts marking up a five-minute chart bar by bar: trend bar or doji, inside the current swing or breaking it, always-in long or always-in short. The immediate behavior change is patience during the channel phase: instead of fading every pullback, they wait specifically for a high 2 or low 2 setup, or for a clear failed high 4/low 4, rather than trading on a hunch that the move is 'due' to reverse.
The second change is targets. Instead of an arbitrary stop and profit, they start measuring the spike's height and projecting it from the pullback, and they hold part of a with-trend position through the channel instead of scalping the whole size out at the first tick of profit. Brooks is explicit that this only works if the trader already has screen time reading the bars; the book gives the vocabulary, not the reps.
| Leg | Label | What it marks |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | High 1 | First bar whose high breaks above the prior bar's high; ends the first leg of the pullback. |
| 2 | High 2 | Second such bar after another stall; Brooks' preferred with-trend buy entry (the C leg of an ABC correction). |
| 3 | High 3 | Third leg pullback, usually shaped like a wedge bull flag. |
| 4 | High 4 | Fourth leg; if it fails and price breaks below the signal bar's low, treated as a warning the bull trend may be ending. |
The mirror sequence, low 1 through low 4, is used for pullbacks in a bear trend.
Every bar is a potential signal both for a short and for a long trade.Al Brooks, Trading Price Action Trends
Where it fails
- No mechanical way to grade a setup. Terms that carry the entire method, a 'strong' bull reversal bar, a 'good' high 2, a channel that is 'tight enough' to trade only one direction, are never reduced to a rule two readers would apply the same way. Two traders looking at the same bar can reasonably disagree on whether it is a signal bar at all, and the book offers no tiebreaker beyond more chart study.
- This single volume is deliberately incomplete. This is book two of a three-book Brooks trilogy, and the text repeatedly defers key concepts, magnets, climactic reversals, the mathematics of trading, breakout strength, to 'book 2' or 'book 3' rather than explaining them here. A reader who buys only this title is missing pieces the author himself says you need.
- The probability figures are stated, not measured. Numbers like a 60 percent win rate for a strong scalp or 70 percent follow-through odds during a spike appear dozens of times as Brooks' personal estimate from screen time. In this edition (2012) there is no backtest, trade log, or statistical table anywhere in the book to support them, so the reader has to take the hit rate on faith.
- The chart commentary is heavily repetitive. Chapters 19 through 26 run well over a hundred pages of near-identical Emini five-minute charts, each followed by a 'Deeper Discussion of This Chart' section that restates the same spike-and-channel and bar-counting logic. The method itself fits in a fraction of the page count; the rest is repeated pattern-matching practice dressed as new material.
- Every example is narrated with full hindsight. Brooks walks through each chart already knowing how the day ended, and describes bars as 'obviously' signaling the outcome that in fact followed. There is no example in the book where a textbook-looking setup fails, so a reader never sees what the false signals actually looked like in real time.
- It is written for one instrument on one timeframe. The overwhelming majority of charts are the Emini S&P five-minute bar from roughly 2009 to 2011. Brooks says the logic transfers to stocks, forex, and other timeframes, but he does not show the adaptation, so a swing trader working off daily bars or a stock trader outside the Emini has to make that translation alone.
Who it is for
Buy it if
You already watch a five-minute intraday chart for a living and want a shared vocabulary for what you are half-seeing, and you are willing to put in months of bar-by-bar chart review before expecting the setups to click. It also suits someone planning to read all three books in the Brooks trilogy rather than this one in isolation.
Skip it if
You want a defined, backtestable system with fixed entries, stops, and a measured win rate, or you trade daily or weekly bars rather than intraday charts. Beginners with no prior chart-reading reps will likely find the pace overwhelming without first working through Brooks' earlier material.
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