momentom

Firstly, this has to be one of the best posts I've seen on TL. Thanks Frank. What follows from this is that the result of correctly following Frank's idea is that you would have the best trade location = tight stop + best r/r. Taking early aggresive entries more than pays for itself. One of the reasons people lose or get faked out is the less than optimal trade location of their entry. You really need the trade to go your way immediately and not take heat.

The key is trade location. If you are a breakout trader, wait for the pullback so if its chop, it doesn't matter. Your trade off is missing the trade if there is no immediate pullback. Your other option is to be aggressive and enter early, again to get a better trade location so the chop doesn't matter.

You may want to look at spreading the YM against the FESTX50 future (the Dow50 in Europe). There is one margin issue that the YM is 24 hour market while the FESTX50 trades for 14 hours so you need to watch any overnights. Try creating a single chart of the spread and then doing your analysis on that as if it was a single instrument. Lots of opportunity but needs a lot of homework.

cowcool, have a look at market profile.

The problem here is not which software package. The issue is peoples' expectations from automation. Markets continually change modes between vertical and horizontal activity. Without building something into a trading system that copes with this phenomenon, expectations will not be met as the forward testing data will most certainly be different to the backtested data on which the system was tuned.

Before you decide on an application that you have to pay for monthly, have a look at fin-alg's MP. The latest version lets you overlay it on any bar chart. There is also another product that also provides historical VAH, VAL, VPOCs and more. Not connected to them but a happy customer for a couple of years. BTW, you use these add-ins with Ninjatrader which is free.

The trick for this is to use range bars as otherwise you are out of sync with the high volume part of the market. If you put up a range bar chart and compare it to a tick or volume or time chart you will easily see the advantage.

I think that's the idea. Great opportunity for us.

For me its not the extra real estate. Its just i'm getting closer to oldfarthood and bigger is definitely better for me.

I'm using MC for my testing and Ninja for my trading. I can export data out of Ninja and test it against ideas in multicharts. I'm a discretionary daytrader so this works fine for me. also mc is easy to use for strategy creation - something i haven't mastered in C# ninja speak. You can also get delayed data at a reduced cost from esignal and use that for your testing if you cover a lot of markets.

Hi Tams I'm using 24 inch too and have also considered going to a bigger size. I think its really a matter of the resolution you are going to use. There is an issue of both the monitor resolution capability and your graphics card resolution capability.

There seems to be a huge difference in volume readings between the data feeds. The Zenfire hourly volume readings for June ESTX50 futures for 9Apr09 is: 31634 92958 53213 45217 44452 25823 192561 142542 103964 134185 35400 15041 17087 17183 318 951578 = Total Obviously, we are not all looking at the same movie. I believe it has to do how the data is sampled and transmitted, whether its raw data or whether "something" is done to it to make it more "friendly" to the data suppliers transmission requirements. Those of us who find volume important have a lot of extra due dilligence to do. At the moment, the consensus of people I speak to say esignal or CQG has the truest volume. So those who are trying to use their brokers' feed for charting/analysis have a lot of work to do before deciding on following that course.

What a great way of doing this equivolume stuff. Any ideas to take it one step further by using different thicknesses as volume keeps on increasing. Maybe just 1 or 2 different extra thicknesses???

You could also break the conditions into setup and trigger. For example; If Condition1 then begin If Condition11 then Buy this bar at close

Try looking at the futures profiles for the same time that the underlying trades, then create a separate profile for the period between the close of the underlying and the open of the underlying the next day. Quite revealing. HTH.

This post doesn't really say anything about IB except that you don't likr them for some reason. It would be real helpful to get some facts that say something. On the other hand, in 5 years I have found IB to be problem free although inflexible which is no bad thing. Their margins are happily high too.

Been trading with IB for over 5 years and have only needed to speak to a human 3 times. Highly recommended but use a front end like bracket-trader to make your trades although IB's TWS has much improved functionality since I first started with them. BTW, their day trade margin for futures is MUCH higher than most brokers so if that is a consideration then go elsewhere.

Most laptops have one extra monitor input. I used to use a margi pcmcia cad for a second one but now there are monitors witha USB interface so you can just plug them in and load the drivers.

I went with amp over mirus because of customer service. I day trade and the chart trading on ninja is great.

I'm an MC fan because its EL compatoble and because it supports multi time frame data - you can mix minutes with volume with range etc There's also a long list of other reasons including data time stamping. Ensign is a great charting platform for non programmers but its architecture is also very old.

One of your issues in NZ is internet latency. Have a look at the times it takes to ping a server in the U.S. from NZ. Try a number of times during the period you want to trade as well as what would be quiet times. One of your issues is how you connect to your ISP and then how your ISP connects to the internet. One tool for this would be http://www.speedtest.net/ Once pass this test, the try pinging the broker's server you would connect to to trade and compare.

Can anyone recommend a broker who supports using Ninjatrader for both charting and trading? I'm looking for zenfire data connectivity. I tried Mirus but their customer service was useless. Thanks

Mirus looks not very customer friendly. Had many accounts over the last 20+ years and looked at Mirus to use Zenfire with ninjatrader as an additional broker. I made contact, filled in the forms online, heard nothing and despite two emails to a specific person have not had an account number after more than a week. Doesn't bode well for customer service when I really need it so I will try somewhere else.

I think that the concept behind this "system" is that you only trade in the first hour or so after the RTH market opens while the market is finding its balance. It is at these times that the countertrend trades have the highest probability of success.

You completely missed Kiwi's point. BTW, the more complex the stratregy the more curve fitted it is and further from likely real time replication of results.