UrmaBlume

Thanks for the kind words. I work with a wide selection of tools that includes Neural Networks, Rules Generators, Decision Trees, MARS (multivariate adaptive regression splines), Genetic Optimizers and Selectors, Bayesian/probabilistic networks plus various tools for intelligent data extraction, scaling and general pre-processing. Given the proper understanding of the tool, its data preprocessing requirements and the data domain - any of them, individually or in tandem, can be used to develop successful trading bots. The point I tried to make in the post above is that it takes more than just buying a NN development kit and throwing the output of some indicators that don't work to begin with to make money using these technologies. There are masters of technology that can't build successful trading models and there are trading wizards who can't build intelligent trading models. It takes way more than just professional expertice in both domains to have a chance at this game - it takes an artist at both. Just like in trading in general, it is only a few that succeed. "Success in the markets is not about instinct, divine inspiration or spontaneous intellectual combustion. It is about intelligent data processing, sound method and the management of risk and resource that is both effective and adaptive to change." cheers UB Below is a picture of my desk where I track and train these little bots of mine: 4 dell workstations and 23 19" monitors

Over thirty years ago when DARPA had first allowed developers to make Neural Networks and certain other tools available to the public, I bought N-Train, a NN development kit offered by Dr. Jeffery Katz. I developed a model to trade the Swiss Franc. The model produced answers that were very close to perfect. I hooked it up, ran it and it never made a winninhg trade. Thus began my leaning of the effective application of data mining, artificially intelligent tools, feedback mathematics and genetic optimization. Experienced users of such technologies refer to curve fitting as an instance of the technology memorizing the data rather than generalizing rules from the data. There are several ways this memorization can be avoided. One is to have enough data - some say there should be at least a couple of hundred records for each input to the model. Also at least 20 percent of the data should be unseen by the technology during development/training and then test the developed/trained model on the unseen data. The degree to which the model performs more poorly on the test data is one of the ways to detect curve fitting. Also the model should be built using different versions, branches and sets of these data mining/AI/feedback mathematics tools and test results should be similiar if concept and data contain inputs that truly offer a solution. In any of these projects pre-processing the data is 80% of the engineering and 90% of the work. The greater/better the relevance, scaling and other preprocessing of the inputs to the target - the greater the chance of success. cheers UB

The "MRO" function reports "bars ago for a certain event or condition. MRO(MA1 crosses over MA2, 100, 1) will scan the previous 100 bars and report the number of bars ago that the first instance of MA1 crossed over MA2.

I am upgrading my WorkDesk: These 23 monitors report from 4 Dell Workstations. cheers UB

Tams, Like you, I first thought this guy was just touting his room. I managed to have an hour long phone conversation with the guy and have exchanged some PMs. He claims to be an MD in Texas. As a result of the phone call and after reading these posts, I do not believe he is an MD (my labrador can write better), I don't believe he has any sort of technology (from the call he came off as both very inexperienced with the market and with technology) and I don't believe he even has a room (not one person we know has been to this room). As you know I wrote a book on odds & probabilities and I put the odds that this guy has anything like what he represents at over 10,000 to 1 against. I believe that he is a lost soul, off his meds and if you notice most of these posts come on the weekend which is when a lot of people do their alcohol/substance abuse. I have no comtempt and only sympathy for this guy - imagine the turmoil that must be his internal dialogue. My though is that it is the power of the random reinforcement that he gets from replies that keeps him posting. Maybe if we all stop he will give it some thought and get some help. UB

My time in Africa taught be about Bush League BullShit and this is that. No show here - just some guy jerking off with daily limp wristed "if it doesn't go up, it will go down" forecasts. You are welcome. At least for a couple of posts there was someone here to hear you shouting/stroking in the dark by yourself. Now I leave and you can go back to your one person circle jerk. UrmaBlume

...................... ......BushBaby......JerkOff

If you are the only one posting to a useless thread then you are just playing with yourself - it's called jerking off.

Bob, As Pryme suggests - value is subjective and volume/orderflow/balance of trade is objective. We trade nothing but automated systems and all of them are based on order flow. I see every day that changes in the balance of trade drive changes in price and that in many, if not most, instances these changes in order flow occur BEFORE the change in price. Almost anyway the value of a stock is calculated, the result is something that doesn't usually change during the course of a trading session. At the same time it is for damn sure the price of the stock changes during that session and those changes are the result of the surges of buying and selling that occur throughtout the session. While value, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, it is still the buying and selling of these stocks, futures, etc., that drive/motivate their price. cheers UB

