4EverMaAT

To answer the OP, there are two main explanations as to why successful traders may not post their winning system (or at least some of them) 1) they prefer to keep them in house. This is due either to adopting the scarcity model of economics, or just preference to not wanting too much of their business out on the street. You probably guessed that the scarcity model wins in the majority of cases. 2) they don't have a winning system (one that is consistently reproducible), but prefer to claim that they do. My experience has shown that #2 is the case about 90% of the time. Humans love telling stories. Especially in Western culture, when there isn't a good explanation for something, we either ignore it altogether or if the object is so in-your-face that blatant ignorance is not feasible, we create powerful mythologies to explain what or why a phenomenon is happening. The good news is because the truth is obvious and readily accessible to all who want it, it is unnecessary to rely solely on guru or teacher. Yes. Of course the trader's ego will resist with all its might :security:. Without the trader, the ego has nothing to latch onto.....no way to interject an opinion. The system could actually work as intended without interference. To help answer the OP's question, Tams actually reminded us in the very first reply to this thread of the classic approach to buying and selling: buy low, sell high and vice versa. This basic approach to determining the best contract price to buy or sell will not change. This is easy to do walking forward in real time, mainly because you have a real-time display of prices. You can always buy lower or sell higher based on the available price. So depending on your buying power (available margin), you can buy or sell an instrument in series and then accumulate net profits when prices move back in your favor (on a retracement). This is also known as cost averaging. Here is a spreadsheet to help practice working out numbers and determine appropriate levels of risk. There is another tool that works on metatrader 4 that closes out profit after equity target is reached. There are advantages to automating the entire process, but that's for another thread.

NOT please. for the drawdown rule. It would be better to introduce some type of technique that would rate the volatility of the % gains/lost, such as a risk-adjusted rate of return. It took the standard deviation of the change in account balance from day to day and divided that into the gross rate of return to give a more realistic idea of risk to reward rate of return. It still allowed people to trade however they wanted, but gives equal footing to the aggressive and conservative trading strategies.

I see some confusing conflicts with the video you presented: 1) Drawing Fibonacci Lines top and bottom are subjective the way you present it (and the way most people present it). It is all relative which "top" or which "bottom" you use. 2) It is a lagging indicator when done this way, because you must wait for a retracement has taken place before making any trading decisions. 3) the pin bar that you describe is relative to the timeframe and broker that you are using. It appeared you were using 4 hr timeframe. But what if you were using 1 hr? Or 4 hr timeframe, but a different broker? 4) You are using moving averages (lagging) as an additional filter. Why? Isn't the properly drawn fibonacci enough.

If the OP was trying to say (to some degree) that you cannot know everything there is to know about the market with words, with symbols, then I concur. The greatest inspirations usually come from unknowing and unlearning what you observe does not work. Then when you see something that does work, you 'know' it works from experience, not just because someone said so. It is difficult to follow or observe something abstract. You would need to develop or follow concrete steps, preferably a system that has a continuous cycle of the same core steps to test the validity of the steps. But when the OP makes a statement like "...So, what does a trader who claims to have learned how to trade really mean? Really its not a objective measure but a measure ones own self confidence. A measure of how competent they feel and capable. Let me back up and also say that I have produced materials on developing specific types of skills that have helped me. There are specific types of skills that one can develop, and that can take off years from the learning process..." What are these objective skills or steps that the OP refers to?

At least he is taking some action and doing his best. That does count for something. Such is the reality of the trading business. As one of the original turtles once said [paraphrasing]: "...Those of us who actually trade for a living know the names of many "famous traders" who are famous as "traders," but that don't make money as traders ....Most of these so-called 'experts' can't trade and don't trade the systems that they [tell others about]...." I read many of these recent articles and wonder: "Ok, so what exactly was your point?" or more specifically "How do I apply this [non-sense] in an actual trading situation?" I guess I'm one of those people who just don't "get it". I was just recently watching magic's greatest secrets finally revealed. Don't underestimate the power of illusion. The majority of tricks they showed had nothing to do with camera tricks, but classic misdirection of the person's attention or hidden devices/compartments in a clever arrangement.

