Tradewinds

Those are good analogies. The underlying comparisons have to do with: Level of proficiency Time spent practicing Time spent studying Professionalism Performing to a degree of excellence If you are a "C" grade student of trading, I doubt you will make money. To make money trading, you need to get an "A" for a grade on the test. A 75 score out of a possible 100 won't get you anywhere. If you are not on the "honor role", you won't make any money. In school, you can take a few notes, rely on short term memory, and hope the True/False answers come out in your favor, and get a passing grade. In trading it's a different story. You not only need an "A" on the test, you need to be able to apply it to the real world of trading.

One problem with forums is that many of the good threads are "out of sight" if nobody is posting to them anymore. New threads get started over and over and over again, and only the current threads are clearly at the forefront. I'm not against discussing things over and over and over again, but I've never seen a forum that had a structure and a system that was able to categorize and sort out the good from the bad. In the Advanced Search, I don't see a way to search for threads by the thread rating system. The Main Page has two sections for "Latest Posts". Why does there need to be two sections for "Latest Posts?". I'd like to see a section of the main page for 5 star threads.

I have a suggestion. When someone first registers at Traders Laboratory, automatically send them some tips, or links for beginners. They may not be a beginner, but it won't hurt.

I have two basic trend patterns that I have identified. If either of those trend patterns fail to adhere to their exact pattern, I automatically assume that the market is going into a choppy phase. But choppy doesn't necessarily mean choppy sideways. There are real trends that are volatile. There can actually be quite well defined trends that are difficult to recognize as a trend because of volatility. Those kinds of trends can cause a lot of draw down. You get caught in larger than normal draw down, then think it's a trend reversal, when in reality it's just more volatility. So you could reverse, then be caught on the wrong side of the trade all over again. Do that to many times, and you give up all your profit. There are times of day when a slow, choppy market is almost guaranteed. There are probably major support and resistance levels where choppiness is almost guaranteed. There are news events that will almost guarantee a choppy market.

I look for cause and effect. But that gets very tricky. For example, let's say that 100% of all traders used the signal of moving average lines starting to converge. Well, . . . if enough people are trading the same strategy, maybe it will move the market. So did the Moving Average Convergence/Divergence cause the price to change? Or did the market cause the Moving Averages to Converge/Diverge? They might influence each other. There may be an indirect cause and effect of plot lines on the price, but I don't think that plot lines directly effect the market. Ultimately, it's about how profitable companies are, how good the economy is, what the news was, how much certainty there is, and other factors. Those are the real causes.

I issue a challenge for all 100,000+ to make a post to this thread. :rofl: Hopefully all within the next day or two. What's the Guinness World Record for the number of posts to a single thread by different individual users? Everyone sign on, and let's see if we can crash the site! Or get a record for the number of users signed in at one time.

Me too. I mean, enter a target. Don't make it too small.

Thanks for sharing that Steve. I've looked at your posts about the supply and demand nodes, and find it very interesting. So it seems that your "stop loss" for a long order would be when price drops below the node band. If this is your "stop loss", then personally, I prefer this tactic for a stop loss rather than a specific price target. In your case, if the band for taking a long position is broken to the downside, which is a failure to maintain support, it's a reason to stop the loss. I'm taking the liberty to make some assumptions here. I'm just guessing at how you are trading. Again, it seems that your "stop loss" is the failure of your long signal, NOT a specific loss target. I use the same logic. It's not about a specific loss amount, it's about whether the reason for a trade is still valid or not.

If you were right 100% of the time, you would never need a stop. So the issue is about whether you are right or not. Then there is the issue of luck. You could have an order taking draw down, but then be at another high probability set up in the same direction as the order. In that situation, it doesn't make any sense to exit. But the key is having a way to judge what the probability of success is. If there is no way to judge how probable the next price move will be, then trading is nothing more than managing a gamble. That is part of trading, but is it more of a gamble, or more of an informed decision? Let's say that you take a loss, and re-enter, take a loss and re-enter, and then take a third loss; if it were me, I'd be thinking that there is something that I don't understand. So there would be a fundamental issue other than where to place the stop loss. Here is another thought. If you enter an order, and you are wrong, then why wouldn't you just reverse? I'm not suggesting that is the right thing to do, I'm just getting back to the point of knowing what the price is going to do.

