TheNegotiator

Clearly there are different views on the whole topic of randomness and often it's trading strategy which determines this. A question I feel has been less than fully explored which does interest me, is that at times any market can display as good as random behaviour. Depending on where the market is trading with respect to the auction or an MA or whatever, or what type of conditions are present, give us clues as to what might happen and most importantly, where it might happen. But what about outside the construct of strong price activity and high probability entry levels? What about if you get stuck in "the noise"? How random is the behaviour of the market in "no man's land"? My contention is that it can appear quite random even to the well prepared. That's surely the whole reason for doing preparation- to identify areas which you believe will bring better odds of success and to identify market activity to go with or avoid.

Hi Tomer, First of all, welcome to TL! People here have a great deal of knowledge which you can learn from, or like many other forums, will confuse the hell out of you as it's all coming from different people with different experiences and different objectives. You seem intent on becoming a professional trader and that's fine even if the amount you are starting out with is not exactly great. A really important point for when you consider how much effort and time it will take before you are profitable, is who you believe you are up against. You will be up against seasoned profitable traders, big funds, commercials, algo systems and of course a constant stream of fresh wannabes who think they'll be the next big thing. These participants are all in a big rat race who's sole purpose(despite what they might tell you) is to redistribute someone else's wealth into their own account. These are hard realities and you must grasp them fully. Your $300 a day average target is all very well, but you have to account for this not happening and even you losing that much each day at times. Like Tams said though you really should be able to demonstrate to yourself consistent profitability on a good sim before you even consider going live. This way you will have a fighting chance in the market and perhaps will be able to focus more on your likely biggest enemy- you. If you want to read up, take a look at the psychology section in our forums. If you think to yourself "yeah, yeah, but I'm different", my advice is take a really hard look at yourself and know that the problems people come across within themselves while trading, are there in all of us to some extent. Apart from that, if you have taken everything into account, studied hard and set proper money management rules, have a great and proven strategy and you understand probabilities, I'd say that there is no reason why the goals you have mentioned are unrealistic. I'm not being sarcastic at all. Just really think hard whether you are truly ready to be a consistent and profitable trader.

Wow, I can't actually believe this debacle is still dragging on! The fact that months later and this still hasn't gone away makes me wonder about the other piigs again and whether or not they truly are 'okay'.

This might be a good link for you to look at:- Market Profile Calculator

The volume is just way lower outside rth. Maybe if you could normalise for volume outside of rth or even normalise price and volume from brent you might get a better idea. I just think that the volume that is done is what is important because that is the basis of underlying positions. I know lots of big moves happen outside of rth though. I just put a 24hr version of the profile next to the rth profile. 24hr is on left.

The first thing I'd be looking at is what I can control in front of me. Is your pc a trading only pc or is it cluttered with lots of other stuff? As for their hardware, you may need to do a bit of digging. Generally the best way is to speak to a friendly engineer. If you get one it'll probably be more lucky than anything though. As a rule of thumb, look at an ISP who advertises as providing low latency.

This is the intel page with processor specs for i7 sandybridge:- 2nd Generation Intel® Core? i7 Processor Specifications

I think Asus are coming out with some decent and reasonably priced ones at the moment. I don't have a model for you though. I don't know whether you actually even need to have 6GB. 4GB should do for the most part. It all depends what you're willing to spend though. Make sure you pick one up with a 2nd gen i7 and confirm it is 4 core/8 thread. I think there may be one which is 2/4. Also, depending on the level of charting you'll be doing, an ssd could be useful. But unless you are comfortable with sticking one in yourself and reinstalling windows, probably dont bother as most companies fleece you for ssd's as an add-on and don't even give you very good ones.

Upload & download speeds aren't actually what makes the difference. The higher they are, the better the ISP's hardware generally is so it can help. But the important thing is lag/latency which is the time it takes for you to see that something has traded. This depends on the distance from exchange, the set up of your hardware, the ISP's hardware and if you are on a public ISP, the number of users currently online(and what they're doing). You could trade off the speeds you quote if everything else was set up correctly, but that's not necessarily likely. The other really important thing is how the data feed provider sends the information. Generally, there are a decent number of providers who don't exactly give you a high quality service. However, all of this depends on how you trade. If you're a day trader, you'll more than likely want a fast and responsive connection, with high quality data and a pc which is correctly configured to use that data. Hope this helps.

ECB just announced US liquidity operations in Q4 which caused the spike just now. Anyway, yesterday was pretty good for bulls even if we didn't manage to take out 1198/1200. It looks like a decent volume base has come in at 1166 and so long as that area is held there's a good chance ES will target 1224 last swing high and 1232(1237.75 before back-adjustment). I'm sure today will provide plenty of volatily and chances to profit, but I'll be keeping on my toes!!

