AgeKay

I don't know what you are trading, but on exchange traded securities it can only trade on the bid or ask. I don't see how your data feed might screw that up since a mid-point requires both bid and ask as information.

That's because a transaction at the mid-point is impossible. It's either traded at the bid or ask.

You're always risking at least 1 tick (2 ticks if you use stop orders) whenever you enter a position. Just because S/R breaks, does not mean that it will move far enough to make it worthwhile. And I don't know what market your trading but the bund does not always move in discrete steps. If you check today's chart, you can see that it literally jumped from 123.41 to 50 at 11:17am CET. I agree. I my opinion, S/R is less about how often it works (accuracy) but more about finding good entries. If you're S/R is broken, you know you're wrong. I agree that many people use it very broadly. For me, S/R are prices where a price move has reversed repeatedly. For example, if you look at today's chart of bund, between 9:07 and 9:45 CET, the bund bounced off of 123.26/27 exactly 29 times and then another 3 times off of 123.25. If this wasn't Support that I don't know what is. During the same time, it bounced off of 123.29/30 also 19 times. So that was the corresponding Resistance which later on (13:40 CET) turned into support and then after climbing 14 ticks bounced off of 123.44, of which it bounced off of earlier twice (12:12 and 12:32 CET).

It depends on the market. In the bund, S/R is accurate to the tick.

It came down to doing the opposite of what I used to do when I lost money (kind of obvious, I know). Cut losses short and let profits run, instead of doing the opposite Go with the trend, instead of going against it Average up, instead of averaging down Trust my feel for the market Be more focused, more patient, and less emotional Don't use any technical indicators (this is just personal preference) Completely stopped reading trading books, forums and blogs (except Don Miller's blog) Started writing down observations and mistakes during trading and learn from them Started to understand how exactly the largest traders in my market manipulate the market I trade Started to take care of myself (go to bed early, live more healthy, do sports)

Be warned that you can't trade Forex with small money unless going with a bucket shop. And in any case, avoid MetaTrader like the plague.

Alright girls, can you please stop arguing about stupid shit and focus on the topic of the thread. It started out so well, but the signal-to-noise ratio went down significantly with the past posts.

Thanks for all the responses so far, I really like some of the explanations. Just so you know, I trade very short-term, I don't even look at yesterday's chart, so if you talk about days and weeks, I can't really relate to that. The "markers" explanation by wjrusnak is one of the best explanations though, in my opinion.

I see this way too often to deny its significance. Support becomes Resistance and Resistance turns into Support, especially after day's high/low breakouts. It's so accurate (to the tick) that it's scary. I am wondering why that is happening. Two reasons that came to my mind were the following, but both aren't terribly convincing: a) traders that went long at the support try to get out break-even or with a small loss, that's why they keep selling at the previous support, effectively making it resistance. b) traders know that other traders went long at the support and want to prevent them from profiting so they sell at that price, knowing that long traders have to sell eventually. I hope one of you has a better explanation.

I love how "educators" never put any money on the line when they show something. At least this one does not hide that he is trading in a simulator... I think what he means by 'order flow transition' is those bars turning green after having been red for a while.

While all market data from Zen-Fire is unfiltered, they do not have a 'trade' data type that includes a field that says whether it traded on the bid or ask.

It depends which API the application uses and how it implements the API. I have no experience with X_Trader's FIX adapter, but their XTAPI certainly supports it, you just have to use the right event handler and set one property. X_Trader shows all unfiltered trades in its time & sales. All I know about Ninja Trader is that they use the FIX adapter and not the XTAPI. But I don't see how that would make any difference since NinjaTrader only exposes their own interface where you have that synchronization problem and the trades do not contain the information whether it was traded on the bid or ask. You would have to implement X_Trader's API directly in your own application to take advantage of that.

X_Trader's API offers unfiltered time & sales that contain a field that tells you whether it traded at the bid or ask in just one stream so there is no need to check the inside market and therefore there is no synchronization issue. It's probably the best feed/API for these kind of indicators.

I guess I am a little late to the party, but here are my comments. Not really. I've programmed almost everything under the sun and you don't need any math skills beyond grade 6 to program unless you're programming a physics engine and or do transformations for graphics. C++ is not much faster than most people make it out to be. C#, which is managed is only 30% slower in most scenarios since the run-time knows what platform it is running on and it can optimize accordingly. C++ is a mess anyway (not to mention that manual memory management is a nightmare). That's what you get when you try to hack object orientation into an old language like C that was not intended to be used as one. Yes, C++ and C# are different. The syntax is similar though (as is Java). C# is basically a better version of C++. C# is "managed", meaning it runs on a run-time called ".NET" which was originally developed by Microsoft and runs on Windows only. There is another innitiaive called "Mono" that is basically a copy of Microsoft's .NET but runs on all the other operating systems. C# is getting better and more dynamic with every new version. It's currently at version 3.0 but C# 4.0 is already in the works. All imperative programming languages are basically the same which means that if you understand one, it's pretty easy to pick up others. Statically typed languages are compiled while dynamic languages are usually interpreted at run-time and/or the code is dynamically generated and injected at run-time. It's a question of performance and productivity. I would learn a procedural language (e.g. C or Pascal) first, then object oriented but statically typed (e.g. C++, C#, Java), then dynamic language (VB 6, Javascript, Ruby) and then maybe a functional language (e.g. Lisp, Cobol), which is not required but a completely different programming paradim. My experience is it's better not to learn in high school or university, because it's taught so badly. It's better to get a good book from an author that knows what the **** he is talking about and go from there than listen to a tutor that does not really get it. I think it is essential that you answer that question. If all you want to do is write your own indicators, then you do not need to learn a general purpose programming language like those mentioned above. I agree. Just pick a platform and just learn the simplified programming language that comes with it. I think there was a reason they came up with domain-specific programming languages like EasyLanguage.