Success in the markets is not about instinct, divine inspiration or spontaneous intellectual combustion. It is about intelligent data processing, sound method and the management of risk and resource that is both effective and adaptive to change. Why the high failure rate in trading? Most new traders fail and so do most new businesses. While the failure rate for new traders is probably even higher than the failure rate for new businesses, the reasons for these failures are mostly the same. The two most common causes of failure among both new businesses and new traders are under capitalization and lack of domain expertise/education/understanding. As to capitalization, the minimum requirements for successful futures trading is full margin + maximum negative departure + one standard deviation of expectation. That formula assumes a positive expectation. Without that positive expectation - the capital requirement for a losing trader or business is infinite. Expectation is one of the prime determinants of capitalization and domain expertise/education/understanding is a prime determinant of expectation. Consider the requirements in time, money and self to become a medical doctor and then note that the most successful traders make far, far more money than the most successful doctors. As capital requirements are inversely proportional to expectation which means that the very best require the least capital, one distinction between winning and losing players is defined by losers trading highly leverage forex and ES traders with only a few thousand dollars per contract - neither has more than a pennies on the dollar chance of success. Considering domain expertise/education and understanding, imagine in your mind a complete description of those few that make all this money. What does their shop look like, how is it equipped, what is the speed and flow of their data, what is the collective education, experience and resource of the people in those shops that design the systems and methods that produce all of those billions of dollars. Now imagine in your mind the resource, education and experience of the average individual trader - make the comparison and you have your answer. UrmaBlume

AZMike, Thanks for the kind words. As to our work with order flow and the balance of trade, there is more coming. By the end of next month TradePoint Software will bring out new software that will include an updated version of our Indicator Pack and an Update to the HUD. This will include more information about how to use Intensity to spot runs on stops and buy/sell programs. To demo the efficacy of this software we will start a free room whose main purpose will be to demo and support the software. To demo the software we will show real-time, real-money trade by bots who use inputs from the indicators in the indicator pack as their main source of trade decision support information. To start, I will run the room and be open to questions about the software and trading in general. Participants will be encouraged to join the discussion and be given access to either phone in, Skype in or VOIP in. From those participants I will be looking to hire someone to take over the room to allow me more time for my work with the development of automated systems. Besides offering a demonstration and support for my software, my goal with this room is to provide more useful trading support and information for free to traders of any level than is provided by any of the paid rooms. As always I am open to any questions or comments by anyone. Contact info including phone is on our site. cheers UrmaBlume

Bomberone1, The indicaors in our Indicator Pack are designed to work with volume charts as described in a TL Post Here or by downloading the Indicator Pack Manual HERE. The Velocity/Intensity indicator works best on volume bars that are around .0004 of the average daily volume of the target instrument. For ES we find good results using 1,000 bar chart. Today's session high (so far) was posted at 1008 PST in ES @ 1355.50. The HUGE spike in velocity shown in the chart below and the negative divergence between price and indicator V94 led to a 15 point drop in ES. The chart below shows the session high today and how it was well indicated by these indicators. Some of the indicators in the pack indicate continuation and some such as shown in this chart indicate reversal.

We have found both McAfee and Norton to be huge resource hoggs, hard to get rid of if you want to change and short of features. The Microsoft product is probably ok for most home users but not robust enough for power users. ESET has never let us down. Does not hog resources and is very feature robust.

ESET 5 - very effective, less resource overhead, sends almost all spam to Outlook junk folder.

On its way

I am using TS9.0 with Windows 7, 64 and have experienced none of the "crash" issues you mention. I am a TS add-on developer and easy language specialist, our apps make great demands on TS and we have none of the difficulties you mention. Multi-charts is a TS knock-off done by some of the same Russian developers that worked on TS. They have no object orientated programming without which system automation is primitive at best. The new TS Order, Price Series and Position objects are the first to make a FIX like protocol available to retail traders. All that is not to mention the data. TS offers 6 mos of tick data and decades of data in 1 minute and up time frames which is more than any vendor that supplies MC and the data is cleaner. But then again all of that means nothing when your position is as stated below that programming/software is "in general a gimic." LOL - Tell that to those at Goldman and at Renaissance We disagree and believe that "Success in the markets is not about instinct, divine inspiration or spontaneous intellectual combustion. It is about intelligent data processing, sound method and the management of risk and resource that is both effective and adaptive to change." UrmaBlume

The newer versions of TS include very useful object oriented programming. I am very curious to know what you can do in 8.7 that you can not do in 9.1, or what 8.7 does different from 9.1. The new versions are faster, have made moves towards multi-threading and as far as I know contain all the features of the older versions plus some powerful new features - could you please be more specific in why you say the newer versions "suck." UB

If you use the "BackUp/Restore TradeStation" routine under the file choice on the menu bar you can save the back up and it contains everything - charts, elds, workspaces, desktops, even tool bars. When you install a new version of TS you can either select to copy the old enviornment or install it and then restore your back up and you will be exactly as you were. cheers UrmaBlume

Pedro, Many of your issues will be solved if you do not trade from a strategy but rather implement your trading from an indicator using the new order and position objects in TS 9.0 & TS 9.1. I miss my sundown drinks on the river side veranda of the Oriental plus the rowdiness of Nana Plaza. cheers UrmaBlume

As you relate your stop to previous bars' extremes here is some simple code that will establish and move your stop: If MasterBuyCondition1 = True and TimeCondition = True Then Begin Buy TradeSize Contracts next bar at market; SStop = Low[1] - StopF; LongExitCondition = 0; end; If MarketPosition > 0 Then Begin If Low[1] - StopF > SStop then SStop = Low[1] - StopF; Sell CurrentShares Contracts Next Bar at SStop Stop; end; Cheers UrmaBlume

