wrines

Thanks for the video, Soul. I have a couple comments on that indicator, as I have used it extensively in the past several months. I have also corresponded with the developer of it on the TS forums, and made inquiries to TS directly regarding it. Here is the bottom line: As anything, whether or not it can be helpful in your trading is entirely dependent on your application of it. One very important thing you need to realize about it, though, is that it is a CHART indicator in TS. Why is that important? Because in TS Time & Sales, Matrix, and Radar, the bid/ask volumes are true and accurate in real time. HOWEVER, the charting element in TS does NOT get true bid/ask detail per-trade data. It gets "snapshot" data. This was explained to me by a TS support person on the telephone about 2 years ago when I tried to use TS's own indicator they included beginning with TS 8 called "bid/ask volume ratio". I tried to make use of that indicator in real time, and it wqas extremely erratic. Now this newer version coded by a TS user includes some smoothing of the bid/ask volume data and some other tweaks intended to improve its accuracy and efficiency, but it is important to remember that in real time, the indicator makes use of "snapshot" data, not true, live bid/ask volume data. The TS support personactually said he wished that TS had not even included the bid/ask volume ratio indicator in TS 8 for this very reason, because the chart plots can be, in a word, unreliable. Obviously, as Soul just demonstrated, the indicator CAN be useful, and its developer and I also agree that it has *some* merit, but you just need to be aware of the nature of the data it is built on. This has more impact the shorter the time frame you are using, as the odds increase that the "snapshot" data it is built on are not valid representations of shorter time-frame changes in the TRUE data. I was told that these "snapshots" are taken "every few seconds", for whatever that is worth. In personal use, I have found its optimum usefulness to be on a 2-3 minute time frame (or its equivalent if you use tick/volume charts), and had never considered monitoring it only around pivots, which is a great idea. Hope this clarifies the subject matter a bit. W

From my observation of this strategy on ER2 and YM, I have yet to see it be very effective at all on YM, and very effective on ER2 with a couple caveats. On ER2, I set this up as a bracket trade as soon as I see what the 9:15-9:30 range is. The buy/sell on the breakout is an OCO order I set up in Ninja. One of the things I like about ninja trader is that is can be set up to then automatically manage a trade beforehand, and I have found it effective to use a setting where I have an initial 1 point stop loss and 5 point target, and then once there is .70 profit it moves the stop to entry +.20, and trails every +.70 (locking in .50 profit every step). Doing it this way has kept me out of losses on the reversals and yet locked in decent moves at the same time. Today, for example, we had a reversal but I was able to lock in 1 point before that. It can be tough to manage if you cant do it automatically with something like Ninja, because the instrument reverses so rapidly you dont have time to adjust before a .70 profit becomes a loss...and insisting on a minimum 1 point gain can lead to a loss instead. My .02 from experience this past week.

In Tradestation: In time & sales window, the default color coding for trades is green for at (or above) ask, orange for at (or below) bid, but it claims WHITE is for "between bid and ask", which might make sense in some cases, but I see this constantly on LARGE (>50) lots in the YM, where the spread between bid & ask is 1 tick, so this is IMPOSSIBLE. Can anyone tell me what the WHITE trades signify? Very puzzled. Thanks in advance. W

ok - here is the pic again - had to zip it breeze.zip

Raul, I have attached my chart from this morning. It is in TS. 15 minute, 5 minute, and 500 tick are used (which normally takes 1-2 minutes to complete a bar). This is exactly what I am talking about. The price pierces the high of the 9:30 15 min bar range at 9:31 but reverse right after a .70 gain, and drops almost 3 points before coming back again at 9:41. In hindsight, the better play would be to ignore that pierce of the high, and instead short the low of 770.70 - then there IS an easy and relatively quick point to be had. But again, HOW on earth do you know this as it happens? Thanks! W

Maybe I'm just dense, but I can't seem to make this work out via visual/manual backtesting consistently on the ER2 - at least not without huge drawdowns on the myriad reversals...what are you guys using (time frames) to test this? Has anyone tried coding it in TS easylanguage? Ant where are you? Feb, you mention "momentum" and "pace" of the breakout, and from looking at it, I can see that clearly some breakouts are easily spotted and some arent, that is, many breakout but reverse quickly. On the tick charts I have been trying to find an indicator that somehow conveys to us the "speed" a candle took to complete, and one possiblity is eKam's "hesitation" indicator - I have attched it here. W 20036222324_EKAMHESITATION.ELD

