uexkuell

Yup. All-time high. Source for free data & charts: prorealtime dot com.

NOT working: Trying to reverse a NOT working strategy and thereby producing a working strategy. That's why this thread is pointless. Some strategies that are not working: (For the following assuming that "not working" means "producing loss") Strategy 1. Enter. Wait until the position goes into negative. (=inverse buy&hold) Strategy 2. a) Enter. b) When positions turns increasingly negative increase position size (=try to average down). c) When positions comes back close to break-even liquidate most of position (=realize loss). d) Wait until condition b) is met again. Strategy 2 is very frequently used obviously. What can be taken from the examples: Bad money management is a fail-safe road to loss. (Point of entry is not that important if you want to loose big.)

If you are really new to trading this will save you much money: Stay away from trading just to avoid the fee! You will unevitably pay much more than the 100 bucks for Tradestation in the end if you try to avoid the fee by trading. If you think you really want to get into Tradestation better take into account that it will cost you 100 bucks every month until you get profitable (which will for the most people take 2 years at minimum). Free screener: Finviz.com Test any strategy thoroughly in paper trading first.

Please elaborate what should be expected on the observations cited: Up or down for the week?

Some people will not like this way to think about “S/R” but perhaps it may be helpful to others: Assume that S/R is a valid concept. (Perhaps even “to the tick” as was posted here) Then it would be trivial to design a highly profitable strategy from it: - When price is going down and approaching support: Position a buy order with size X (less than 50% of the buying power of the account) at support. - If price goes up after touching support stay in the position until your profit target is reached (or exit at break-even if price is moving back down) - If price breaks support (going further down) reverse position to short with size 2*X. Then stay (at your discretion) in the position until the loss vanishes (break-even) or ride the downtrend to the next lower support. If it would be safely possible to spot S/R the outlined strategy would be fail-safe and it would at worst break even, never loose. Therefore it would be easy to make nearly unlimited amounts of profit using this strategy. Since we know that this does not work so simply some other idea might be considered: “Support” and “Resistance” are concepts that work sometimes but only on a rather statistical basis and they are in many cases just expressions of random processes. (Please do not think that I am adherer to the random walk hypothesis of the markets – I am certainly not. Just quite skeptical about the validity of S/R). So trying to answer the question “why does S turn into R?” S and R are not really well-defined. At least much worse defined than people think. And mathematical logic says that it is impossible to answer a question in which the words of which it is constituted are not clearly defined.

Care to elaborate how this could be done?

Both may be right. As far as I remember IB kind of "buffers" stops and does not transmit them to the exchanges in any case. Mirus is handling things much more directly and your stop will appear in the DOM. In my view very much of trading is just about mass psychology: The big / well informed players have several means of knowing where the weak hands have their stops and they are using this knowledge to shake them out of their positions. The problem is just that as long as a trader is behaving like most of the others it is easy to hit him. It's hard to get psychologically out of the main stream. One possible measure is to take much time to develop a trading approach, test it in realtime in paper trading until it's consistenly working and stick to it to the point when it goes to real money.

In order to give a somewhat deeper answer and avoid misunderstanding of the question would you like to state what's the reason you are looking for a market with less arbitration? In these days of electronic markets and still growing financial products there are arbitrage possibilities for pretty much everything and they are widely used. Nope. Oil: Futures: Nymex CL (crude light), HO (heating oil) ICE: BRN (brent), WBS (wti crude), GAS (gasoline) ETFs: USO, OIL, DBC and others also some arbing with natural gas futures. Grains (less than the energy products): Futures: ZS (soy) ZM (soy meal) and between the various grains ETFs: DBA, MOO (some more I forgot) also moving the big companies like POT, MOS Furthermore any form of energy futures shows high synchronization with currencies and index futures (look at some major turning points in the indices - will find them in the energy futures at the same time, often to the minute).