Somebody on our side doesn't seem to be able to see the whole board. More Debka: "The bombing attack in Tehran which killed Iranian nuclear scientist Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan last Wednesday, Jan. 11, generated an angry phone call from US President Barack Obama to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the next day, debkafile's Washington and intelligence sources report. Washington is increasingly concerned, the Wall Street Journal reported Saturday, that Israel is preparing to strike Iran's nuclear sites over US objections and has bolstered the defenses of US facilities in the region in case of a conflict. Obama, Defense and Secretary Leon Panetta and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have been sending private messages to their Israel contacts warning them about the dire consequences of a strike, the paper reports. Top US armed forces chief Gen. Martin Dempsey will visit Israel next week. debkafile's exclusive sources report that the differences between the US and Israel surfaced before the tough Obama-Netanyahu conversation last Thursday. Political, military and intelligence officials privately voiced resentment over the strong and unusual condemnation the White House and Secretary Clinton issued over the death of the Iranian nuclear scientist. By denying "absolutely" any US involvement in the killing, the administration implicitly pointed the finger at Israel – an unusual act in relations between two friendly governments, especially when both face a common issue as sensitive as a nuclear-armed Iran. Obama seemed to suspect that Israel staged the killing to torpedo yet another US secret effort to avoid a military confrontation with Iran through back channel contacts with Tehran, while the administration's extreme condemnation is seen as tying in with its all-out campaign to hold Israel back from a unilateral strike. As part of this campaign, the Foreign Policy publication ran an "investigative report" Friday, Jan. 13, the point of which was to show that US and Israeli undercover agencies have been at odds for years after what was called a Mossad "false flag" operation. "Two US intelligence officers" are said to have revealed to the publication that in 2007 and 2008, Israeli Mossad officers posing as US intelligence agents with American passports recruited terrorist group Jundallah operatives for covert attacks in Iran. This Pakistan-based Baluchi extremist group was described as utterly shunned by the CIA. The weekly's sources said they were "stunned by the brazenness of Mossad's recruiting activities…under the nose of US intelligence officers, most notably in London." They implied that Jundallah were sure they had been recruited by US intelligence. But so was Tehran. The Israeli "false flag" program was therefore accused of putting American agents at risk. A "serving US intelligence officer" told the paper that President George W. Bush when informed of this episode "went absolutely ballistic." debkafile adds: At the time of this alleged operation, Ehud Olmert was prime minister of Israel and Meir Dagan director of the Mossad. While the Bush administration is not known to have ever taken it up with Israel, Barack Obama decided to cool US intelligence cooperation with Israel on the Iranian issue when he took office in 2009. Foreign Policy in its tendentious and selective report presents Mossad as the sole recruiter of Jundallah for sabotage and hit operations for defeating Iran's drive for a nuclear bomb. It omits the slightest mention of the fact that US intelligence started using Jundallah for such operations from early 2005 with ample US-dollar funding approved personally by President Bush. Our Washington and intelligence sources note that the report appeared two days after the Iranian nuclear scientist was killed and the day after Obama took Netanyahu to task. It had two objective: to show that US is not responsible for all the covert operations of recent months against Iran's nuclear targets and, secondly, to demonstrate that Washington means to continue harassing and pressuring Israel by every means to hold it back from a military operation against Iran."

Steve, I think you are absolutely right. I had about an hour on the phone with the guy who claims to be an MD. I googled up the name he gave me and it showed an MD by that name but both his writing and his conversation lend doubt to that claim. Still I gave him and his outrageous claims the benefit of the doubt until non sequitur after non sequitur and the lack of any cogent explanation has left me believing that you are right when you say the simplest and most obvious answer is probably the right answer. cheers

Debka: "US President Barack Obama is busy aligning Middle East allies with the next US steps on Iran. Contributing to the mounting sense in Washington of an approaching US-Iranian confrontation, the Pentagon is substantially building up its combat power around Iran, stationing nearly 15,000 troops in Kuwait - two Army infantry brigades and a helicopter unit – and keeping two aircraft carriers in the region. Iran's Ali Larijani told Turkish leaders in Ankara that his country is prepared to take on any attacks and may go public on a nuclear weapon."

WOW - 172 ES Points in 31 successful trades in holiday trading on Thanksgiving day. I had almost an hour on the phone with this guy and given that conversation and the non sequitur/disjointed nature of his verbage both here and in that conversation my opinion/best guess that it is much more a matter of meds or the lack of them than it is a matter of cash/not cash. cheers

Tams, I had almost an hour on the phone with this guy and given that conversation and the non sequitur/disjointed nature of his verbage both here and in that conversation my opinion/best guess that it is much more a matter of meds or the lack of them than it is a matter of cash/not cash. IMHO A claim of 172 ES points in 31 successful trades in holiday trading on Thanksgiving Day pretty much says it all. cheers