It does, and I couldnt agree more. W

Congrats on gaining on that pop. I think the better play (one which *I* failed to jump on, sadly for me) was realizing the market would drop huge soon after, which it has. I mean, seriously, anyone who swing trades stocks will tell you that as soon as you can't trust the company's financial reports, the stock is junk (and it will pay to short it), which is analgous to the stupid "revisions" the government keeps pumping out. W

I agree. The wheels do seem to be coming off the cart a bit before the finish line, unfortunately for the incumbents and their window dressing antics. I don't speak from political bias, as I have none, it's just that it's painfully obvious. Did you see the revision to the unemplyment data today? What a riot that was! And HOW CONVENIENT..... Although except for a 10 minute pop it didn't seem to help much - awwww, nice try tho. W

I find it odd when some people claim "indicators" do or do not "work". I also find it odd when I hear some people claim they dont use "any" indicators. If you use ANYTHING other than tape of the security you are trading, you ARE using indicators, as was just mentioned. Now, as for whether or not they "work", that depends on what you mean - lots of indicators "work", but the caveat is that everything is dependent on the underlying data they are based on. If they are BASED on price (past price obviously), then they WILL LAG THAT DATA, no matter how they are computed, and so I understand, and to some extent agree with those that find it cleaner and simpler and most importantly, most timely, to just be rid of them and use price alone. For those that hope lagging indicators will forecast future movement, they are often WRONG, which typically negates any edge the trader has on the occasions when they DO forecast correctly future movement, hence most traders LOSE MONEY. Having said that, I do see the value of using some indicators if they help to visually explain what HAS happened, in the past (which is of dubious merit, IMO). On the other hand, using indicators such as POC/VAL/VAH and pivots do not LAG prices even though they are calculated on past data, and therefore can at times be useful to support or confirm the trades based on price data. More useful than indicators BASED on current prices that are then intended to forecast future movement. Just my 2 cents. W

If anyone WANTED to manipulate the market (like politicians, for example ), all they would have to do is: 1) convince a few key analysts to lower their consensus on earnings for a bunch of the dow stocks for next quarter & convince a few OPEC partners to drop oil prices temporarily (say, until after the ELECTION) 2) when earnings season hits, "WOW, SURPRISE, LOOK AT ALL THESE BLUE CHIPS BEATING EARNINGS!!" - DOWN RALLIES HUGE (other markets are dragged up, kicking and screaming) - GAS WAY DOWN!!!! 3) Headlines are screaming the great economic news. 4) Key banks and large investment houses (who are in the pocket of said politicians) buy up huge blocks of blue chip stocks and continue to, defying logic and increasingly AWFUL economic data, and no one complains because we are at ALL TIME HIGHS AND EARNINGS ARE GOOD (for half of the dow 30 anyway) and gas is lower. 5) of course, buying up huge blocks of shares of stock sends the cash index higher, which sends the futures contract higher eventually. Can this be done? Not only CAN it be done, you have been watching it for the past 3 months. Look for a major crash Mid November when no one cares about putting lipstick on this pig any longer. W

Tin, I agree there werent many good opportunities today in the index futures. I trade the YM, and other than the tank at 8:30EST, the only thing worth a hoot was the 11:22 EST bounce off of the 12060 POC from yesterday. I didnt see a single playable long, though I didn't have my pivots up and now that SoulTrader mentions it, there was a playable long off of S1. Tough day, the afternoon was a total flatline. Soultrader - I know MP generally looks at YESTERDAYS VAL/VAH/POC (at least the older material uses that), but in using Antonio's TS version, it builds the MP in real time - I have found that in the morning it is too much of a raw "skeleton" to be useful as a reference, but do you actually make use of the developing MP heading into the afternoon? It seems to me after using this for a couple weeks that as a session gets into the afternoon the prior day VAL/VAH/POC areas are often ignored, while the levels built upon earlier in the same day gain in validity - has that been your experience? Thanks for all the great work and the Journal - your pivots are also excellent! W

I assume you mean 12050 not 19050. What is a VAL pivot and a VAH cluster zone? Are these MP terms? W