Hi Josh, Thanks for sharing. I constructed a longer profile for crude to view in a slightly different way from you. (please ignore the small profiles in the middle blue profile - forgot to remove!!)

This is what it looked like before.

back from top in '07 - I had switched to the '09 low but if you look it was lightweight when we broke down so looked back again.

With the four witches fast approaching, here's a little clarity on the happenings of the day so far. In my haste, I forgot to mention we just held the open on IB re-entry.

I feel that at the moment we could go either way. Last week not breaking above 1200 was not good imo, but clearly buying over the past couple of days is positive. I'd like to see what happens around the 1184 area as I feel at least short term on the upside, this could be important. However, 1195/98 could also cap us on the upside if we get more excited. On the downside, I'd still be watching the low volume area below and then what happens in high volume centred around 1137.25(blue profile).

So here's a chart from just after retail sales.

Interesting technically over the last week or so. It sort of feels like the markets can't make up their minds although the failure to take 1200 (and attempt above 1223ish) last week I see as negative. Anyway take a look at my chart. We closed right on the high vol at 1157.50 and overnight so far the high was low vol at 1166 ish. I do feel the test was a bit lame though and although price has recovered from the earlier test lower, it is still exhibiting a trend lower. Basically though ES has been in the low volume area kinda hanging around. What's important though overall is what happens in the RTH. I think we need to test the 1166 again and gauge strength into it. If it's strong, next up would be 68.75,75.50,80.50. If it's weak, I want to see what happens in 30-40 area and if a proper test of low vol below can happen. What are you making of crude right now josh?

Here is a first look at the new continuous contract. Btw, if you aren't a member, join up for free to see the images.

I'd like to try to illustrate the idea in a different way. By looking at an event which most would label as random. The coin toss. The idea is obviously that a coin toss produces over many samples, an equal number (or near) of heads and tails based on a 50:50 probability of either results randomly appearing. But is this right? The results do exhibit what we expect to see, but is it on a random basis that each individual result is formed? What about side which the coin is flipped from, strength which the coin is flipped with, atmospheric variables? What would the results be if a mechanical device was used to flip the coin which could use precise force and it was done on the same side of the coin each time and in a vacuum? Well I would suggest the results may not vary in quite the same way. Obviously there are other variables and factors which would be needed to be accounted for in the design of any such experiment, but I think I've made the point. So if something which we perceive to be random is not, how sure can we be each time we make a call and place a trade that the basis for our trade is complete and sound and has no random nature? My feeling is that nothing is random truely, like was indicated in a post earlier in this thread. Random is a creation assigned to events which we don't fully understand and so can't predict other than on a basis of probabilities from a set of previous results. Because we can never be sure of why markets are currently exhibiting certain behaviour, whilst the behaviours themselves are not random, our interpretation of them can only have a probabilty of being correct and therefore show a degree of random nature. As Siuya in different words so rightly pointed out, any strategy must be correctly managed in terms of size, risk:reward etc., etc. and so we can balance out the perceived randomness by being better traders. To reiterate one last time, I don't think markets behave randomly.

Wow, I think that many people are seriously missing the point here.

Lessons are for everyone, not just for 'newbies'. What you take or don't from anything varies based mostly on your experiences. Random data showing aspects of real data is intriguing to me, but I'm not saying that you should take that in any way in particular or even agree that there are similarities. The point is to have a discussion about it and maybe all grow a little wiser.

Er, yeah of course. But the fact they can appear to be similar at all must make you question how you look at charts and the level of importance you choose to assign to patterns.

Looking at it again, I was actually quite suspicious as it looks so real. I looked at the file though and generated some more charts. It's a really good illustration.

I don't know exactly how you generated the data, but if it was well thought through, the chart you show is a good demonstration. It shows consolidation followed by a break then a retest of consolidation followed by a trend then a double top!! No patterns huh?

I disagree. I think they do show similarities. Remember the candlestick charts are really too short in length as to be really a good test. Plus I only did a 144 tick chart and I didn't factor in any probability of whether a tick changed the bid/ask or for that matter that the next tick could only be a bid/ask price and not 1 higher/1 lower/unchanged. It's a crude example of randomly generated data which I attempted to make simple but fairly decent, so I don't think picking it apart is really the object of the exercise I had in mind. If anyone with better excel/access skills than me wants to work on a better model for the random data and present it here, that would be great.