A properly coded system is always discretionary in nature. But let's make a clearer distinction here. The if-then rules are always followed in the sequence that the programmer has laid them out. How do you determine the rules? Through deduction, observation, and making choices based on how you think (or feel) the market price will go. And since the price for financial instruments is 100% linear (it can only increase or decrease in a sequential number value), and the values (OHLC, volume, tick, shares, etc) are all recorded electronically, quantification can be 100%. The various if-then rules to account for various market conditions are a result of the discretion picked up over a series of repetitions. You may have unlimited if-then statements (as many as you can keep track of). Discretion can be quantified as long as a definite choice is made as a result of [whatever event triggered choice]. Now whether or not this discretion can be coded partially depends on the skill of the programmer and limitations of the trading package. The distinction of what is discretionary in the negative case are arbitrary rules that are not applied consistently given the same set of "if" circumstances. What I found is that the discretionary trader (same circumstances, arbitrary application of rules) are the most difficult to follow along to determine how to duplicate their success. And the vendor or trader certainly could not teach arbitrary discretion with any accuracy. But this is excellent for some vendors particularly. Why? Because at any time the rules are not working, the vendor can easily say "yeah...you see you should have bought instead of sold because my [mystical discretion rule] said so" Of course this is a charlatan's wet dream, because they can fleece a lot of new traders into buying their *great returns system* and then have a ready, "plausible" excuse when the system does not produce the stated results. Of course there will be the discretionary trader (same rules somewhat arbitrarily applied) who can be profitable. You can be consistent enough to make money...even good money. Just like you can have a small bakery shop and be profitable baking cookies all day long. You don't have to be exact with your methods, just good enough to keep the shop open with some extra profit for yourself. There's no right or wrong with this approach if it is your preference. If you want any chance at growing (scaling) or passing on your success to someone else, you will need an exact process to pass on to your successor or to open a new store and duplicate your success. I actually think the discretionary trader does have a set of core rules that it follows, but certain parts may be difficult to put into words. The same is true if you want a chance at watching multiple markets at the same time. You'd have to employ a large degree of automation, which can only be achieved with clearly defined rules. I am not referring to a black box system, where an inflexible, one-size-fits-many approach is assumed. But at a minimum a grey-box system where settings can be adjusted and if you own the system fully, could be modified at the source code level to test different scenarios. Systems approach actually takes discretionary trading to a whole new level in your ability to forward test new rules for feasibility. If you've ever driven a car, flown on an airplane, used a cell phone, used the internet, or a laptop (computer), you are already familiar with the huge amount of leverage that automation can give to the end user.

It's funny how the most actively traded forex and futures financial products are very highly leveraged. The eurodollar futures contract boasts between 1:1000 - 1:5000 depending on the broker you use and their day trading margin. Non-USA/JPY retail forex brokers typically have anywhere between 1:200 to 1:1000 leverage on offer for most of their currency pairs, and their minimum lot sizes can go down to 10 units of the base currency (although 100 or 1000 units minimum is more common minimum for some accounts). The leverage only is appropriate for determining how many positions per tick or per pip that the account can trade before being unable to trade anymore. This is best done mathematically using a spreadsheet designed for this purpose. This is how you can determine with 100% objectivity how much of an actual pip/tick range in market movement you can handle from initial entry before blowing up your account. One person said it best on a different forum: if you cannot sleep at night with the amount of open positions you have, then you are over-leveraged. It can be a big temptation to overuse leverage, when unaware of the true power of position sizing. One advantage about using the spreadsheet is that you can determine your level of aggression and then copy the lot sizes into your system and forward test different levels to paint a clearer picture of the difference between aggression and recklessness. The idea of not using more that 1:10 leverage is a rehash of the "risk no more than x% per trade" idea. Neither of these abstract-only method address the strategy being used for entries. They also do not address pip or tick value price movement relative to each (or total) position size. Luckily for most traders, price is linear and all these relevant events: pip/tick value, position size, and position value per pip/tick can be calculated precisely from entry to exit (equity stop loss or take profit). Use the spreadsheet or something similar to determine these precise values. It is true that we cannot predict the exact range of price travel all the time. So shouldn't the goal be to focus our attention almost exclusively on the aspects we have control over in the most objective manner possible?

i'm also interested to know why a stock would be restricted like this? Not too familiar with these instruments.

