Kiwi

I'd be interested to know what the op figured out in the mean time and, thus, their response to the one genuinely helpful post in this thread (Not claiming that I'm always genuinely helpful, especially when faced with an ego-bloated guru type)

And Peewee got 147 points.

It didn't and peewee decide it liked the trade too so it joined in. Currently a bit below this picture (780) . I moved the target on the other one down to 749 to see if i get a break of the bottom. Edit: got 200pts on the first. Will post peewee when it exits

currently short but if it shows too much more strength i'll take a small profit and exit

The forum is very good. The search is fine for me. But if one wanted to search for ADD one alternative is to google ADD site:traderslaboratory.com I often use google for a different view of trading sites. One interesting element of TL is that we've attracted a lot of guru types. People like Spider who has found that he can quietly run a thread on Hershyism and only gets hassled for a bit or Urma who keeps starting new threads. The nice thing is that Spider stays in his thread and doesn't feel an advertisers need to keep starting new threads to promote himself. I think gurus who are relatively unobtrusive are a good thing. Noisy ones, except the likes of db who shares well, is open, and doesn't act like a clever dick (legitimate phrase from yesterdays crossword) are a bit more irritating. Note to BF: despite your everlasting fascination with things best left at the front of the church I don't classify yours as guru behaviour (no secret, self-aggrandizing knowledge).

All caveats aside, the reason that X percent of people fail has more to do with them and their planning and execution processes than the method they are taught. 1. People don't plan and test their strategies 2. People don't execute what they planned to execute 3. The markets are a humbling machine and your brains programming is based on chasing things in the woods and digging for grubs not beating a modern electronic market - you need to overcome this. People are designed to be happy and overconfident and one of the mechanisms that achieves that is distortion of past events. Hence, even when the mentor taught something valid, they are blamed when 1,2 and 3 humble the trader - who wants to be humble when they can be happier by blaming someone else?

If you miss Asia you are missing a lot. Often I see a nice move in Asia after the US and the European market will open with adjustment for the US+Asian move since its previous close. Having spent 5 years trading asia I think you probably won't find much useful unless you build a theory of what you are looking for before you run tests. Otherwise its probably crude data mining and may generate correlation based theories that have little predictive value because you missed the causation. One observation is that there have been periods where there are big moves in US time. When that occurs the Asia time move is often a big gap followed by choppy consolidation. So is this true or is my memory just biased by the effect on my trading of those days where it was true? Bias and distortion being the wonderful things that they are, damn it. Also consider this one. You guys have those morning news reports. These cause currency markets to react in shock and they ring and create non-trending behavior. I've not watched your equities but the currencies trend nicely from London open to US reports (with 30-60 minutes of prepositioning behavior before big reports) then ring like a bell when the report comes out. Edit: Last idea. Rather then just looking at one period vs another or taking the paranoid delusion hypothesis that the big boys all moved the market at the same time during the early hours (I laughed out loud at that ... some people see ghosts in the machine) you might look at correlations between ES and HSI/Shanghai for Asian time and ES and ESTX50 the European time.

The rectangles are higher timeframe bars. They usually have nothing to do with the strategies - I just like to know where things are wrt the longer time bars. Main variables are whatever they are. They are the things that make your strategy succeed or fail or the things that change in the market. One example might be some criteria for how much a double top can be tested before it becomes a break. Over time the players in the market will move such things around - can't make it to simple for the plebes after all. Or maybe you use the slope of an ma as a qualifier - does it change in summer or something. The issue is that you design a strategy to catch some sort of activity. Then you test it to see if it does. But the nature of that activity will change over time as the market evolves and you need to adjust the strategy to reflect the change in its nature. Or design it to be so crude and robust that it doesn't need that. One needs to be careful that you are really adapting to market changes and not just curve fitting though or you will always find that today doesn't fit your curve - a nice thing about Peewee is that it is performing better now than it did in its test period.

Thats a good list of books brownsfan but I wonder if he should start with less (buy them from time to time). That post by Thalestrader the other day was an excellent one ... lets see if I can find it. Good basics to get started. http://www.traderslaboratory.com/forums/208/reading-charts-real-time-6151-31.html#post78242 Then add douglas for psych ... and others as needed.

MK's point is very good. Choosing to automate is likely to be a choice to forgo some strategy options. If the context is too hard to program then you can't do it. I am finding that trying to code things generates an enormous number of questions as I make new "discoveries"- but also that 5 years of discretionary trading gives me enormous resources of ideas and intuitions about what might work that I didn't have before I traded. A question for the intuitive is "what is it about the context that is so hard to program and what edges might that give us?"

Yes. You can create any combination of factors from the data available. I have found three things: - I can out trade my systems because my visual perception is better than my ability to code it but I can't trade 2 different strategies on 4 different markets (short time frame) at the same time. - I am using more indicators simply because some of them generate a good summary that is equivalent to what I am looking for by eye (they simplify programming) - People talk about systems that are adaptable and frequently mean automatic adaptation (use AR or ATR say) but markets don't change in a nice linear fashion, they move in jumps so my adaptation will consist of periodically reviewing the main variables to see if they should change because the way that market participants are acting has changed.

