mp_trader

You may want to consider breaking up the data into a days worth of tick data per instrument and use the date as part of the filename. Ensign recently switched to a tree structure and individual files like this. Its easy to maintain, and hard drives are cheap. -mp

Regarding your P.S. - I have not called you anything, nor have I characterized your comments as BS, as you have done mine. I believe my comments regarding TTZ were reasoned and could not be construed as "pointless bashing" worthy of your "protection".

I was done spending time on TTZ, but now I'm am being accused of "giving little hard evidence" and that I'm full of BS. Incidently, I thought this may happen as soon as I mentioned Hlm's fervor in defending TTZ. Had I known Hlm was an ardent apologist for TTZ, I would never engaged in this fruitless thread that Hlm will spin ad nauseum as a positive for TTZ with each post. So I will end my contribution to this Hlm spun, TTZ advertizement, with a summary: 1) I have a trader friend X who has been a TTZ member for a long time. X tells me the trades called by SEC are not reproducible with the methods taught by TTZ. X has asked other TTZ members if they got the trigger when SEC did and answer was, no. X has asked SEC for the timebase of the chart he uses for his signals, and X is also been told what it is. Greg will say it is the same trigger as used on the 3 minute chart only on the faster xxTick chart. Call after SEC call is made _before_ the trigger on the xxTick chart occurs. This is what I mentioned in one of my first posts. 2) By Hlm's own words, SEC is used as a "...filler and an unrealistic one". Yet a vast majority - if not all - of the trades called in the "demo room" are from SEC. Make no mistake about it, SEC is the draw. 3) After SEC has a couple hours of calls, the moderators engage in a dialog telling all the longtime "free loaders" its time to payup or leave. The insinuation being that the "free loaders" are making a ton of $$$ and not paying for the course. At the same time the moderators are telling visitors they cannot shadow trade SECs calls successfully. So which is it? It would be easy to argue that, TTZ's "demo room" has as its main attraction, a scalper who calls the trades by a method not taught in the TTZ curriculum. Is that an "unfair" statement? Perhaps a bit harsh, but in my opinion not "unfair". That is the basis for calling the TTZ "demo room" a charade when I said, "Run - don't walk- away from this charade". For anyone beguiled by Hlm and considering TTZ, be careful, and be wise. -mp

I don't have a horse in this race, and I have spent as much time on TTZ as I care to. -mp

You make it sound as if the "Scalper" (SEC) and the "Floor Trader" (gator iirc) as you put it, are somehow not affiliated with TTZ or TTZ trading method. That does not seem to be the case. The times I was there, it was never stated that the methods employed by SEC in the trades he called were different from what Greg offers as part of the education service. Perhaps a trade log and P&L posted on the site would obviate the need for filling "dead air" with trades that are not part of the curriculum. Or, perhaps entering in a contest where the results could be verified without disclosing too much of the method to non-students would suffice. In my first post regarding TTZ, I said I know someone (X) who is in the room. From the times I went in there to check it out, and from what my trader friend X has told me, there is not a remote possibility that I would pay for or recommend TTZ. Run -don't walk- away from this charade. Just an observation: For someone who has "only been there a few times", you sure seem to be offering a fairly vigorous defense.

It seems to me that anyone considering TTZ, should ask themself, "If Greg's system is so good, why does he need SEC to 'fill the room'? Why isn't he making just the calls live in the room that his system teaches?" -mp

I have not seen a review of this guy done here. According to the site, it is MP based trading, and he (Reza?) puts the cam on his DOM when he is about to enter a trade to show he is actually trading what he says. That's a nice touch. Has anyone taken this course or a member of the room? I am not sure I could gain anything by going there, but I am curious.

