johnw

I know that this is not what you want to hear, so just discard it it. I reached a point where I decided to turn off the PC,then in my mind I took away ME and YOU,and all INDICATORS so that I was only left with price and volume. Slow as I am, I realised that price is the only thing traded and so I dropped volume and from there I tried to piece together just what the few Traders who trade the bulk of the contracts each day, are trying to do. Imagine my surprise when it slowly dawned upon me that they are marching to a completely different tune to the one being force feed down the Retailer Traders mouth. That realisation took me back to the core of the order flow and from there I rebuilt myself. But as you say ...everyone is different

[quote name=joshdance; If you could expound on this I would be most grateful' date=' as I'm not quite sure what you mean.[/quote] No problem, Set your frame to 1 tic and write a simple program to cum all up tics versus down tics at ask and also at bid Then compare this to price movement and see how they compare. Price is PURE it doesn't care how you board the train [ ask or bid] Therefore you need to satisfy your curiosity as to what % is at ask and what is at the bid. I always find that I learn through the quality of questions that I put to myself .. this only happens when I am not looking at the screen. Once I began to appreciate the order flow I found that I could begin to appreciate price. cheers

Hate to mention this, but how much do you pay for your data. Add that to the 90% of Retailers who never learned the Trading Industry and therefore fizzle out before they really start, and you can see that we all must have decent raw data if we are to outwit the odds.

OK I see where you are coming from ... if 100 contracts are bought at the ask and 100 are bought at the bid then the cum delta is 0 But what has this to do with market and limit orders and in the longer term [ more than here and now] what has this to do with say the daily cum delta. Being a perpetual student of the markets, I switched to 1 tic frames [ some years ago] on the ES to see the cum effect of selling at the ask AND the bid and buying at the bid AND the ask. This simple exercise taught me more than anything I had ever read. cheers

Thanks joshdance What is 0.85

Try if you can to stay out of the frenzy of small frames ... it is bad for your health Take a look at CL today at 15 mins. Ask yourself what the big traders use ... if you answer "tic charts" then your tic charts are the way to go.

joshdance, Cum delta works best on big frames. ie on a Daily frame you can sometimes see the big boys building a position over several days and when price is allowed to eventually turn it results in a big move. On a smaller intraday frame,cum delta cannot distinguish between Limit Orders and MOs, so you are better advised to follow price only .... in fact looking back over intraday bars, the cum delta looks not unlike the MACD which is a 50/50 call on divergences, but lookback at say a 5 min frame is useless for the reason I have mentioned. To day trade ES you need to give yourself a significant advantage beyond 50/50 accuracy and then follow through with a healthy reward/risk ratio. Forget any nonsense about a low accuracy [30-40%] producing profits and concentrate on producing a high figure [70 - 80%+]. At the same time avoid the temptation to "scalp" for few tics... this is a dismal adventure at best .... the easiest way of avoiding this trap is to follow the 15min frame and when you have a signal for a buy/sell zone, drop down into a lower frame if you need to do so. Eventually you will learn that all you need to know already exists in the 15 min frame ... ie levels of s&r and s&d plus the price of course. Knowing where the POC,VAH and VAL won't do you any harm either. But make sure that you roll yesterday's values plus today's values together. good luck

Might I ask what you saw at 95.5 that suggested a trade

MO = Market Order [as opposed to Limit Order]

Excellent thoughts. And watch carefully when a large MO reverses the imbalance before you have time to be filled. MOs move price and deltas lag. This is not apparent in anything other than real time. The Neg is correct "You'd have to watch the delta" and you can only watch in real time.

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It is the second mouse that gets the cheese.

If this is your belief, shouldn't you be telling this to yourself rather than posting it here on TL. Or perhaps it is only a thought which you need confirmed by others before it becomes your belief. Just a thought over lunch

Hi Tim, I see you are trading the first retrace after a bounce of the channel's midband, If you keep an eye on the higher price wave it is a good little earner Easy to program as an Alert

Neg, Fear might be real to you and any other rational person, but it does not make it real to everybody. To some people, life is an illusion, further compounded by believing this statement does not apply to them ... an illusion within an illusion ....

Excellent thoughts ... But how do you know that you are self aware. Your self awareness just might appear to be a self delusion to others.

Sorting out who you are, what makes you tick and detaching your ego sufficiently to allow your "Back Office" to kick into gear is essential to enjoying life to the fullest. But in reference to Trading, do not overlook the need to get to the essence of what makes markets move, otherwise you will be out of control whilst you think you have control ... a nasty place to be. Here is what seems to happen, when you read Posters stories here on TL. A person hooks into a Trading Software program full of bells and whistles all coupled through what they consider to be a high powered PC. They bring with them an attitude from the manipulated world, a world in which they believed that they were successful. Read a few books, talk to other lost souls on Forums and away they go. The first thing that happens is they lose money and the second thing that happens is they lay blame on everyone and everything around them. Now, peel back the illusions to reveal the reality of what happened... They stepped onto an elevator thinking they are heading to the 43rd level Penthouse ...they ASSUMED they were at the ground floor, whereas they entered at level 39. It is a long fall down, but thankfully it was only money and ego that suffered. The key is to establish you are at the ground floor before you begin the journey up. That will require honesty and hard work.