If one flash crash could wipe out your account, that would mean you are highly leveraged and trading every penny you could trade. I don't see how a flash crash could wipe out your account if that wasn't true. The other issue is how the trade is being monitored. If there is a flash crash, and you are right there watching it, then you could just hit "flat" and exit. So, at the very least, there are 3 issues here: Leverage Amount being risked relative to account size How the trade is being monitered

I've only paid for three services that I can recall, and I only took a look at them for about a month. They either did not fit my style, or the advice just did not seem to impress me. I've looked at trial offers for a few more services, and again, they just did not seem to have the depth of information or understanding that I was looking for. It has been stated that there are 43 quadrillion ways to solve a Rubik's cube. How many ways are there to make money in the market? I have no idea. The point is, there are probably many ways, and each person has their own unique twist. But, there are many, many known problems that traders encounter. You will learn at least a few of them the "hard way". There is no way around that. Unless you quit now. The bottom line is, you must have enough time and money to endure until you can put enough of the puzzle together to come up with a solution that will probably be unique to yourself. Take a lot of time to learn about the typical things that traders do wrong. And get your information for free. That will mean that you pick up a little scrap here and there where you can find it. Whether you pay for a service, or you do research on your own, either way it's a time commitment to do the reading and the learning. So you can make the time commitment, and have less money in your pocket because you paid for information, or you can make the time commitment, and not pay out any money.

I totally agree with you. And I can't remember ever reading another post that makes this point. I've read plenty of posts that mention slippage, and a fair amount of post that talk about things like co-located supercomputers, but I don't read a lot of posts about the difference between reading a historical chart and what happens in real time. To take the subject to an ever deeper level, and ask some more questions, how can so many trades be executed so fast when the price only hits those price levels for a second or two? I'm not convinced that it's just a matter of co-located supercomputers. If the price is literally, only at that price level for a couple of seconds, AND if a lot of orders get executed in those couple of seconds, then the orders must either be from co-located supercomputers, OR there was a match up of buyers and sellers who had their orders in AHEAD OF TIME. In other words, they staked out a price, and waited for the market to come to them. I'm wondering if a good part of those order executions are from orders that where put in ahead of time, maybe by traders with large orders. That would be something I'd be very interested in learning about. Think about it. Let's say there was a buyer and a seller who wanted to buy and sell at the same price. Both the buyer and the seller put their orders in. But even though there is a buyer and a seller, the market price isn't at that price. So there could already be a pre-existing match up of a buyer and a seller at a certain price, but the order doesn't execute because the market price hasn't gone to that price level. I'm wondering if there are only a few people who would have access to that information. I'm not sure how that would work, but if market makers knew there were a lot of buyers and sellers at a certain price level, the market makers might try to move the market price towards those buyers and sellers so that those orders could execute. I have no idea if that is how it works, or partly how it works, but it would be interesting to know.

Absolutely. I wouldn't want my account number, or user name to be showing in the live broadcast, but other than that, show the live account. Something could probably be used to block the user name and account number on the live account. The key is to have a business model that provides a good balance between what the customer gets and what the business owner gets. I wonder if a brokerage firm is allowed to also be affiliated with an investment advisory service? If the brokerage firm was providing the trading room, the trading room could restrict the users of the trading room to people who had an open account. That way the trading room could keep track of who had already used their free trial. Otherwise people could just sign up for free trials over and over again. The free trial could be limited to a certain email address, but then people could just sign up for new email addresses. I'm trying to think up a way that a trading room, or service could provide a free trial without people exploiting the business model, and make it fair, but well controlled.

I'm wondering if it might be better if the user had all the data right on their computer. Then the website filtered the data, but it accessed the data from the users computer. That could be problematic I guess. The user would need to be constantly downloading data, and have enough room to store it. It would be interesting to test how that worked though. That would avoid the problem of having the server on the website do all the filtering work. I don't know if it would be easier to provide downloading of data or filtering of data. I have no idea. I'm thinking there would need to be a free and a premium service. The people who make money trading would gladly pay a fee that improved their profitability.

