Kiwi

I have a third view (yes, you are not surprised ) The market is somewhat predictable. If certain things happen in a certain context (say a retracement after a breakout) then I predict that there is a 70% chance that it will move 10 points forward before it moves 6 points backwards - thus making a trade worthwhile. I make such calls up to 10 times a day and pleasantly surprised at how often I am right. I am even right in the 30% of times I get stopped out. :smoking:

I used to look for the end of trends. In fact I spent 80% of my trading career in search of them. Then one day I realized that all the other newbies and most of the losers must be doing the same thing (seeing those I knew had a fascination with eoTr and seemed to lose money seeking them). Do you know what the best trade I have is? It's to wait until its clear to most that the trend will probably end - and then fade them. The more people that get tempted into fading the trend, the better the continuation. There are some highly reverting markets but they don't seem to include forex or asiapac futures so it works wonderfully for me. FWIW guys :doh:

Agreed with BigKahuna. Ztrader's post was not offensive or hostile - it was an attempt to offer genuine help. Relax. Go back and read it again - there is useful information in there. On the markets: they go through small, large and very large cycles of change. Some of them relate to topping actions, some are just the market's delightfully quirky way of disadvantaging as many participants as possible. Perhaps the current times reflect a questioning of whether the US issues are oversold vs the economic issues becoming clearer in Europe now. Perhaps too many people have become committed to trading daily and 4h charts. Such is the joy of trading.

I wouldn't erie because I've seen too many situations where it didn't stop. The exception would occur if there was a wider up channel (longer term trend), the current point rejected price to give an up bar or two and a minor test down occurred. I would buy the rejection of 13250 and be especially pleased to do so with a significant drop in volume or an extreme in volume. Depending on what I was trading I would like to see a slight break of the wider trend channel as part of that (the more people exit or go short then the better the liquidity for an up move).

A very interesting post Hlm. It's rare that I read one that long right through. A couple of points I would make: 1 - You can often code a good idea in several hundred lines as long as its in a language made for trading. The thing that takes longest is that you think something is clearly specified until you try to code it ... and it never is. 2 - I don't really agree that the brain learns to do the indicators but agree you could make it do it. I think that the better indicator developers created them to model something they were thinking/seeing although the worse ones just modified earlier ideas. The least sexy indicator of all in its reality is the stochastic although it does get a big following - when you examine it, all its doing is applying a horizontal HiLo channel thats a long as the primary number (6 of 6,3,3 say) and looking at how close price gets the top or bottom. Overbought is in the top 10% of the last X days. Basically a really nice way of asking the OB/OS question. If you understand that then you know that to tune it you have to look at price and say "how many bars does it have to keep going in direction x before its OS/OB." The other two numbers are just smoothing of that and then smoothing of the smoothing. That gives me a good idea for a new indicator. Its the KiwiStoch and it has 4 parameters. The first is the channel size for up moves. The second is the channel size for down moves. Why? Because for many markets (stock and index futures, yes, forex probably no) the market falls much faster than it rises. So the channel length should be different in up trends and down trends (do we need a 5th number for the length of a lsma or fast ma (hull or t3 say) to decide if the current "trend" is up or down)? 3. Some good systems will run differently up or down (or often are long only) and what System developers are doing is including that last issue in their system. One reason they use indicators in systems is simply that its easier than writing the whole price behaviour description yourself (programing short cut).

Yes. What you have found is that simple strategies without context usually don't work well. What discretionary trading is usually about is using context to select the situations where entries, targets and stops will work for you. And that reading of context is the thing I could never really work out how to computerize. There is a class of "simple" strategies that can work well enough. Those are generally where you do something that is not obvious and thus not what other people are trying to do or have tried to do. Perhaps you fade one of the failing simple strategies in some clever way that takes advantage of the way they fail. Or something else. So its not so much replicating the discretionary as seeking a non-obvious edge. Such edges probably don't last for ever so part of it is determining the failure criteria and how you will monitor for those conditions so that you don't give all your profits back in the bad periods. I think its also a good idea to seek strategies that a "big guy" couldn't do because size would work against them if you can figure something like that out. That way there is less competition for the niche. Aren't the markets fun? :deal:

Your numbers seem reasonable. Unbundled gives you advantages even at the base rate except on Yen denominated futures (where ub is higher than bundled) so choosing requires a choice of instruments as well.