Good idea. Have seen many guys that spent much on pricey feeds and other information sources and failed more or less because of this. If you spend say 100$ per month on a feed this puts you on a big pressure to start trading with real money pretty soon (this sums up to 3600$ in 3 years which is about the minimum time horizon most people need to get profitable). It's still astonishing to me that nearly all the really valuable information comes more or less for free on the internet (like here on this site). But you'll have to spend a lot of time searching, reading, thinking, trying and judging on your own. On the other hand many of the information sources that charge you around 100$ per month give mediocre quality or are even misleading.

For information on principles what a cont. contract is and how it can be constructed: http://www.premiumdata.net/support/...scontinuous.php http://www.csidata.com/cgi-bin/getM...tedoverview.htm Shortly: Yes, you are right - the main purpose is for charting futures in longer timeframes.

Probably the most sophisticated site: FINVIZ.com - Stock Screener Enjoy.

Just a little suggestion - but it would make quite a big difference at least for the way I use TL: In the "New Posts" view (and the others where threads are shown) if you want to see the latest post you'd have to click on this very tiny little right arrow (in the column "Last Post"), whereas to the left of it there is a big link with the name of the person posting. Maybe I am getting a little old but it would be certainly nice to have this arrow at least twice the size as to make it much easier to click it (It normally is much less interesting to see information about the person posting). Some extreme solution might be to even make the whole cell (not only the arrow) a link to the last post. If the user really wanted more information on the last person posting he might click then from the posting.

Forex DOM is - at least - highly questionable. (IB supplies it also). If you want to go for more valid DOM data look into CME currency futures (6E, 6B, 6A ...) for which DOM is supplied also with reasonable brokers (IB and others).

This might help (as an example from today): Forex Calendar @ Forex Factory Quite nicely parseable HTML.

Hope nobody really gets sucked in by these Jack Hershey-followers! Guys, it's really boring how you try to blind people: - One guy ("MasterTrader") posts something that was posted a hundred times elsewhere - The other guy comes along and applauds on the genius behind this - repeat all over In case someone is interested you can find the exact same postings from quite a time before: If it were really that easy (2-pair working): - The pattern that is proposed in the 2-pair thinking is so simple that it could be coded and exploited easily by any programmer knowing how to interface to a trading API and be used to make extreme amounts of money if it worked. - Just take the time and look at some high-speed feed at the tick level (which is very instructive for other reasons): Nothing like the famous "2-pair" thing can be found there. The question and idea behind this thread is good.

Sure there is something like what might be called big unflexible money. But: They are certainly not the people who are interested in the game of comfort and panic. That can be shown indirectly: Big swings are clearly not in the interest of these people. They are negatively effected by it just as the small traders. Just watch the airline comments (and the reaction of their share prices) on big crude moves. True you can take advantage of their existence because they leave big traces. The infrastructure (people, software, leasing rates, hardware) that the price moving players use is so expensive that they would be taken out of business soon by their supervisory boards if they wouldn't be very profitable constantly. What Urmablume is showing are the traces of this sophisticated infrastructure. For the volume spikes seen in the postings some specialized stuff is needed: Servers right next to the exchange, many clever software engineers and many man-years of programming, some good traders, big pockets.

Certainly there are many ways to look at the market. To me this sounds a little idealistic. Allow me to formulate another view not for theoretical reasons but because I learned that it can make trading efficient: Why are there people that keep markets alive? Because some people make profits through them. And markets will be kept alive only as long as some people (has to be always the same) make really big profits. (If it were only small profits they would start looking for other fields). Therefore the main purpose is to give the few a chance to make big money. On the other hand this implies that they have to take it from the masses. So in this view it is not about finding agreements or disagreements more on finding areas of comfort (for the masses) which quickly turn into traps. It is more like: Where do the masses go? How can we make them feel comfortable (in order to build bigger positions)? After that, how can we shake them out / make them panic?

