Kiwi

Long GU 1.5063. Why: I still think this is retracing up. It formed a short pin bar (down) and broke into the area it broke out from. So, long the breakout zone and anticipating a short pinbar failure. If it fails to move up reasonably soon I will try to get out be+ on basis that I'm wrong. .

In retrospect tightening the stop yesterday was a mistake. However, operating in real time is what alerts you to real time mistakes. Today nothing is clear on daily so unless hourly leaps out at me I'll be trading HSI and thinking about this forex strategy some more. My view: EU Downtrend but in month long consolidation. Down sloping trend line over consolidation still holds. It looks as though at least one more push to the bottom will occur but time will tell and I'll wait for some pa to provide decent probabilities and a risk reward on a trade. AU Uptrend. Looking too extended off the daily for a long at this point. Pulling back? Ok, one dip does not a pullback make. GU Dntrend. Pushed down to 78% after 5th daily thrust down from mid jan consolidation. Looking for an abc or double before short reasserts? UJ Very confusing currently. Seems to be going up in congestion of weekly downtrend. Did I mention fibs Thales? My order of decision making is: S&R, progression of S&R (call it waves or maybe boxes), fibs at those zones, any emas that seem to have provided support for the pair frequently in the past but mainly to keep me on trend. I am looking for an S&R trade but if I can find one where people who look at fibs or mas also think their is support then I expect that their views will provide me an assist.

Couldn't make up my mind, after first test down moved limit up slightly and went long 13635. Not a lot has happened since above, below, above, below etc etc ... slow day in Asia. Edit: Now new hourly high ... stop to be+ as has tested down once, now tested up. I suspect a further test down would drop another 15-20 points so I'd look for a better entry.

Euro this morning. The down sloping line on daily worries me a little so I would have questions about the probabilities of this trade. If entered and the line fails it is unlikely to be be allowed to reach the initial stop. AU. Uptrend. Looking too extended off the daily for a long at this point. GU. Dntrend. Need more study to propose a S&R trade on this one .. I think it could be doing a large retrace UJ. Very confusing currently. Seems to be going up in congestion of weekly downtrend. Edit moved euro entry point down to just above red dotted lines. .

I have 3 ways to enter. Two related to good hourly price action but the most common is a retest of breakout. The nice thing about that one is that because you are entering against momentum you can fill as much as you want with little slippage. The issue is that you may find price skating all the way to your stop. That trade gave a nice first target and a be+ for the second half by the time I got home.

Stop to be+ ..... Going out for a couple of hours. .

Experimenting with trend based S&R trading on eu, uj, gj and au. Hourly bars seem to be a good compromise with daily for a broader view. Bars are colored while I'm awake and gray while you're awake .

I've thought about this donald but wouldn't you want to make sure that there was causation as well as correlation. Otherwise you risk a sophisticated curve fit. I suppose you could also look cutouts for situations where a trend develops and reversion fails.

It was a paid course. The amazing thing is that the guy really is good but repeated the assertion a number of times. The funny thing is that he and I would do a very similar thing but I do it for a real reason and he appears to do it for a reason that has no basis in reality - and reflects a faulty understanding of his indicator (ohlc candlesticks). My issue isn't the tools ... its the prissy holier than thou stuff that seems to go with purity.

Actually most PA traders do use indicators. Typically the either use the indicator called an OHLC bar or the indicator called the candlestick. But some of them use TPOs! Ahh you say ... but they don't hide information behind complex formulae that the trader doesn't understand. But they do. I was listening to a video today by a hedge fund manager/trader who has a serious history of financial success and he described support and resistance and was discussing why in situation X he drew it at the candle bodies .. but in Y at the extremes. And damned if he didn't say that it was because the body represented most of the price action during the candle. Now you guys are truly horrified by this because you've used market profile and volume profiles (more summaries or processing of info = another damned indicator) so you know ... all the candle body represents is the difference between the opening price and the closing price. It doesn't say that most of the activity took place in that space simply where it started and ended. So, candlesticks, ohlc bars, market profile tpos, etc etc ... they all summarize/process the raw price info to make it simpler. And like every other indicator they confuse people - even extremely competent and successful hedge fund managers! Unless the people take the trouble to truly understand the tools that they use. And then use them well.

There is definitely some truth in that perspective. But often it is because its very hard to code 'beauty' and 'looks really good' or 'well proportioned.' I know

I was more inclined to the "i've figured out from all those discussions some clever ways to make money so why would I give them to iwannatoscript" perspective. And the answer is "I don't see why I would."

Listen to atto, you should. and note that an indicator, like a price bar, is also a summary but with more complex relationships.

DugDug has the key point: "so long as the process becomes consistent" Whatever you do you shouldn't leave it up in the air. If you do that you will probably follow the majority into the path of picking the wrong one each time. Under stress (live trade, lots of money ticking up and down) you do not make the best decisions. Have a plan. Execute it. Accept that every alternative will cause some form of pain at least half the time if you hope/want/wish to optimize each trade. And instead congratulate yourself on consistent every time execution.