Mt4 contests are run all the time on myfxbook. I think mt4i.com has ability to run your own contests if you do not have your own management software. Oanda's mt4 bridge is lousy and I cannot afford news time lockdowns (brief freezes are ok). I was looking for mt4, so not sure if I can join this contest yet.

Is this only for oanda?

I'm assuming that a "black swan" is a fast moving market in a single direction. Well, eventually there will be a pullback and you have the opportunity to get out at a smaller loss, breakeven, or profit. The market cannot go in a single direction all the time. Even during a news announcement, a 23.6-38.2% minimum pullback from the top is virtually guaranteed. If not immediately, shortly afterwards. You do have "tsunamis", but they are extremely rare and you can usually 'detect' them coming and minimize the loss.

While only the rumpled one can answer questions about his own trading methodology, once you pick a direction, you must see the signal through until you have completed (either hit expected profit or loss). If you change directions mid-trade, then you cannot fully validate how the original signal would have performed.

Normally these tricks only happen in market-maker type of situations [forex--although it is rare to see this now as there are lots of tools to readily determine trad. Regulated environments traded on an exchange I didn't know that could happen. Aren't these ETF/Stocks traded on or through an exchange or are these off-exchange transactions?

So what exactly does a trader do with these magical boxes? There's no specifics here as to how the boxes (a user-defined trading range?) will work to the trader's benefit. "By drawing the boxes, we are able to predict where price might head to on the next box after the breakout." I understand the technical aspect here (draw the box). I'm completely lost as to how it would help the trader manage profitable entry/exit. Especially since you are "lagging" the drawing of the box (drawing the box after the fact). Similar to how people draw trend lines AFTER the trend has occurred :doh:.

Charts are just visual representations of historical and incoming price feed.....number series of data. So all of those neat price patterns can be calculated in excel with the right amount of programming knowledge. A chart is a much faster reference, where you could "see" a high or low from a particular day much quicker than you could on a bland spreadsheet. You can have functions flag certain conditions (like highest high/low for a day) in a spreadsheet also. Technically any platform that could be populated with a large volume of individual number series (such as a spreadsheet, database, XML, HTML5, etc, etc) could be used to facilitate trading. Of course it needs some level of programming ability to automate the processing of the ticks, place orders, etc. But it is good to have a platform that is dedicated to the task with ready-made drawing tools, robust programming language and support from other traders.

I think once you've passed through Thailand or Columbia, you might change your mind. But I'm thinking more accessibility vs variety. The Westernized countries have the infrastructure for serious and scalable business. But the emerging economies have the simpler, stress-free lifestyle. The wise people pick the best of both worlds whenever possible.

It's as easy as moving the decimal point over. Check out these recent returns from recent forex contest: Trading Championship May 2012 | Myfxbook and http://www.trading-challenge.com/pdf/Ranking.pdf I like the Varengold contest a bit better because it just wasn't about the "highest equity wins" like most contests. They measured risk-adjusted returns, which is why 3rd place winner only had 20% total gain That doesn't stop most people from using "all in" type of strategies to get ahead. A demo account, but good enough to see the possibilities. And varengold even allows the winners to trade real money afterwards.

EuroDollar (not confuse with Euro FX) has contract size of USD $1million and aggregate daily volume of about 2 million contracts. That's $1,000,000 x 2,000,000 contract daily volume, or $2,000,000,000,000 [2 trillion] worth of daily volume:wtf: Ten year US treasury notes are #2 (i think) in volume * contract size. The S&P is arguably the 3rd and can move up/down in rank depending on the value of the underlying index. I'm probably overlooking energy contracts. (I didn't go through the entire list and match up the contract specs). Exchange margin requirement as of today is "only" $500-1000" depending on how far out in the future the contract is. Most brokers have day trading margins that cut that in 1/2 or more for electronic markets). That's 1:1000-1:4000 leverage. More on that in another post. The point is, liquidity is not a problem;), especially if you can spread out into multiple contracts. The CME actually provides volume statistics for each market category (agriculture, grains, fx, etc), for the different exchanges in the CME group, and for the total volume in all of the CME group. ....you must use as much automation as possible. As Dan Weiss said in one of his recent marketing videos: "....[paraphrasing] yes, you can make money doing xxxxxx, buy can you make a living from it? Not without automating the majority of the repetitive parts of the business." Good to know your wife supports you in this business. it can be a hard sell among financers (viewed as gambling) and family (viewed as gambling/unstable income). Especially if you are trading with the rent money. And living up to Western standards of living.

