A pencil order for swing highs and swing lows
Mark swings from the left edge toward today. If a new mark makes an older mark unreadable, erase the new one.
Swing marks fail when they are pretty. A page with every minor high circled looks thorough and becomes useless the next morning. In our technical analysis training we use a strict pencil order so multi-timeframe chart analysis can be reread without a guide.
Start at the left edge of the sheet, not at the most dramatic candle. The first swing high is the first peak that price left and did not re-enter for a meaningful run. The first swing low is the same idea in the other direction. Work forward. Do not hop to the current week because it feels important.
Use one symbol for highs and one for lows, and keep them small. We use a short horizontal tick, not a circle and not a box. Circles eat the candle. If you need color, use a single copper pencil for the daily sheet and ordinary graphite for the lower sheets, so the eye knows which timeframe it is looking at.
When a newer swing cancels an older one, erase the older tick or put a single diagonal through it. Do not leave both and hope you will remember. The sheet is the memory. This matters even more when three timeframes sit side by side: a cancelled daily swing should not survive as a ghost that the fifteen-minute sheet keeps honoring.
Stop when the remaining ticks can be named out loud in one breath. If you run out of breath, you have marked noise. That rule sounds simple in a quiet room and feels strict when the market has been busy. It is still the rule we use on Saturdays, and it is the rule Hana looks for in a journal review.