I was having coffee monday with a guy who trades the equivalent of tweezers and shooting starts (pinbars, buobs, beobs) on daily charts. Having looked at those formations on a daily to hourly map I would suggest that they are more than double bottoms. Why? Because the pinbars, and outside bar formations also (for him anyway) require a certain size to show that price was rejected solidly. So not only did you get a double bottom but price ended up leaving it and progressing strongly away from it.

Unless you find a broker who is not seeking a US linkage then all you are doing is diluting the secrecy of your AS. Stay away from TS or create another AS that your wife is a director of and you are not associated with - but make sure that your wife's earnings are not the purvey of the IRS. Then she can pay you a couple of dollars to trade for her and you can declare that as income. Keep the income low enough and I don't believe you have to tell the IRS about it.

If you want sense don't look at Gann then. Wyckoff is simple sense. Gann is a mix of sensible and strange. Don't mess up your mind.

I think that the reentry issue is important because: - if you can't reenter then exit quick strategies are much harder to take (cause u miss out) - if you look at breakouts you get quite a few immediate failures but the break of the failure push is a much higher probability situation if the pattern stays clean.

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Have a look at the derivative material from fxachillies as well BT. I noticed that many people seemed to struggle to really get a handle on Thale's trade management and suspect that thinking about this material might help quite a bit. I think that fxachilies struggled with the system ii stops for the same reason you did and thus created a more logical structure to remove doubt. His definition of a multiple stop strategies that evolve depending on 1. the entry pattern used and 2. what happens afterwards addresses the sort of uncertainty you describe above. To my surprise I realized that I too can trigger more aggressive exits to my benefit and will be experimenting with that tomorrow - and also that the exit is not a stop but a reduced limit order. It also makes me wonder about the use of the absolute first exposed R in both R multiples and in expectancy calculations. If one is able to consistently manage a much lower loss then perhaps the average loss should sometimes be used rather than the maximum - or at least two measures should be considered when evaluating system quality.

Thales (and others following his HH HL breakout style) might enjoy a look at two threads over at forexfactory. The first is "The System II (Yes with Irony)" which is a slightly different breakout; and the second is a derivative "FCR Thread" which include thales trade as an FCR 1. The derivative also has a spin off website which includes a description of the method. An interesting thing about it from my perspective (as a set the stop and just give it room type of guy) was that both are, like thales, very aggressive in tightening. This page describes the tightening strategy rather well ... its a little different to thales (maybe??? you could comment) but I think its quite a solid approach. exit descriptions (author is not a native english speaker) You need to read the summary document on the FCR spin off website to understand exactly when the different exits are applied.

Here's my pick for MidKnights chart. This is not so much a prediction as a preference for a particular scenario which could be joined with a 15m thales break when the top penetration failed (if) or some sort of breakout on penetrating the lows after the failure.

I, like TrueBalance, was irritated by VT's lack of attribution of the R Multiple idea to Chuck. Particularly because I'd found Chuck to be one of those guys, like you my dear Thales, who provides great value to others without requesting payment. And lets not talk about some suspect stuff in VT's love of the once popular NLP. But, I said that expectancy and R multiples didn't take risk of ruin into account and thus were a little flawed. I'm going to prepare a long post on this with a little spreadsheet attachment so that people can test the ideas themselves but this will take a while so I don't know when it will happen. One question though. To demonstrate it easily I'll use the Kelly RoR percentage as the equivalent to RoR for a particular system. I don't say it is an absolutely correct calculation (because the assumptions actually aren't right) just that if I have two similar system outcomes (one at 35% wr, one at 50% wr and one at 80% wr) it can be used to compare one RoR with another and thus determine relative bet sizes. So, the question: does anyone object to my use of Kelly and if so what would you suggest instead? The clue to my thesis on why Expectancy/R Multiple is imperfect is that you can bet much harder on a high win rate system than a low win rate system. To see this intuitively think about what causes ruin ---- a string of losing trades or more correctly a string of mainly losing trades that takes your account balance under (say) 50%. If you think about an 80% wr system ... how many times are you going to take trades before you see a string of 20 losers? On the other hand, if you have a 35% wr system, how many times do you throw the trading dice before you see a string of 20 losers? So, if on a 50% wr system you were willing to bet 2% of your equity on every trade would you also bet exactly 2% on an 80% system and a 35% system ... or would you bet a different percentage. If different then how does that affect the expectancy?

The trouble with Van is that, as usual, he's half right. Expectancy is a really good measure (right). But it isn't as good as Van promotes (wrong). Why, because you get a higher expectancy from low win rate strategies than high win rate strategies that have the same profit factor ... so it makes them look much better!! But. And its a big but. Expectancy ignores risk of ruin. And when you add RoR back in you find a somewhat different picture. But more later.

Today you had a learning day dinero. On a day you made money or didn't but followed your plan/process you would have had a good day. If you fail to learn from it ... then it truly is a crappy day