tolland76

hmm. It's difficult to respond to that. You should give up trading as soon as possible.

dude, your trade signal is not significant compared to the randomness in the price action. you are always going to lose over the long term, because even if your signal is 100% correct, there are going to be many false positives.

Unless you can demonstrate your strategy is better than random, then you are just going to be ground down by attrition

I think one of the issues that arises from traders who were inspired after reading Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, or after learning strategies and styles from people who are from that tradition, is the idea of being able to "learn to read the tape" Livermore is characterised as a free-wheeling sort, who is both talented and lucky to learn from many of the great stock players of the period. However the tape is characterised as though it is a secret language that can be understood by piecing together strands and clues from here and there. However the reality is that a hundred years ago, the markets were less efficient and the stories are fanciful. The reality is that in order to have any success you have to understand why you are making a trade, what is the information that you are trading on, and have a process for evaluating each strategy objectively. I think understanding noise to signal is very important, and also having a tool like the Sharpe ratio in order to evaluate whether you are actually picking wins, or just being lucky

Oh, it doesn't seem like I can edit posts on this forum, which is odd. (lol maybe to stop users going back and fixing their poor calls) If you expand the consideration of the NYSE:NOK on 1st June to include the interesting price/volume trades later in the day, you get the following charts; here you start to see in the price/normal plot, that there is some movement that is not entirely as what would be expected by stochasticity. eg see the data points +/- 2 standard deviations. However the key thing to consider here, with regard to the trade strategy that Enigmatics gave an example of, is that within 1 standard deviation, the price changes are plausibly random. 1 standard deviation here corresponds to about 0.06, which is close to the OPs stop loss distance. The noise to signal ratio here is very high, so that particular strategy is unlikely to be fruitful under these conditions.

from taking a quick look at the 1-June-11 5 min NYSE:NOK chart, I can see that the most obvious likelihood for a trade executed as you described is to buy at about 10:00 EDT and get stopped out shortly after. (if that is not correct then ignore the rest of this...) Were you trying to trade the bounce off the big overnight drop?, I am not sure what the fundamentals of the trade were as it was against the trend. There was some price and volume action at about 11:00 EDT, but i generally don't see that there is any evidence that the price and volume action is anything but random during the time period of your trade. If you look at the Price normal and volume normal plot, there is no reason to believe that there was any information that could not plausibly be explained by randomness.

Hi, This is my first post, so hello everyone! I am a developer, working on a trading project - and I am interested in using a list of all the major mines in the world for each major mining company listed on the FTSE mining sectors and US equivalents and their economic importance. - or as similar to that as I can get. I started by looking on wikipedia, and they really do have a lot of information. but a lot of the geographical data is not there. I was wondering whether any of you chaps use any sites that collate that sort of information that I could use. Thanks, Tom