Let's say you want to scan for something that needed a months worth of data. Where would the data come from to get a months worth of data for 10,000 stocks from different exchanges all over the world? I don't know. Maybe it's easier than I think, but I'm wondering how difficult or costly that would be? A scan of historical data is basically a query in a database. If a user interface could be developed that could translate simple conditions at different levels into a multi-tiered query, that would probably be unique. For example, have two sections for user input, and allow the user to link a subquery to the main query. I've seen a scan that allows the user to define the main set of data, and then have the filters work on only that main data set, but the main data set is very generic, like "All NYSE" stocks. Another problem with scans is that a lot of users trying to filter massive amounts of data requires a lot of computing power on the server side. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's what I'm guessing. I would think that a scan of price data is very different than looking up something like a customers address in a database. There could be hundreds or thousands of price bars depending upon the aggregation period. If a business is looking up a customers payment history in a database, the computer finds a match for a phone number, or an account number, then retrieves the data. With a scan of price data, you could be applying a moving average that first needs to make many, many calculations. I would think it's a different level of computing power. But I don't know.

What's the point in helping people? Are you going to profit from it? Are you doing it for the satisfaction of helping others? Why do you want to help others? To make the world a better place? Do you think that the people you help will appreciate your help? Do you think that the people you help will "give back", and then help other people? I think it's natural to want to be helpful, and share what we learn. But I also think that most well intentioned plans die very quickly. It doesn't take long to realize how much work is involved, and that very few people share your same ideas, and that you aren't going to get much cooperation or help, and that it's difficult to find a good working relationship with someone. The reality is, that in order to make any endeavor successful, you must be providing something of value that people want, and there needs to be a well thought out compensation system for everyone involved in the business. The key is motivating the people who are providing the goods and/or services, and giving the customer good value. I would use a web site as a means of filtering people who I would want to hire, or partner with, or to attract investors. And I would be very "Up Front" about that. I would provide something of interest and value to anyone who wanted to use the site, but I would make it clear what the reason for the site is. I think people value and appreciate honesty. Long term business and customer relations are built on trust.

This is an interesting subject for me, because I was just thinking about how I could create a trading room that would call trades live. But I would give people a free one month trial, to decide whether it was worth anything to them or not. Then, I would charge a lot more than $39 dollars a month if the system was actually worth anything. The very first thing I would concern myself with, is giving out personal information. $39 dollars for a month isn't a big risk, but it's a risk giving out your credit card number, and your personal information. If I were trying to convince someone that I was a legitimate business, I would have an address and phone number on the web page. This web page does not have that. You don't know where they are operating from, or how to contact them other than email. And the email address is an email address to the website, not a regular email address. If you give them your credit card information, and then you want to discontinue their services, how do you do that? If they ask you to sign up for automatic renewal, and that's the only option, I would never do that. Here is part of the disclaimer: You can cancel your subscription at any time through your Pay Pal account.DISCLAIMER: By subscribing you acknowledge that you have read, understand, and agree to accept them. NOTE: sp500-trading.com is operated on the internet by sp500-trading.com SUBSCRIPTIONS AND BILLING: Your subscription will continue until you cancel your subscription or until terminated by sp500-trading.com. sp500-trading.com ; reserve the right to deny service to anyone.Submission of an order form grants sp500-trading.com ; authorisation to charge your (subscriber's) credit card for the cost of ongoing membership. It states that your subscription will continue until you cancel it. I don't like that situation at all. It also states that you can cancel through your PayPal account. I have used PayPal, but I'm not really that familiar with it. I'd make sure that was true. This is also part of the disclaimer: This information is not meant or intended (and should not be used) for the purpose of investing in any of the above investment vehicles in any way whatsoever. Okay, so the disclaimer is telling you not to use your subscription for trading.

Make sure your right. :rofl: But seriously, if you add to your position as you are getting draw down, are you doing it because your set up is still valid, or are you desperate to try to force the trade to work? If your reaction is: :doh:, I made a mistake, how am I going to fix this trade! Then averaging in is probably one of the worst things you can do. If it's a matter of all your signals and your setup still being valid, but you just missed the perfect entry by a little bit, then maybe averaging in is a good idea. But that's the only way averaging in makes any sense to me. I'm guessing that averaging-in, is often used as a desperation method. So the very first thing that must take place, is to ask yourself what the emotional and psychological motivation is for layering in.

