DugDug

this says it all...... Nial Fuller's Price Action Course Review - Page 2 - InformedTrades If a sell the market does that make me a vendor? (which I am doing at the moment in the equities - sent this to friend yesterday morning) I had been waiting on this for a while and just got lucky in the timing - thankyou Dubai world. But wait theres more..... I'm excitied.... are you sick of paying good money after bad for products that just dont work.....:spam:

makes more sense - and its one of the setups i have used for a long time as its very reliable. I have never seen anyone code it so discretion is required. Ultimately you need a lot of patience. I usually use a little saying "three times a charm" to help the patience. ie; I dont take the first exhaustion, i dont take the first rally. I might take the second trade as quick trade, but the third time - definitely get on board. Not so detailed but it keeps me sensible. it works on every instrument really - i sometimes trade the AUD attached 10 min chart that it worked well on. I dont use volume at all - never have (no real reasons for or against) Its very flexible for me, this stops me from trying to be too specific on entries and exits levels

On reading these quotes I thought of another thing to add regards new traders merging from SIM trading to real life trading. (maybe not 100% what this thread is for maybe) If you have problems due to the fact you are thinking in terms of dollars made lost, then think in terms of ticks or percentages. It helps take a lot of the emotion out of it. example; if I told you I made 30 ticks here, lost 5 there, then it a lot different on the psyche than saying I made say $30,000 or lost $5,000, or $300, or $50. Also regards the ES - futures are a zero sum game so for every 'loser' there is a 'winner'. If you are talking about numbers of people participating and being successful then put it terms of any other profession. For every person who can play a musical instrument, there are probably only a few who are very good, or good enough to make money from it. Focus on your trading and what works for you - not wandering what everybody else is up to. (on saying that its still always good to keep learning new ideas)

CSI data = unfair advantage also has information and a great data downloading service with lots of flexibility if you really get into downloading a lot of data.

ninja trader (until you open a brokerage account is free to test) Incredible Charts: Home Page (charting) FINVIZ.com - Stock Screener (stock screener)

hi - as a market maker your edge was probably in spreading options around fair value and (anybody who tries to back test that is kidding themselves as there are too many parameters and volume and liquidity problems to make it applicable to real life.) So back to what i think is your question - how to judge a system. While there are a lot of measures eg; max drawdown, winners v loosers, ratios etc; (buy some of those recommended systematic testing books for more detail) There is only one that i find that can ensure it works in real life - prior to actually doing it. common sense - if you are getting crossing the spread each time, not getting set at lows, and selling at highs then maybe it might work. Never trust a system that constantly shows you as getting great fills every time. Really track and follow a few trades and make sure that they correspond to what did/might/can actually happen in real life. hope this helps

sorry to be blunt - but i am not sure what you are trying to point out. it seems as if the points you are making on the chart are obvious in hindsight thats all. do you enter long when it goes back up, or do you try and pick the higher lows.

plus dont you just love when reports are revised the next month again! Makes you wonder why all the economists are not rolling in it. (an old bug bear of mine is that one day a positive report drives the market up, the next day it will drive it down). Its all about expectations, context and relativity - maybe i should have studied physics.

As a side note to the ES talk - there are a lot of long term CTA trend traders out there who also dont use the SP500 as well. Turns out it gets a little choppy even long term. From my own testing of this I would agree. While from a visual point of view it looks like it trends, the whips seem to stop you out a lot unless your stops are extra wide. Look for the easy money that suits your style. Trading is not about ego and mastering the most difficult product. (or maybe it is for some:doh:) good luck

Buy the book Demark Indicators by Jason Perl - can be found on the bloomberg website. - if you (like I) dont have Bloomberg - which they now have a whole demark indicator section - very good. Everything is explained there. To replicate a lot of his indicators would seem pretty difficult, but there are some good ideas, and some things that can be reasonably easily done - Plus his are not systems - just indicators.

