notouch

I took a long on that sharp rejection of the down side breakout represented on your chart by the dragonfly doji. The breakout gap was great confirmation so I'm still holding that long because I think we could return to the highs we saw in February. There was some trading on Friday and the price is currently up at 12664.

Cooter, I didn't find that at all useful. Merrill might sell 200 and the price may go up or down or nowhere. You definitely couldn't trade off of that. Merrill selling a few hundred here or there makes no difference. All the volume is on ES where it's not unusual to see several trades of 500 or more coming through every second.

With respect, I think everyone on this forum is well aware of pivots, fibs and RSI. I'm glad you've got a system which you think works but I don't think it's as amazing as you think it is. You might also note that this thread is about agricultural futures, not stocks.

Are you going to post that semi-literate paragraph in every thread? If you have time to keep posting you might want to clarify exactly what you're talking about instead of posting the same nonsense.

I discovered that all decent charting applications have a version of that bid/ask indicator. ESignal, Sierra and Ensign all have it.

Ben doesn't make calls, he just reads out the bid, ask and trade prices and describes what's going on in the pit. Pit noise is just a very imprecise way of measuring volume on the SP contract. You'd be better off looking at ES volume which is where all the liquidity is. Pit noise is not going to give you some secret, magical "edge" which other traders haven't discovered.

There are a number of products on the market now that enable trading decisions to be made instantaneously on the basis of news feeds. For example this from Dow Jones: "Now, Dow Jones, the leader in real-time financial news, introduces a faster, structured news data feed for automated trading and analysis: the Dow Jones Elementized News Feed. This advanced solution delivers headlines in precisely tagged elements on a low-latency feed, all designed for direct integration into quantitative analysis models and computer trading programs." "The innovative Dow Jones feed revolutionizes how newsflow can be interpreted and acted upon for algorithmic trading, quantitative analysis and execution management. The Dow Jones Elementized News Feed gives hedge funds, banks and securities firms an enhanced news source for analyzing and identifying trading, investing and hedging opportunities – and moving on information in milliseconds." These sorts of products are the reason the market moves instantaneously to, for example, Bernanke testimony and FOMC statements as well as terrorist attacks.

A US holiday when the biggest market moving data of the month is released. Non farm payrolls! The markets should still move, maybe more so because of thinner volume.

If you trade a non-European currency pair like USD/JPY, USD/CAD, AUD/USD or NZD/USD or even a cross like AUD/JPY then the London open is not that important. USD/JPY is the second most traded currency pair and if you like trends check out NZD/JPY.

1) There are two types of forex broker: the direct access broker and the bucket shop. The direct access broker gives you direct access to the banks (Bear Stearns, UBS, Deutsche Bank etc) while the bucket shop makes its own market. Avoid bucket shops at all costs. Some direct access brokers are EFX, Interactive Brokers (IdealPro) and hotspotfx. 2) There's tick volume and some data providers allow you to subscribe to the volume of particular banks but total interbank volume is not available. Volume on futures is available but often too light to be useful. CME Euro futures are very liquid though. 3) I wouldn't say currencies trend necessarily. It depends entirely on the currency pair. USD is in a long term down trend against the European currencies. I think swing trading opportunities are best. 4) I wouldn't use less than a 30 minute chart. 4 hours and daily charts are also good. Direct access brokers couldn't care less how you trade. Bucket shops will try to fiddle you. 5) Extreme volatility and wide spreads immediately after economic news. 6) The same one you use for index futures will work just as well for fx. 7) A full sized lot is $100,000 and leverage is typically 100:1 so you need $1000 to trade 1 lot. So for GBP/USD and EUR/USD each pip is worth $10. With EFX you can trade $10,000 lots and with IdealPro you can trade any size above $25,000. 8) EFX and IB. 9) Do your own research before pestering me with such simple newbie questions again.

Soultrader, your approach is the same as my approach and probably the same approach as most people who successfully use technical analysis. The pattern is just a convenient way of spotting the underlying price action. I think you're a closet TA trader. :p

So double tops and double bottoms are total crap? One of your trading methods is a test of the low at lower volume which is just trading a double bottom with the addition of volume analysis (which is how most people trade double bottoms). Now I'm confused.

