notouch

On the daily ES chart we have a double top and a shooting star candlestick on high volume. This is a classic exhaustion spike pattern. If you look at the SP500 cash charts it's a classic shooting star candlestick. This all points to a pullback or at least consolidation in the days ahead.

Pretty severe rejection today above the upper trend line of the pitchfork. Almost a shooting star daily candlestick. Now is the time I'm thinking of taking profits on my YM longs and re-estabishing them after a decent pullback. It was still an up day though so we'll see what happens tomorrow.

The problem with Elliot Wave is that you can take random data, put it on a chart and find Elliot Waves in it. A lot of the waves you've identified don't look very convincing. An Elliot Wave should ideally retrace to a Fibonacci level but a lot of the waves you've identified don't and look more like ordinary market noise than proper Elliot Waves. I think there is value in Elliot Wave but at the moment the only waves I see are on the weekly chart.

Just checked, spread betting is available in the US for sports betting. Try TradeSports or BetFair.

It's definitely possible to make a profit betting on online sports events. There are some guys over on the T2W boards specialising in it. The principles are similar to stock market trading - profit from other people's overreaction. It works well on spread betting (which I think is illegal in "free" America) where the odds are based on the bets being made during the game. So when a goal is scored that's like the knee-jerk reaction to a news event. You can fade it, or wait for the pullback and buy etc.

Soultrader that second one was easy to explain - CPI Tuesday! Keep your eye on those economic numbers. ZN and ZB acted as predictably as always.

Someone decided to buy a load of contracts then a load of stops got hit. Time zone is UK.

I'm not too concerned with the ideal entry any more. One or two half hour periods after the tail gives you time to confirm the tail and gain good trade location. This may not be true of all markets all of the time but right now the indices are getting bought back up in the afternoon after the morning sell off and the single-print buying tail is a good way of getting in after the shakeout but before the up move has gone too far.

Agree with you 100% TinGull. Today I took another YM long exclusively on the developing Market Profile. There's so much more to MP than yesterday's VAL, VAH and POC. Single-print buying tails signal a great long opportunity in this market.

MX, I tried to be subtle but now I'll be brutally honest. No one cares about your predictions. Who do you think you are, Nostradamus? If you have decent analysis and charts to post, please do. But posting a one line prediction is totally worthless and just wastes everyone's time.

Don't get too big-headed MX you've been calling a top for the past month and now you've finally seen sense and recognised the obvious ... we're in a bull market! Seriously, these bulls vs bears, pick a top/bottom, watch out for Black Monday - Dow down 1000 points, 20,000 Dow by July etc etc type threads are amusing on Elite Trader but there's more sensible discussion on this forum.

For me MarketDelta was informational overkill but I can see how others could make successful strategies with it. Remember it's just a charting tool. It doesn't tell you when to buy or sell and the strategies published on their website are pretty lame. It would definitely be possible to develop your own strategies for it but you'd need to have experience of strategy development.

I don't think there's much interest in uranium amongst retail traders to be honest. I know as of this week uranium futures can be traded on Globex. I don't know what the average daily volume is.

I agree you need to master one before adding another but you have to appreciate that swing and position trading is very different from scalping. With swing trading you're making one trade and leaving it for a month. Is sitting there staring at the same chart a good use of your time? I definitely agree that for scalpers who need to be watching the same chart from open to close, it makes more sense to increase the number of contracts you trade. For longer term trading though it makes sense to diversify instead of putting all your eggs in one basket.

I don't agree with the specialisation idea. It's probably wise if you're just scalping but for position or swing trading or even day trading when you only make one or two trades a day per contract, diversification is key. If you have good set ups in different contracts and you have say 5 open positions at any one time, it's highly likely that every day will be a profitable day. I trade YM, ZN, GBP/USD and QM but I'm also looking at trading other contracts. I'm planning to add a new market one at a time and once I'm comfortable trading it, move on to the next. Gilts, Eurobunds, FTSE, Stoxx, sugar and corn are on my "to do" list. I've looked at gold and the Asian stock indices and didn't find them to my liking. I'm not saying this is necessarily the best way to trade, just that scalping is not necessarily the best way to trade either. To me the issue isn't whether a contract is fast or exciting but whether I can profit from it.

When retail traders who have been calling a top finally turn bullish that an excellent bearish indicator!

I've never used a bond squawk. I've only ever used the tradersaudio S&P Squawk which I found worse than useless. Do you have any recommendations for a bond squawk and how to use it? I'm not concerned with catching every tick, just the bigger moves.

What you say about the yield curve is exactly what I was thinking. Unlike the Dow there's no speculative retail participation in the bonds. There's yield curve traders, arbitrageurs, hedgers and long term investors to name a few so how could you make sense of all that from the tape? You have my admiration if you can. I don't agree with what you say about the bond squawk because most of the volume is electronic.

Looking at the first half hour's volume over the past few days it has been over 10,000 on YM whenever the morning reversal occurred. Today it was under 10,000.

On the daily chart it looks like the start of an up trend so weren't you breaching your own trading rules by taking a short? The first hourly candle was bullish too and on high volume so it looks like you paid the price for ignoring your own rules. I personally concentrate on the fundamentals for trading bonds and treasuries, especially on days like today with the weak trade number and expected weak retail sales number tomorrow being bullish for bonds. I didn't trade ZN today but probably will after tomorrow's retail sales number.

Both I think. You would look for price to be rejected at the upper line and then revert to the middle line. It should find support at the middle line but if it goes through the next area of support is the lower line.

The warning signal was the low volume coming in at the lows compared to yesterday's volume, suggesting lack of professional participation. I love hindsight analysis

Similar to Fibs but you need 3 points, ABC, as marked below.

Andrew's Pitchfork is interesting because it's based on sound principles similar to Market Profile and Volume Spread Analysis, namely standard deviation and reversion to the mean. You'll see on the chart that we seem to have rejected the upper line sharply so the chances are we'll see a return to the middle line or even the lower line before moving higher.

Often there's a pullback either to a Fib level or to just below the low of the day before it takes off in the afternoon session. Again it's a case of looking for reversal candlesticks and lower volume on the lows or increasing volume as it reverses.