CapFlow 32 is designed to capture the "run, pause" nature of markets using more modern market profile techniques. From what I've heard, most CapFlow users are position and swing traders - not daytraders. The more modern market profile is described by Steidlmayer in courses on how to use CapFlow. I think Alex Benjamin and JPJ trading are using traditional MP. I think Tom Alexander may be teaching modern MP, though I do not endorse him. Ray Barros teaches both, according to his site, and Reza of profiletraders.com may be as well. Don Jones talks about the run-pause nature of the markets, but I have not taken any of his courses.

tickiman, You are absolutely right. Run -don't walk- away from these guys. I know someone, let's call them 'X', who spent the $$$ and took the courses. SEC does not use the setups that are taught. X has been there a long time, and SEC's calls come _before_ the setups taught. SEC is a great scalper, and you will not be able to duplicate his results. If you go into the room, and ask how many traders have been there for a year or more, you'll get about 40 of the 150+ in the room raising their hand. Of course, Greg will say something like, "They have already made their money, and they are probably at lunch". During the time you are there, you'll hear, "Its time to kick out some of these free-loaders", or some other such drivel, implying of course that their stuff is so good, that visitors are making a killing and not paying for the course. Then you'll hear them say this is a "demo room" and that no one can shadow SEC's calls and be profitable. So which is it?

I checked these links and all have been disabled. I guess some of it was stuff greg did not want getting out.

I use MP extensively in my trading, and use the new version of EW for my MP levels. To make EW conform to regular MP, you simply put the PH on a 30min chart. The POC will be the same when the number of price buckets are odd, and vary from other software when the number of buckets are even. This depends on whether that particular software rounds the half a tick value up or down. The new EW supports two value area computation methods. One conforms to eSignal, the other CQG. I use the CQG method. It is selectable as a global option. The VA computation matches other software with the same caveat regarding rounding. You will not get a MP with letters like a standard profile, but you can toggle the 30min bars on/off to see which bracket the TPO belongs to. In the past, the PH tool used screen coordinates for the price buckets. That was a major complaint, and why I used a different program for MP. That has changed in the new version to buckets matching tick size. The EPH is the only softare I use for my MP work. I would like to see a couple more features added, and I have submitted those. Ensign is in the process of designing a new implementation for higher performance (I don't see any performance issues, btw) and adding new features. I am not affiliated with Ensign, so I have no idea when that is scheduled for release. I use the PH tool on a 30min chart with TPO (time at price), and export the poc/vah/val values from that chart to other lower timeframes. EW supports constructing the histogram based on time or volume. Volume Based Profiles I know jperl has videos with a volume profile based on one minute bars. In my experience, EW does a reasonable job most of the time in this case, but I have seen occassional large differences between a volume histo based on one minute bars vs. actual ticks. I was running the two profiles on the same system with the same data feed. The comparison software was MarketDelta. The discrepancies occur when the profile takes on a double distribution shape. The occasional differences are large enough to place the volume POC on the other side of vwap. To be fair, even two different softwares using the same tick data can arrive at different POC (and value areas by extension) in this double distribution case. The reason is volume profile implementations usually incorporate some kind of threshold when comparing the buckets, and those thresholds vary from one vendor to another. So one software using a smaller threshold would dynamically shift its VPOC sooner as the second distribution began to overtake the first. From a trading perspective, this is a technicality, since a developing dbl dist provides a reasonble expectation of price behavior when transitioning from one to the other. On a broader MP note, using MP for just VAH/VAL levels -while useful- is nowhere near the utility of understanding the auction process that a MP uniquely shows. Just my opinion.

Jerry, I am working on it right now. To those who have downloaded that vwap_std template, the vwap is correct, but the stdev lines are off. I failed to weight the prices properly for a vwap. The stdev lines are shown with equally weighted prices, and they are different from Jerry's. My apologies to those who have tried it.

I posted a DYO for vwap with stdev bands here http://www.traderslaboratory.com/forums/6/vwap-q-and-a-and-how-2563-4.html

As a semi-professional poker player, I consider a gambler as one who participates in an activity in which the outcome is based entirely upon chance. Having a long term statistical edge over most players in the game I played, I referred to my playing - somewhat euphemistically - as a series of very short term investments. I guess you could call me a professional speculator. I have found a couple similarities between poker and trading; both can require a "tuition" nearly equal in time and money to that of a traditional degree, and both require a couple years to determine one's actual success. The latter point is not discussed nearly enough in the trading books I've read.

This is a put-on, right?