How smart? I currently use limit and stop-limit entries with OCO brackets to protect the order and limit adjustment to exit on trailing profit capture (rather than stops because hsi can be so thin). I think the Sierra Chart team would implement anything that we could make the case would be useful to a reasonable group of customers. I'm using SC to drive Interactive Broker's TWS but it can be used with other platform. I write my systems as dlls using C++ but you can also design systems using the SC worksheet interface. Worksheets will never be quite as flexible or efficient as a dll though. The most important element of this change has been that I no longer attend to the market real time and I don't feel any guilt/blame/pain when the system makes a suboptimal decision ... its just statistics in action.

Its interesting that I am in the process of completely eliminating intuition from my daily trading. Having spent 5 years watching the market and trading it in real time (HSI, SPI, STW) I realized that my intuition about the markets, my real time execution, and my attention to operational details were not my fundamental strengths. Said another way, it had become boring and I suspected that I wasn't going to get better at it. So, in my inimitable style I decided on a radical change. My strengths are: understanding of the market and setups, solving problems and programming. I like newness and I love problems and the satisfaction I get solving them. So I am in the process of automating my trading style. My first system, Peewee, was an attempt at it and didn't quite work. I ended up with something that I didn't really like but it had a nice profit factor and even on really ugly markets stayed above 1.5 so I implemented it. I've been live on it for 2 weeks now and I'm getting kinda fond of it. While I work on Popsicle, Peewee trades HSI. Every so often TWS pipes up and says "Trade Entered" and I check to see what happened and whether it looks ok. I no longer jump each time this happens. In the first week I intuitively interfered with it about every second trade but after 3 days I realized it was better off without me so now I let it go. And the damned thing makes money almost every day. I now reserve my intuition for generating ideas to test and program. Once they're implemented I just let them go.

James. If no one else has an issue with it just leave it. Now that I know what causes it for me its not an issue any more. My config is so unusual (ssds, stuff on ramdisk, etc) that I wouldn't assume it will occur elsewhere unless it does.

Actually. In the terms you set it is a totally relevant reply. And if you really don't want to hijack the thread you will accept that Brownsfan and I disagree with you and we think that we know enough to be right whether you think we are or not (note that shouting is impolite). If you really wish to debate the topic feel free to start another thread explaining why you (I was so tempted to capitalize that) are right (and again). Then someone might feel the desire to refute that ... or not.

Note for Brownsfan: Grey1 thinks that the only futures contracts are for stock indexes. Because of this he thinks that he has a fact. If one was to consider that there are a lot of contracts that are not for collections of stocks then one might come upon a new fact. And one might even learn something. On the other hand: divergent opinions are what make markets so interesting. Imagine the horrifying situation if we all traded the same facts?

I have a lot of add ons but I disabled them by xxxing the extensions directory and then running 3.5.3. Checked and only the java quickstart reinstalled. Simple process for forcing the error. Open the front page for TL with 3.5.3 and leave it open dos deltree of the ffprofile/cache directory which will kill all but 4 or 5 files Close firefox immediately Reopen firefox Reopen http://www.traderslaboratory.com To get rid of the error. Close firefox and deltree the directory again which gets rid of all files and the directory. On rebooting firefox all is well. Seems to work almost every time.

I'll also attest to the value of snagit. Here's the rest of the morning with snagit 8. I wasn't monitoring this trade ... I was gardening but had convinced myself I should trust Peewee and Sierra Chart to do their thing. Save as ping or gif for small size with clarity.

But it didn't have legs.

Liquidity generation example this morning on hsi

It was such a good example I thought I'd annotate it. Not taking anything away from Thales' zones of S&R - more that if you see a situation like this then it adds another layer of momentum to the long opportunity.

I'd second the point wrt time scales. In my own experience, scanning charts until you find the timescale where moves are meaningful for the type of trade you want is very important. Some would claim that there is too much noise on shorter timeframes - but I think thats too strong, its more a question of right timescale for the type of move you are trying to trade. Steve's point is also interesting. It might or might not be useful though. You need, once you know the timescale and type of move you are looking for to study prior examples and find out if the pullback must be deep for sufficient liquidity to have been generated for a good move to follow. This will vary from contract to contract and may also be something that changes over time (markets both evolve and cycle as "simple" things are eroded and then sometimes become simple again - if it was static then it would just be too easy, right?)

Got it I think. I am creating the issue James, which is why I see it so often. I clear my cache automatically from time to time by batch file. It seems that if it does it while firefox is on it leaves something there that creates the problem "just" with this site. If I close, re clear, and reopen it is fine. So I'll put a branch in to prevent the problem. If you're programmer wants to recreate the problem let me know and I'll mail you the remaining cache files from when the problem is live.

Perhaps the issue isn't my reading. Glad to hear you have no problems.

Since yesterday. And the first time I looked (and posted) this morning it was fine. Now its gone to the other mode. I'll clear my cache in a second and see if makes a difference.\ Edit: Cleared Cache and its back to normal.