MightyMouse

Josh, I did not buy because I was still in an oil trade and once again I am in an oil trade. If i bought it would have been at 1308.5 and I would still be in it. I wasn't making a call on it at all. It simply went where it went and I happened to have mentioned it. I was only stating some of the conditions I wanted to exist for me to want to get long and the conditions that I wanted to exist to get short. MM

Well, If I sell you an indicator and I tell you that it can help you make money and you fail to make money with it, then is that my fault and am I unethical for telling you that it can help you make money? If you purchase a Porsche because you thought it would help you get women and you fail to increase your consumption of women, is that the car's fault? You do not have to answer these. The point is that the trader at some point has to take responsibility for whether he makes money or not. MM

I am a discretionary trader, but I can see how i would benefit from coding what I do to free up some time or get me into trades that set up in the overnight. I have not looked at any systems other than a quick glance as I delete them from my junk folder, but I think a trader could benefit from systems if he used them properly. I have basically 2 "systems". 1 for trading a range and the other for trading a move or a trend. Breakouts I consider to be either trend continuation or trend reversal. But, I pretty much do the same thing each time in each system. The trick is knowing whether we are trending or ranging. I do not know if I would trust a system to tell me if a market is ranging or trending. So, the systems that are one size fits all are probably a waste of time. A trend trading system will probably end up costing you money if you try to use it in a ranging market and a range trading system would end up costing you money in a trending market. But I do not see how a trend trading system would be a bad thing if you actually used it to trade a trend. My way of trading a trend and someone else's way of trading a trend are probably not that much different in the long run. and ditto for range trading.

I was thinking somewhat of the opposite. If it stays above 1301.75, I would buy it with a buy stop at 1310. If it didn't stay above 1301.75, but stayed above 1299.5 I would still buy it but I would buy it a little lower than 1310. In either case I would begin adding to it at about 1330 and trying to ride it to a new high. I see the move up from the 1280 area as a relatively solid move and I believe there is still more demand to continue the move. The afternoon sell off occurred on weak volume and was aggressive. I suspect that weak longs exited, aggressive shorts entered. The inside buyers who absorbed the selling late in the day and held overnight I would not consider weak. I won't jump in just yet since they can be wrong, but I will up above. I would be worried this morning if I were still short from yesterday and if there is no follow through on the downside. I would want to short this if we broke below the 1299 area and it occurs on decent volume. By volume I mean market volume and not ES volume. In that case I would try to ride it back down below the low. I am in an oil trade and will not do any of the above if I have not exited the oil trade first. I only want to have one trade at a time. Anyhow it is always interesting to me to see the different views that are occurring in a market. Good luck. MM

Yeah a lot of things may have coincided at the same time as trading that I attribute to other events.and not necessarily to trading.I don't race bikes but i can see how that too might have provided some lessons on its own. Marriage and children are another big chapter. MM

Josh, Are you trying to short down to 1293? or 1283? MM

What is unethical or immoral about selling an indicator or a system? It would be unethical if you bought a system and you got a blank disk. It would be unethical if it failed to enter and exit properly. But the trader is the fool if he thinks he is going to turn the market into a personal ATM. You get what you pay for. If you were expecting magic, then what you paid is probably not that much to learn that there is no such thing as magic. MM

I have heard that said a lot and have thought about it. Quite frankly, I haven't learned a thing about myself that I already didn't know. Maybe I did something wrong. I do not know. But, I am curious to know what you learned about yourself that you didn't know beforehand. MM

There are lots of breakthroughs that occurred. The manifestation of the breakthroughs was evident when my winning trades became significantly bigger than my losing trades. And my winning days became a lot greater than my losing days. When a trader takes money from me, he gets crumbs, when I take money from him, I take anything from crumbs to everything he has if he is willing to put up it up on the table.

As a goof, you should put your own picture up as your avatar. No one would know it was really you.