The question was: Why So Many Indicators but Little Strategies in TL? The answer lies in the question: What type of forum is this? The forum was started by James a few years back and James has a strong interest in Market Profile, the epitome of a discretionary trading method. I think most of the early posts were in this theme. I had certainly come across from a systems trading forum (Curtis Faith's one) and note that there are other sytems forums out there (Forex Factory is one of the nicest examples). I don't want to be insulting in what I say next but its an observation of both the forums I have touched in the last 10 years and my own evolution as a trader: the love of indicators and systems is largely a newbie thing. So those forums are full of newbies. A small percentage of traders succeed and remain system traders. Most who have long lives in trading seem to move to discretionary. Those who stick with systems accept the drawdowns and the low quality statistics that systems give (2:1 is a good profit factor in systems but I do staggeringly better with discretion). I think its possible to mix systems and discretion in such a way that you get most of the benefits of both and will probably try that at some stage but success seems to come most easily with the learning that comes with discretionary trading. Part of that is because discretionary traders become naturally adaptable. So the forums that have experienced traders in them tend to be largely discretionary. And here at TL we have a relatively quiet, polite, forum with a high ratio of experienced traders.

If you find the US too late (i'm in Aus) then you might also look at europe. The bund (gbl) and eurostoxx (estx50 a dji equivalent) are nicely behaved futures contracts. The dax is bigger and more volatile.

One of the things I like about it James is that its honest in its Volume so if you are thinking Wyckoff or Market Profile you might rather like it. By way of contrast, HSI is totally deceptive with volume and SPI is largely honest but has a habit of starting moves on very low volume (whereas STW usually indicates its intentions with a nice confirming punch). I found the number of N225s to confuse me a little on volume (and have played with adding sgx, n225 and n225m together to try to improve my read).

Yquem, Never forget that the next timezone's futures markets and stock markets will be available when you get home from work. So in the US you can trade asia (spi, nk, kospi, stw, hsi).

pipal, Don't forget the STW (Taiwan on Singapore Futures). It starts and hour later than Nk & SPI but its a nice mover with good depth that's about half the size of the other two. James, do you have any analysis of market participants on STW? I've not seen one and would be curious to know who I'm trading with on STW.

IB provide a list of products that Nanny has approved for the kiddies (no offense kids): http://individuals.interactivebrokers.com/en/trading/eligibleProducts.php?ib_entity=llc

And just to prove that the markets will do as they will - they finished the day close to their highs (don't know about kospi).

A question worth asking is: does it perform better than this one? .

Aussie SPI has also lost its enthusiasm for the up side too. And stw keeps trying but vol on each up move dropped (so far). .

Actually, thrunner, you can trust what GammaJammer said without statistical analysis. Trust is an unfortunate word here because it suggests that one or either of the other parties might be untrustworthy. What is interesting is the question of whether or not you could build a useful trading concept despite the genuine issues with any forex volume measure. You might be able to because the proxy for volume might have useful characteristics. However, knowing what he has said could apply at any time and almost certainly differently to different feeds you might also be considerably wiser in your use of a proxy for traded volume.

You can do multiple periods with Sierra chart ... Here's 3 day vps on a 15minute chart (the blue bars are overnight, green & pink are up & down. .

Do you know what is wrong with your self-discipline James?

I think you are describing one type of loss of focus Eiger. Dr Vohs is describing a different type. "Dr. Vohs notes that self-control problems occur because people are caught up “in the moment’’ and are distracted from their long-term goals." The simplest example would be someone who had decided to lose weight. They move through the day resisting temptations. And other things happen. Then they happen upon some freshly baked blueberry muffins: caught in the moment, smelling those delicious muffins, they pick one up and bite into it; delicious. Oh, darn, forgot about my goal. Substitute watching the market for the day passing, resisting a few good looking moves that didn't quite meet the rules, then just losing focus on the long term goals ... and ... oh no, it looked great, I entered ... but ... ahhhhggg ... its not according to the rules. Caught in that damned moment!

LOL Feb, with that attitude you will never see it! If I go to the trouble of creating that system the last thing I will do is give you is "a look at it." I will be trading the french connection UK out of it with no help from you.

If you knew there was a big announcement due in the next 5 minutes would you enter wasp?

I don't use fundamentals at all either. What I do though is avoid entries immediately prior to planned news announcements, not because of any knowledge or assumptions about fundamentals, but simply because it's prudent to manage risk by not entering at times where volatility is likely to be high. I also don't enter on the first bar of the day or during the Aussie lunch hour. Actually I don't trade the futures market after the stock market closes either. I'm pretty sure that wasp doesn't enter around fomc announcement times or when their is a big announcement scheduled for 8:30. Other than avoiding times with a historical negative effect on expectancy I am more than happy to let price and volume tell me where the market is currently going.

Plus Frank will support you "forever" gassah. Something that you don't normally get with a $97 book. I use a simplified version of Frank's work to determine intraday trend (although I trade ma bounces) and have found it keeps me on the right side of the market.

Soul is correct. The US tricks don't work well on SPI or STW either although at least Wyckoff style volume interpretation works intraday with them. With HSI even the volume is unreasonably deceptive. Personally I establish intraday trends and then microswing trade the trends until they reverse (if they do) and then swing the other way. Here's a 15 min spi chart. SPI trades ~24hrs so you can see the effect of the Euro/US timezones which I show blue on my charts. .