Think up a list of possible things and ways to trade. List the PROS and CONS. Narrow the choices down to 3 of the best possibilities. Then scrutinize the 3 best possibilities. Compare and contrast the detriments and benefits. Effort versus Benefit Opportunity Costs Potential Dangers Potential Opportunities Personal Limitations Personal Abilities As with anything, there will be trial and error. Each person probably processes information differently. Trading is about processing information, and filtering for possibilities. Ultimately, I look for why the price did what it did. I do not like looking for something to trade. I want to know everything I can know about what I trade. I'd rather trade a slow moving market, with little profit potential, and know what I'm doing, than trade something I know nothing about.

I'm also relying heavily on my oscillating studies. Price is constantly oscillating up and down. My oscillating studies will only go in one direction for so long. Typically, in a down trend, one of my oscillating lines will only go up once in a cycle. If that line that only typically goes up once in a price cycle, suddenly goes up for 3 bars, it's usually the bottom. So if the trend is down, and I short every time that line goes up, statistically, the odds are in my favor. Even at the bottom, when the line can go up for 3 bars, the odds are I can reverse at a very small loss, or break even. So it's worth taking that small loss at the very end of the trend in order to stay with the trend for as long as possible.

The trading system defined in the article includes a "Self-Knowledge Section:" It suggests listing your strengths and your weaknesses and how you plan to to capitalize on your strengths and avoid (or overcome) your weaknesses.

In an article named, "What Is a Trading System?" By Van K. Tharp, Ph.D., Dr. Tharp interviewed an Army systems expert, LTC Ken Long, about developing systems. 1) Define who you are: 2) Objectives: 3) Calibration: Those 3 things were suggested to be the starting point in developing a system. In the article, a distinction is made between a trading plan, a trading strategy and the trading system. The trading strategy includes things like the setup, and stop losses. The trading system is more like a business plan.

Wow, that Free Tharpe Trader Test was encouraging. Out of the 15 possible trader types Tharpe has defined, I scored in the highest group. The report states that I have potential, IF I'm willing to do the following: First, are you willing to take complete responsibility for your trading results? There is no room to blame the market, your broker, your education, or anything else. Second, can you change your thinking so that you treat your trading as a business? Initially, this means writing a thorough business plan. Third, could you develop a trading system that fits you? You probably live in a world of ideas and strategic planning. You value intelligence, knowledge, and being competent. You have an original mind and a great drive to implement your ideas and achieve your goals. TRADING CHALLENGES: You may be so logical that you don't recognize when emotions are causing you to self-destruct. You have a strong desire to be right, even to the extent of perfectionism. This might cause you to never actually trade because you continually are trying to develop or buy better systems. You may be susceptible to the loss trap. Therefore, you may not honor your stops because you want to be right about your trades. Okay, so they are telling me what I already know. Now what do I do? Well, it's good to consciously think about this stuff so that I can deal with it.

Tharp Trader Test - What type of trader I am: You are a Strategic Trader You are quick to see market patterns, which allows you to take advantage of them. You are an avid thinker; therefore, understanding trading will come easier to you than to your peers. Your great drive to achieve your goals will help you be a great trader, if that is important to you. One of Your Trading Strengths - You are quick to see patterns with the ability to rapidly hypothesize and generate low-risk trading ideas. One of Your Trading Challenges - You have a strong desire to be right so you might want to work on perfecting systems rather than trading them. The above statements are the results of my Tharp Trader Test. It really "nailed" me. This is the type of trader I am. This is interesting. It describes exactly what I'm trying to do.

That long tail on the inverted hammer at the peak, would automatically make me think the price was peaking. Plus there were previously 4 bars that closed up, and the last two bars where really strong price moves. In a situation like that, at the very least, I would expect some retracement on price. In this case, the retracement turned into a down turn in price. My guess is, that something was happening on the longer time frame. I don't really read candlesticks except for what I intuitively pick up, but I'm always looking for patterns in my indicators. And when a pattern fails I ask "Why?". The first question I would ask is, "Was there any news releases at that time?". When a pattern fails, it's often some influence outside of price and volume. The next thing I look at when a pattern fails is the higher time frame. So if a short term time frame pattern fails, I then default to the longer time frame indications. The bottom line is, unless you have additional inputs with known affects on price, then this might be just one of those situations where you can't really figure out why the price did what it did. We can't know why every price move happened. So how do you strategize for something like this? If you were long, and had a nice profit from that strong move up, I would just lock in profit, and wait to see what is going to happen next. If price was going to continue up, there should have been an indication of that, but it didn't happen.