Drawing Valid Trendlines on VN30 Daily Charts
Most trendline arguments among retail traders in Vietnam come down to the same issue: two people connect different swing points and both believe they are correct. At SensePath we use a narrow set of rules so a line either qualifies or it does not — removing opinion from the first step of chart reading.
Start with the daily timeframe only
Before drawing on 4-hour or 60-minute charts, mark structure on the VN30 daily. Intraday noise on Vietnamese equities — especially around the morning open — creates swing points that disappear when you zoom out. The daily chart shows which levels have actually mattered over weeks, not hours.
Swing points: bodies before wicks
Anchor your line to candle bodies where possible. Wicks represent momentary liquidity grabs; bodies represent where the session actually settled. On a rising support line, connect the daily lows of the real bodies. If a wick pierces below the line but the body holds, that touch still counts — the line survived.
Exception: during a low-volume holiday week when bodies are unusually thin, we allow one wick anchor if it aligns with a prior month's swing. Note this on your chart so you remember why you broke the body rule.
The three-touch minimum
A trendline becomes actionable in our method only after three distinct touches without a structural break. Two touches suggest a hypothesis; three confirm that price has respected the geometry enough to plan around it. Touches need not be perfectly precise — within half a daily ATR is acceptable on VN30.
When to redraw
A line is dead when a daily close breaks through it by more than 0.3% on VN30 (roughly one meaningful gap on current volatility). Do not extend the old line hoping it will reclaim relevance. Mark the break date, identify the new dominant swing sequence, and draw fresh. Alumni often keep expired lines in grey as a visual record of where the market shifted character.
Common mistakes we see in workshops
- Connecting the absolute lowest wick of a crash day to a recent low — the crash day is an outlier, not structure.
- Forcing a line through four touches by adjusting slope each time — if slope changes, it is a curve, not a trendline.
- Drawing parallel channel lines before the primary line has three touches.
These rules are taught hands-on in our Trendline Foundations Workshop. Printed workbooks include six VN30 charts with deliberate errors for you to find and correct.