"Trend" is an artificial concept. That is the reason why it cannot be quantified. With a pretty simple experiment this can be proven: Enter e.g. EUR/USD with 1,000,000 EUR or USD. You will get immediately the feeling that there is a "trend" because the account goes up or down numbers that will probably seem significant. With other words: Trend is a function of account size, profit expectancy and risk tolerance. If huge leverage is used there is no trend-less phase, "chop" or whatever people call it. When strategies seem not to work in "choppy" times this is due to some other problem - probably bad entry point. If the entry point is chosen correctly it's always possible to choose one of: - increase leverage - increase time frame = wait until the symbol moves far enough

I joined OpenTick long ago. It certainly was a nice idea. But I have to say: Their data was always messy. E.g. if you downloaded a continuous range of ES futures tick data it was always cluttered with holes - worthless for any serious analysis. It was obviously only a testfield: They used the service to eliminate bugs (with the help of their customers) then moved to commercial.

About ways to store large data sets please notice this extensive discussion (you may have to register first to get access to the yahoo-group): Yahoo! Group TWS-API: Has anybody tried some sort of database? It is a discussion group of people who are writing programs for IB (Interactive Brokers) API. Anyway the discussion is relevant for everybody who thinks about saving (and accessing) a big amount of data. Answers your question about SQL also. Another thing that might deserve your interest: Esper - Complex Event Processing A free, open-source and working event-processing project.

One example: Quote.com U.S. Markets - Futures Quotes and Charts - Chart for ES U9 Another one (german): https://isht.comdirect.de/html/detail/main.html?hist=10d&sSym=F2:SP\U09.CME&DEBUG=0&XsearchWPArt=UKN&bFirstTime=1&ind0=VOLUME&lSyms=F2%3aSP\U09.CME&overview_hist=10d&sCat=FUT&sPageType=extended&sTab=bigchart&sWpType=UKN&type=CONNECTLINE You might also use (best quality of charts in my view): Prophet.Net | Analyze | Prophet JavaCharts® chart the index that is associated with the future (like $INDU for YM) and consider the offset between index and future value that is relatively stable over one day (if you do not need exact values).

Too bad for me (and probably some others). Sorry guys, perhaps I don't know how to search in YouTube but I surely don't succeed in finding these videos except some trailers that do not have any informational content. May I ask you to sum up what the results where or what impressed you?

El Guapo asked: One response: No, there is certainly some truth in classifying people as buyers or sellers. Buying and selling in the markets is not symmetrical. Just imagine there is a guy who wants to buy a car. He gets offered the car for a certain price. If this price is really low he will go "I must get it right away, the guy who is selling it does not know what it's worth!" Or if it is overpriced and the potential buyer seems to be inclined towards buying the seller thinks "Where will I find another guy who buys the car for this high price again? I must do everything to make him buy now!" It is the same with futures contracts. If a (well informed) buyer sees a low price he will hurry to get it. If a (well informed) seller sees a high price he will hurry to get out. It can be assumed that buyers or sellers of big volume must be well informed because if they were making just a few mistakes they simply wouldn't be there any more. So instead of just buyers vs. sellers it may be better to distinguish between: - Well informed buyers, less informed buyers - Well informed sellers, less informed sellers The point is to find a proxy to what well informed buyers or sellers are doing. I doubt that the closing price of a bar is a very valid tool for this (chunking into e.g. 5-min bars is very arbitrary).

The question which index is leading the other may have played a role some time ago. Today it can be demonstrated at the tick level that changes in different indices are differing only by milliseconds and it cannot be said that index A is always the first to move and B the second or vice versa. (Surely there is a difference between the various contracts in volume traded but it might be a bit too simple to use this as a criterium for leading or not)

They are highly correlated most of the time, especially before news releases. If they are not correlated so much it means, that something is on the way. But that high correlation is just the same for all the major indices (also DAX, CAC, FTSE). If you want to have a look on your own (free charts): https://isht.comdirect.de/html/detail/main.html?hist=3m&sSym=DAX.ETR&DEBUG=0&iSLid=32&ind0=VOLUME&overview_hist=10d&sCat=IND&sIsin=DE0008469008&sTab=chart&sWkn=846900&type=CONNECTLINE To the lower right you will find a point: "Vergleich wählen" There you can select several indices to compare against DAX. Watch the perfect synchronicity.