You can read endless amounts of maths and theory regards money management and position sizing - and I would always suggest you do. Basics - risk a % of equity per trade, be consistent, trade your equity, incorporate a measure of volatility into this (eg ATR) But I think Ed Sekoyta summed it up best in not just theory and maths, but in a quote something of the sort - "make sure you have enough heat at risk that its worth while" ie; risk enough that makes the returns worth it, but not enough that you risk ruin, and be comfortable with the risk. There is not much point being a conservative risk taker and risking 2% per trade - you will be too mentally challenged by losses. Plus - dont change the amounts at your whim - thats when you will get into trouble. Be consistent.

there was an interesting article on BBC TV last night - how long is a piece of string? Well worth watching, as it covered fractals. Call me old fashioned but - fractals, the mathematical theories etc; were just that- theory. The question as a trader is - can I make money out of it? To put it in perspective - Why would anyone ever short a market? We all know that over the long term they rise. But in shorter time periods they do fall. there was something also about - relativity and time and other physics stuff. I dont know - I sometimes find that I make the same mistakes over and over again I just hope they get smaller in number and magnitude. (I apologise for my random musings):missy:

suggestion - the bonds trend heavily in one direction. This may sound obvious, but - Wait for a re-tracement of the major trend, find good support levels, and then enter with the trend, when it starts again. Otherwise as someone mentioned they can really whip you around. I might manage one - possibly two trades a week on this, so you have to be patient.

I would imagine that if the setup is good, then you just need to adjust you position sizes for varying volatility levels. Clearly though an individual grain or stock is much more likely to be more volatile than an index. I would strongly suggest you have a good look. Not all instruments trend well, some just will not suit you style. Euro Stoxx 50 is good for shot term and long term trading - lots of volatility and volume but it tracks the SP500. I also look at Sugar occasionally. Agree with the grains - but i dont trade them short term. NG also very volatile - but can also get very thin and whippy. FX is interesting as while the individual instruments may move 1% a day, they generally only trend 10-20% a year. So for short term trading FX is potentially very viable (assuming you get it right) If you are after uncorrelated instruments then the world is your oyster - unless we are in 2008 again.

sorry about the small picture - I'll work out the best way to send these things one day. Its VBA-ASX on esignal feed. In this case as its a long term trade I use the weekly to confirm, but it also looks similar on a daily chart. It uses the Donchian channels (I am not a big believer in optimising for the best values, and hence just use 25 day and 50 day) I simply look for higher highs, and higher lows, while also looking for a lot of potential upside. Which means you have to be prepared to get on reasonably early. But using a weekly chart still gives plenty of time.

Good idea, for all the reasons stated, there are usually a few standout charts. (i hope) I have attached one that works well for me.. It is VBA an Australian stock. The reason being that it has a lot of potential upside (2-300%), showing signs of rallying on all indicators, and is actually getting upgrades from analysts. (though i am technically based, I stumbled across this news hence alerting me to it) One point of a thread like this though - ideally it needs be be segregated into either countries, or sectors. Otherwise too many charts may come through. OR try and limit it to people submitting the best of the best - eg; one a week, or fortnight. Even then I think it will lead to a lot of charts.

Quick Question: Has anyone tried to mix any fundamental analysis with their trading style and to what degree? If you watch bloomberg TV - one day they are bullish for some fundamental reason, the next day they are bearish for the same reasons.- So the answer from me is NO - just watch the price action. I sometimes look at a price chart and make a trading plan without knowing what the instrument is. When you find out what it is its interesting then how often the brain wants to then interpret some rational reasoning for why it then will go up or down. Its handy to know a broad based macro view sometimes, and to know when announcements are being made, just to keep out of trouble - but otherwise its all price action. (i am probably longer term than many other traders here)

DbPhoenix, "To ignore this process and instead wait for the trading session to begin so that one can determine how it all feels and seems and looks accomplishes nothing but to extend and flatten the learning curve so that one can spend (waste?) years learning what should otherwise take months." Possibly the best thing I have read regards trading in a long time. All the indicators, systems, discretionary styles amount to nothing if you dont have a plan - stick to it and then analyse it afterward. thanks for putting it so perfectly- this should be a requirement for everyone starting to trade.

