momentom

notouch, what happened to the simex nikkei futures I used to trade from Australia? What are the daily volumes of the OSE contract?

The above statement by Walter is one of the most important in this thread. If you do stats on your trading according to wins and times of day, it should be quite revealing.

My initial stop loss is a drop dead stop loss and is about 2 x my expected initial minimum profit target. Having said that. The "possible" profit target is more than 3X my risk. Once the trade is on, I manage it.

I cannot trade successfully unless I have a high percentage win rate - more than 80%. I am unsuited to any other way of trading. The only way I can then earn enough is to trade size on "sure" setups. Each time you trade, you take on risk. So I only risk when the odds are surely strongly in my favour. So I maximise my earning by trading confidently on those "sure" setups. Works for me but may not work for you.

I used to trade the whole session. Then I did the statistics and found a pattern when I had the best trades. It was really clear. Now I trade ONLY during those windows. And I trade 5 times the size doing fewer trades.

Just a heads up for MP traders. Ninjatrader charting is FREEEEE! http://www.ninjatrader.com There is a new add-in for sale that is MP: Final| Financial Algorithms You can use a miriad of datafeeds. I've just started the free trial. No affiliation with either, just a user.

Walter, do you use this with your Ms?

I received an email from TradeGuider offering a free download of Tom Williams book. I took them up on it even though I have the hard copy. I needed to authenticate with the emal address they sent the offer to.

Browns, TS uses the volume from entire trades. If you are charting, say, 500V bars and the bar is up to 499, and the next trade is 127 contracts, you will get a 626V bar. They don't split trades. If you want Easylanguage compatability and EXACT volume bars and don't mind a work in progress, have a look at MultiChats (Trading and Charting Software for FOREX, Stock, Future and Option Markets) . They are great people behind it. MC has some issues so I'd suggest you read their forum but you can port all your TS stuff over easily, take a 30day free trial and run it off your TradeStation data feed. MC supports about 10 other data feeds. I use it, eSignal and TS and prefer MC. Still trying to wean myself of the other two.

I have both TS and eSignal. eSignal FINALLY looks like they resolved their Eurex data problems. TS still has some Eurex latency. It comes down to this for me: I use TS because I can test trading ideas. eSignal needs programming skills to do the same.

I've been trading the DAX for years. Its probably one of the hardest markets to master, but the most rewarding. Its become two markets now: The european one from 8am German time until about noon. Then lots of U.S. players join and it gets more volatile with autotrading by computers changing its nature. Can be a VERY whippy market but you can make 100 euro on a 1 lot in a blink if you are a scalper. Usually, trading in 5 lots works for scalping for me. I paid a lot to learn this market and know many who could not get profitable before they quit. Volume now is very good. There is no tick or trin that i know of but I wouldn't use them anyway. STOXX follows DAX more or less. These two are like ER2 and YM. Hope this helps.

Nice Candlestick resource: http://www.candlestickforum.com/

Guys, I struggled with Equivolume over 15 years ago. Never quite worked for me. Then came volume bars from eSignal. Changed the world. Metastock was the main equivolume package. Ensign now has a good version. But for me, nothing beats the Volume candles because it visually tells a story, word by word. I add a 35 XMA and a 105 XMA and its a language I can understand.

Soul, you have hit the nail right on the head. The timeframe you use MUST, in my unhumble opinion, relate to the stop placement strategy you use. For example, many of us use the previous high swing on a short. If that is too far away, we must pass on the trade so we need to choose a number that gives us logical exits that are comfortable to trade. One approach is to look at the "average" volume of the market you trade. Just an eyeball calculation. Then, divide the volume into the approximate number of bars you want to see in a day. I am a scalper and mostly trade the DAX and Russel. Both now trade about 250,000 cars a day. 0.25% of 250,000 is 625 and gives me over 400 bars a day if I use a Volume Bar of between 315 and 625 (triand error eyeballing the charts for my setups) and get about 20 setups a day and a stop loss that fits my trading plan. If you do not want so many trades you can either have tighter criteria to maintain tight stops and a larger % of winners or you can slow things down by looking at 0.5% of 250,000. If you are a swing trader look at 1%. Hope this helps. Great threads on VSA and Volume candles.

MiP was, for me, a completion of what was left out of MoM. Having been at Jim's seminar and at Pete Steidlmayer's a few times, I found that MiM really locked it in for me. It was the stuff that created the image in my mind of the moving value area I think that did it. I used to concentrate too much on TPOs which are reaqlly not so relevant in index trading although they were more relevent for T-Bonds when they regularly moved $1k+ every day.

Hi How do you trade the opening of a day like today? No S& R on the indexes. I will have to waqit for quite a while until structure develops.

There's a program out there that you may want to look at: Elliott Wave software for trading Stocks Commodities Futures and Forex It is basically a fib pullback and projection software with position sizing. It uses ABC waves.

Guys, when measuring the ema angle a la woodie, I look at the angle 3 bars before the bounce due to the fact, as walterw rightly points out, the ema flattens on the pullback. The countertrade when the price is far from the ema is also a very good trade when filtered by an oscillator to show overbought/sold condition. The CCI is perfect for this. Try the 50 CCI, not shorter.

I've been trading the 34ema bounce for a couple of years now. I use tick or volume charts. I've even automated it for TradeStation but the fills have too much slippage and TS gets out of sync easily due to the number of trades a day. It works better trading it with an oscillator that gets over bought or oversold as well as the steepness of the angle of the ema.

Problem with limit orders is that the market trades there but you don't get filled. This means one of two things: Your system thinks you are filled and you are not, or, You miss many profitable trades and get all the losers whick makes your back testing useless.

The biggest issue in mechanical systems for me is EXECUTION. Slippage is an enormous problem as is the system getting out of sync with the actual fills. My systems trade about 20 times a day.

IMO, trading is not about indicators but a "structure". A trader needs to create a structure in which to trade so the trend can be seen as well as whether price is cheap or expensive. Indicators are part of this structure. Price action can then determine entries. Exits are a separate matter and need the structure to be able to be relevant. Market Profile attempted to do this but is not quite precise enough for very short term trading.