It was something I tossed up on a few forums to facilitate the explanation of how money management is more important than trying to guess precise entry/exit. It also shows how you don't have to reinvent the wheel to be profitable. The videos are a bit extensive, but the spreadsheets can be viewed in a better light when you see a full mechanical system in action. I never did post those videos, but hopefully this weekend there will be some new surprises coming. It's been several months and 1000s of man hours of combined observing, testing, and tweaking system bugs. Especially the APAMI price action indicator. The website will have a more written documentation of how to use spreadsheet. I will do my best to contain more written words in the videos. I was going to wait until I actually had the webpage up before making any update comments

Classic problem that some traders face of not following their original rules. Nothing wrong with adjusting and tweaking your system, but it is the way you went about it. You made numerous changes on the fly without any prior testing. Then you make a hard rule never to average down or move stops. Had you used a tool to work out your averaging ahead of time, you would have been prepared for the drawdown and been able to pick out profit targets more objectively. Choosing a new and untested method caused you to panic when immediate expected gains were not achieved. Is it fair to write off the entire method due to fear instead of re-attempting the method with a more thorough approach? If your position came back to your original stop loss level, then you should have either broke even, or suffered a smaller loss because of the averaged total position.

It appeared your father was "lucky", because you look at life as being random series of events. Your father understood the power of choice, and controlled his life story by making wise choices. Most people write their life stories without awareness, so when something "good" comes their way, it appears as what you are calling luck. With spread and commissions, you are actually still behind. Casinos realize this and remove the "edge" from all of their games. There must be less than 50% chance of you winning with any game where you play against the dealer where you can win the whole pot or a matching bet.

Very well put. I was amazed at how people really go all out to interpret all these wonderful chart patterns and other visual "special effects," yet the most basic, linear part of price per unit volume totally escapes the majority of traders. I suppose the best place to hide something is in plain sight. This is why my APAMI move indicator will be such a breath of fresh air. The focus is solely on qualifying just what is price action in a way that allows a trader to clearly define a trend (higher high or lower low) and then make a choice.

Not sure if the OP is referring to purchasing or leasing a platform, but you do have a point Siuya. I think sierra chart is still one of the cheapest paid charting platforms where you can get free historical data. Judging by the username of OP, then they will probably be dealing with Metatrader 4/5, which is free to the end user anyway. Honestly, i don't know how in this day and age how a charting platform would not come with some kind of programming language and be competitive. Too many "free" platforms or low cost platforms already do "charting-only" well. Additionally, there is a tool called ForexTester which would allow you to practice over the weekend with replay (best to have tick historical data). I think openEcry has something similar, but you can only go back 1-3 weeks. Better than nothing It's up to you to evaluate and make decisions.

The best way to do this is completely "mechanize" your trading system. With an objective trading strategy, it is easier to observe what it does and how you react to what it is doing. Trying to manage trades manually AND your emotions [edit] is tough because your emotions automatically trigger responses. Of course many traders do trade with money they could not afford to lose. So observing your fears and determining what you can handle mentally will help with position sizing. I learned just as former turtle trader Curtis observed, you have to be able to watch your drawdowns and know that they are just part of the overall profit strategy. This is extremely difficult to do when any part of implementing your system, especially the exit, is arbitrary.

Perhaps the biggest secret in trading is that there is no secret. There is a difference between opinion and fact, but the human ego can sometimes have a hard time discerning this. Especially when we are attached to our own preferences. For example, you hinted that there is a correlation between Trading frequency and profitability: The higher the trading frequency, the lower the profitability or ability to keep the profits. But there is no real proof of this. If person X drives from point A to point B at 20mph, and then person Y drives from the same point A to point B at 60 mph, do they both reach their destination? Yes. The only difference is that person Y reaches their destination 3 times faster. This isn't good or bad, but simple arithmetic. One could argue that traveling at a faster speed is "riskier" than a slower speed of getting into a collision. So you would have to test and see which speed would give the maximum speed, but lowest chance for acceptable collision. After all, you could just go at a speed of 0 mph, but then you wouldn't go anywhere. Without any specific advice or concrete examples, it is very difficult for people to objectively determine whether or not the advice can be incorporated into their trading strategy.