Hi DM - "we" is myself, and a person i employed to make the coding for excel more efficient. I know far more about trading than coding. you asked.... Also can MultiCharts backtest a scanning trading strategy? E.g. trade the best performer from a basket? Not that i can gather. Thats one of the reasons we used excel. it allowed us to rank instruments for our system/idea testing. It sounds like you know a fair bit of programming, i would suggest trialling MC - there is a 30 day free trial. There is plenty of info about the language it uses on the web - there are some fantastic people on this and others forum that can help. MC is very flexible and a bit of a pain to learn at the start, but due to this flexibility it seems to be improving all the time. Given what you have talked about I think you will find it a good system to tie in with your excel. Let it do all the data management, and excel do the sorting.

Dangermouse. we built a quite intensive excel portfolio backtester. The problem was it takes a long time to run through (45minutes) but the advantage is that you can actually see behind the scenes and also being excel its completely flexible for the user. The big disadvantage we found was in the data downloading every day became a pain. Also when building a portfolio testing system you need to ensure the data is all matched up accurately. We spent a lot of time getting that data as accurate as possible - using futures it was a pain due to the rolling. What we found now that works far easier is to use the systems that handle data better - eg; esignal, multicharts etc. And run through the signals/alerts . then we get those trades into excel - from there we use excel to really analyse the trades. Disclaimer - we are not fully automated - while i would like to be, we rather use the indicators to show us possible trades, and we test those for how often they work, what happens when they do and dont work, and then we apply context as a discretionary input. I am finding Multicharts works pretty well for this - while it does have its issues - its very flexible and it seems the guys there are actively working to be able to link it to excel using more of a cut and paste basis. This would make using their scans great without needing a lot of programming.

depending on what you are looking at - in terms of numbers of instruments to cover, and indicators. Sometimes the simplest thing is to spend the time scrolling through the list of charts visually. Otherwise - Multicharts has a scanning screen thats handy. Esignal has a third party scanner. As a hint, you ideally want one that allows you to change the lists of instruments to scan, as otherwise you will get the same instruments being highlighted day after day. By modifying the lists the scans operate on, then you have more flexibility to ignore some scans.

It will be reported next time the market goes down as a reason for it declining. Its amazing watching bloomberg TV and a few other programs - one day they are bullish the next they are bearish for the same reasons. Remember the Asian crisis in 1997, it was happening for 6 months before it culminated in the stock market collapse at the end of October, followed by a bounce the next day.

I dont have a problem with revenge trades. I usually just cut and move on, or have no problems saying i am wrong and reversing the trade from long to short say. I do have a problem though that sometimes creeps in that is directly related to the idea of the work ethic. This manifests itself in two forms. One - looking for trades that are not there. not out of boredom, but more out of a thought that you should be working - hence you should be doing something. This normally occurs when markets are crazily volatile and you really should not be there. two - sometimes I try to get too much out of a trade. eg; long, make money, and then you look at it and try figure how could I have made more out of it. The only solution I have found is exactly the one suggested. Go back and look at past trading history, and recognise how the PL tracks in the past. It will remind me of what works. Otherwise, sometimes its best just to get up and walk away telling myself - there are always opportunities - if you dont need to be in the market at present, why are you there.

me - traded for the last 16 years first as a option market maker, recently 9 years just sitting at the desk trading away for myself. Currently in UK, trying to set up a business - so trading has not been a focus for the last year - just getting back into it now. Interesting in that I went from working 4 hours a day back to working 10 hours - its all messed up:crap: Have not received a paycheck since Sep 2000. Dont sell systems, dont buy systems. My PL consists of lots of small losses and a few big gains so it would not look pretty for most day traders. For me if it moves its fair game - FX, equities, futures, options. I must admit that sometimes this causes me problems, as it gives me too many choices. One distinction that would be interesting between different people is those who trade only a few instruments or markets, and only short term trade - and those who run more of a portfolio. Either way - I enjoy the forum and think there are no easy answers to trading