I am wondering whether off-exchange block trades even matter since they do not change the inside market. They would have to appear in the DOM and time & sales to have an effect on the market, no?

Me neither. Does anyone know how to spot these and what affect on the market this can have?

I personally can't concentrate when people talk - be it on the radio or music (this includes hip hop). I think it's just how humans are wired.

Do you believe everything a car salesman selling snakeoil tells you? You said UrmaBlume's work reminded you of FutureScalper, but it has nothing to do with FutureScalper and even UrmaBlume told you to take a closer look because he disagreed.

I just did a little research on Vantage Point and they do not use neural networks and have scam written all over them. Their 80% winning percentage claim is a joke if you read it carefully. The inter-market analysis this software supposedly uses gives you the same results even if you remove markets from it and their other "leading indicator" is just a MA crossover. This is also what I found: There are more customer reviews telling to you to avoid it. Could you do as a favor and at least have a quick look at the software you talk about?

That's what I was trying to accomplish with my custom charts. There is way too much information being ignored by bar charts and you can't keep everything in your head (especially me). I could actually take a break and not miss any information.

Right. Wrong. It's no theoretical and not inspired by the other post. I have an actual working version of this. I just don't want to post a screenshot of it. I have already talked more about it than I originally intended to. I am willing to trade ideas if they are original, but no free lunch for you. This is simply untrue. Trades at bid and ask are not manipulated. If your data stream cannot keep up with the volume of data, then you have a crappy data stream. Get a good one instead of making up conspiracy theories.

No, he does not sample data, he processes every trade. In his most recent post on the "Trade Intensity" thread he explicitely says

You can see this being done in FutureScalper without the zooming though (there are a few videos on YouTube). Exactly. This is what I am talking about. Be creative. Think outside of the box. Discard everything you know and start from scratch. This is what I think too.

I do use a graphical representation of trades but one that makes sense to me (which I have not seen anywhere). My intend is not to slam an approach, just to point out its flaws which is not being done enough in my opinion. It seems that anyone can come up with an approach, give it a fancy name and say Jesus used it and no one will question it at all. I know I might sound rude at times, but hope it will make people really think about trading. Ok, I'll suggest you use it to predict the next inside market before it changes and use it as confirmation to stay in a trade or exit. I don't want to post my charts, sorry. I am not going to tell you. I think everyone has to find it for himself. I know, it's a cliche, but it's true. I've posted in other threads what I think makes sense. If you don't think you would have come up with an approach, then I don't think you should use it. Observing the market, would you have transformed a series of individual trades which contain 4 pieces of information (price, time, size, side) into bars, candle sticks, MACD, VSA or other indicators/approaches? If not (which is highly likely) then there must be a reason (yes, we are naturally not stupid, but we like to believe other stupid ideas). No one is going to tell you there method if it makes them shitloads of money which is the reason you don't read about top trader's methods. I do not sample data and none of my indicators use parameters/variables (this is actually one of my criterias, I do not use it if it requires a parameter). Your jaw would drop at how obvious/natural it is and how much easier it makes profitable trading decisions. My price charts do not use bars or candles and my time charts have no resolution or you could say they have infinite resolution. I trade very short term and do not hold positions overnight. Yes, I try to be provocative because it's a very sad state the trading education and software is in right now. I have wasted more than 2 years reading about traditional trading advice before I started to really think about it and come up with my own approach which took a lot of research, observation and thinking. This is why I loved UrmaBlume's contributions. They are original and inspirational. He does not spoon-feed you and of course I wished he divulged more information, but there is a reason he does not. He is making a lot of money from it. Why give away your hard work? And no, I do not see what effect planetory movements could have on the markets.

Thanks for your polite request. I'll try to explain why I think VSA and other approaches based on bars/candles and indicators based on these are questionable to say the least. I have not wasted too much time looking into VSA so please correct me if I am wrong but it seems to me you are comparing price bars and volume bars with previous price bars and volume bars. The general problem with price bars is that it's just a summary of a lot of information with just 5 pieces of information: periodicy, open, high, low, close. The open and close is completely meaningless on all bars but bars that represent an entire trading day. Even the high and low has little meaning since the periodicy is arbitrary. Due to this bars hide important price action information such as repeated tests of local high and lows. I don't think I have to get into why indicators based on these limited meaningless pieces of information could have any value. Then you have this volume bar that shows you the number of contracts traded during the specified period. That's all the information it gives you - no more no less. It does not show you how many contracts traded at each price, how agressive the traders were at each price and the timing of the trades. And then people compare the volume of one bar with the volume of another. This is ludicrous. There might be 1000 different scenarios of trading and they can all end up with the same number of contracts during that periodicy and the same looking price bar. No meaning can be derived from the volume alone. Watch trades at every price change and you will understand how wrong interpretations based on VSA are. They might still make the right decisions based on luck or having acquired a good feel for the market, but VSA cannot not be attributed to their success. I just want people to really really think about whether an approach makes even sense (rationally) before following it. Please use your brain.