Not all market participants make instant trading decisions so to say price instantly reflects all known events is just silly. News takes a while to digest and price takes a while to reflect the new fundamentals. The post-FOMC market reaction is a good example. Market participants were reacting to the statement at least 30 minutes after it was released.

I hear what you say dalby. It takes time for price to reflect new fundamental information so to say all information is reflected in price is total nonsense. The price of corn is still reacting to a surprising fundamental report released on Friday and if this week's employment report is a shock the currency markets will still be reacting next week.

Newbies often get frustrated with TA because they use it incorrectly. Typically they'll do something like put RSI on a 5 minute chart and buy every time the line crosses above 30 and sell every time the line crosses below 70. Or they may buy every time they see a hammer on the 2 minute charts. They'll lose money and conclude "technical analysis doesn't work". TA is just a way of reading the markets. Looking at the daily YM chart for example we can see a double bottom then a rally then a 50% pullback of the rally then a doji then a dragonfly doji. What's that telling you? It's telling you supply was cut off at the low, then strong buyers came in but the buyers took the price too far up so it retraced but then strong buyers came in again. Using TA to read the markets we could see that a further rally was a strong possibility and the market acted as expected. Also TA isn't just about candles and indicators. Volume analysis and Market Profile are forms of technical analysis.

The corn limit is 5% so if it goes down 5% in a day then it's limit-down and can't be sold. This happened on Friday and Monday but there was buying towards the end of Monday so probably that's the end of the limit down moves. Wheat wasn't limit-down but was pressured to the down side by the weakness of corn. They are of course highly correlated markets.

Corn hit it's 5% limit on Friday and gapped down again Monday. I believe it hit its limit again and is currently locked limit down so you can't sell. That's a bad situation for those locked in long positions.

I use a desktop PC with 2 graphics cards and 4 monitors. You get much better computing power for your money that way.

Silver has more industrial uses like photography, electronics and medicine. It's so volatile because it's heavily manipulated by a few large players. The same is true to a lesser extent of gold. With gold you're playing games with central banks and hedge funds who can drive prices up and down at will.

Gold generally moves up as USD moves down (because gold is priced in USD) and also gold moves up as oil moves up. So the fundamentals that move oil and the USD also move gold.

I agree ST that that 12600 area looks key. I think's it's going to be a slow drift up more than a sharp break. We closed strongly today so my position is still open. I agree with you, NihabaAshi. The key thing is not to get hung up on the points that you're risking but instead focus on the percentage of your portfolio you're risking and for what potential gain. Long term trading allows you to keep a much cooler head and make much stronger decisions in terms of risk/reward and probability of success. Torero, great idea to diversify your portfolio. I think that's the key to successful position trading. At the moment I focus on currency and stock index futures but I see oil, gold, agriculturals and fixed income futures as good products. The liquidity on CBOT's 10 year note is amazing. I want to reach the stage where I have maybe 5 long term profitable positions open at any one time and instead of just focussing on one or two markets I'm constantly checking the daily charts of a range of markets looking for long term set ups.

I'm not benevolent enough to tell you exactly how I trade but this forum is a great place to learn decent trading techniques.

I definitely wouldn't pay $400 a month. Hubert seemed to lose more money than he won when I was in the 2 week trial but he fiddled it to make it look like he was winning. He would trade in quarters but only ever talked about his profit in points which is misleading. For example he would open a trade and all 4 quarters would get stopped out for 10 points. So if you're trading 4 contracts that's a $200 loss (not including commission). Then he would open another position and take half off at 5 points profit, a quarter off at 10 points profit and the final quarter may be stopped out at break even. He would claim this as a 15 point profit so according to his figures he was 5 points up for the day. In reality of course he's only made $50 on the first half and $50 on the next quarter and nothing on the final quarter so he's actually $100 down on the day. I wouldn't give money to someone who fiddles the figures that way.

I just noticed I made my first AdSense money.

I'm not sure trading on the basis of a gut feeling is going to give you an edge. I think sticking to your rules will give you the edge. I am open to the idea that the human mind is like a neural network that can be programmed to spot complex patterns but I doubt there are many people who could successfully trade that way. I'm sure Linda Raschke was thinking of canned systems like MA crossover systems when she spoke of mechanical systems. I doubt she was thinking of advanced black box systems run by investment banks. I'll try to find the article I read somewhere saying that there'll be 90% fewer traders in London within the next few decades - replaced by programmers.