If you want to trade for trading sake, then sure trade for the hour. Go to the casino instead. Al least you have some smoking hot waitresses walking around serving drinks and sporting cleavage. If you want to make money you have to be committed to trading your market when the move occurs which may not be when you are there for an hour. Almost all futures markets trade 24 hours with a small break. Likely, you will be left holding the bag for those who did take advantage of the move that occurred outside of the hour that you were there either by you providing liquidity for them to exit their trade, or your stop providing them with a better entry for the next move.

That's Great!. Has there been anything that occurred that you didn't expect?

Sounds like you have done a lot of work preparing. A question for you: If your draw down occurs at a point that is inconvenient, such as in the beginning or soon after you begin, how are you going to deal with it psychologically? Continue? stop? or change? And, what if your draw down occurs and begins to get bigger and deeper than you thought, then what do you do? Stay the course? Stop the system? Change the system? Keep in mind I am not calling into question whether your method is effective or your analysis was thorough, or if mechanical trading is the right thing to do. I am asking you how you are going to react if A and or B occurs. MM

I agree with giving away the books. And, more importantly, don't just give away the books, forget the content of the books as well.

How are the results going to be tallied? Or, how is cheating going to be prevented?

Well, from perusing the internet, one quickly realizes that there so many choices of educational sources for an aspiring trader to sift through. Which source of formal education would you recommend?

I do think the authors are truly sharing what they think would be a winning strategy, setup, or plan and are not intended to be a con. I also think that they may not be entirely honest about their success at trading if in fact they did have success trading which you could call a con. The reader assumes it is true because he needs to believe. He needs to believe that he can easily turn 5k into 100k in a year.

At times experienced traders act like inexperienced traders. ES will do what ES is going to do; an inexperienced trader will get out too quickly when they are winning and stay in too long when they are losing. A lot of inexperienced traders read about trading plans that are flawed and falsely believe they are true and employ the flawed plan because they read about it in a book and that is what the author recommends and he is a lot smarter than most because a publisher was willing to publish his thoughts, so he must know what he is talking about. Basically, they create the situation that allows back luck to take advantage of them after which they will claim that trading is too difficult without knowing that they sabotaged themselves. They begin to go crazy and seek psychological help to find out what is wrong with them because they are having difficulty executing their plan. I suspect that subconsciously, they know the plan is flawed, but consciously they believe they need to follow the plan because so many books tell you to follow the plan. Its an inner conflict or a case of bad ribs.

Posting a NC BBQ recipe would be an insult to anyone not living in NC.

Trading lessons cost money.

Peter, I have had that bookmarked for a long time. Its a very slow moving indicator but it did a good job calling the turn in 2009. I do not use it as I have gotten away from longer term strategies and have focused entirely on short term futures trading. By raw I meant that the reversal bar plots like a candle and not like the customary "x" or "o" like a PnF. So it shows the OHLC, like a time based bar, but a new bar is triggered identically in the same way as a new PnF bar. MM

I use price, volume, and time. I don't think he is old enough to have invented those indicators. It's not a conspiracy. He is telling stories that no one can ever substantiate. It's sort of like the virgin teen that goes away to Canada for the summer and comes back with stories of sexual exploits to tell his friends. But I will tell you what, I am now intrigued to seek out the indicators of the one Jan Arps who was breed to trade because he drew charts for his father as a child and therefore does not understand the link between fear and uncertainty. I suppose that story makes his indicators work better. But, it seems like someone is trying to slip in a little stiff vibrational essence therapy after which you will want to regress to a past life.

Rande, Clearly, his intent is to sell books. We all know that we don't want to buy a book about trading or indicators from a common guy, so he has to make himself uncommon. We want to be lied too don't we? You should know the answer to this. But, you pass it along as if it is true without knowing whether it is or not. MM

I use raw reversal bar form of PnF. I rely on them heavily in my trading. It's a shame you don't plan on shorting. Canslim or VV can be used to select a basket of weak overpriced stocks in a weak market. Stocks tend to go down faster than the go up. MM

Rande, The Jan Arps story you are telling is completely fabricated by either you or him. If he actually told you this, then go back and rethink it. MM