Recording your own data changes what questions you can ask

Once you keep your own tick history, you stop being limited to the questions your charting tool anticipated. The first thing I did with mine was boring and valuable: I checked whether the assumptions in my strategy were even true. "Volume picks up before the move" is easy to say and easy to test, and in my sample it was true for one setup and not for another. You don't need a research program. You need one honest question and enough data to answer it.