Originally Posted by Tradewinds View Post Originally Posted by Rande Howell View Post When he looked at his ratio of winners to losers, he smiled. It was good. It was very good. ... The problem was that he was not entering enough trades to make a comfortable living. The situation that is being described with the trader, is that; even if you gave this trader "Steve" good advice about trading strategy, he still would not be able to effectively execute it. You asked "why" the trader "Steve" doesn't adjust his trading strategy. The point is, that trader "Steve" has probably already adjusted his trading strategy a million times, and still can't execute the trade. The issue is, that the trader enters the order at the outside boundary, because of the fear of draw down. He is trying to be "safe", but ends up sabotaging the entry. Bingo. Hidden beliefs sabotage rational trade plan. Rande Howell Even this example doesn't fully embrace "tight stops" The pursuit of an ES Trading Plan that embraces tight stops is a worthy one as the outcome is a high reward/ risk and coupled with a high % accuracy, thus your trading will enter a new dimension as size grows. If Steve was frightened of losing money, then so be it .... it is beyond me to know this or comment. But, please do not assume that any ongoing desire to produce a simple and lethally effective ES plan is anything other than what I have described ... it is borne of an ongoing desire to achieve. Where is the fear in that I ask. Watching the screen can do funny things to your head and often has the opposite outcome to that which you are trying to effect... it is as though you are pushing away the very thing you are trying to embrace. Therefore [in my case at least] screen time is rationed to comply with a work list I compile for when I am not trading but I am looking for something. It goes like this. Firstly I sit in a quietly and place my query into my mind. What eventually comes back is my work list and that evolves into my plan. I do this for everything in life, including trading and I have done so for a long long time. It has become better and better the more I practice it and I give full credit to the "Back Office" I figure that if the Back Office can keep me breathing when I am asleep, then I just want to give them a nudge and find out what they are really capable of. Back to "tight stops" The ES is only difficult when you don't know what you are doing. But on the bright side ...... It has a marked tendency to revert on itself at definable levels. Trades are being placed in both directions simultaneously which means if you are fading correctly the fills are nearly always good and clean. And it carries size ... lots and lots of size. So all Steve needs to do is unfold the mystery of TIMING and he can have his cake and eat it too.... because tight stops come from Timing....PRICE and TIME

Excellent work as usual Steve

Why Good Luck. I thought you said it was all about preparation and knowledge. Now you have confused me and you are normally so easy to understand.

Fear and Greed. Perhaps fear comes from the potential to lose or to be wrong. And greed comes from the fear of never having enough... a repackaged name for fear. Either way fear is just fear

As always, these touchy feely threads are fascinating and this one with "fear" at it's roots is no exception. I have read the whole thread this Sunday morning as we wait for the Tennis Men's final at lunchtime. The thing that jumps out at me in this thread is just how many people write about "fear" as a static event in their lives .. "I was fearful and now I am not" Please take note, that I intentionally wrote "write about fear" rather than "experienced fear" and I will leave it to you to figure this out. "Fear" to me is a dynamic state, like "love" If I want the permanence of enjoying one, then I must learn to accommodate the other. Since I spent so much of my time sailing, I choose to see the Markets as an Ocean and as such I choose to regard fear as a bow wave. All yachts make bow waves to one extent or another and their effect upon the performance is proportional to the size of the wave. It is not proportional to speed even if it appears logical to you to hold this thought. It is a dynamic state that has several inputs. Now I look at my fears and I gently sweep them from existing in front of me [bow wave] to traveling with me on either side, but traveling at a slower speed. In effect I am using my fears to speed me up.... they are working for me, not against me. Yes, you must first confront fear in order to harness it. When someone tells me that they have conquered their fear, I interpret this to mean they are not pushing ahead with their life ... they have given up and the sad thing is that they cannot/ will not accept this. This must give cause to much frustration, which in turn leads to black and white thinking.... or perhaps it is the other way around. In theory, trading ES at 20, 50 or 100 lots is the same as trading one lot ..in theory. If anyone tells you this then I would imagine they are in one of two states. ... they do not know what they are talking about because they have never been there. ... they are reckless and they will take some mighty losses before they learn a valuable and very expensive and very avoidable lesson. Enjoy the Tennis

You seem to cap your true potential, perhaps as insurance against fear. It is probably not fear of failure that disturbs you, even though this seems to be the most widely mentioned fear here at TL. No, it is probably the fear of the power of reaching your true potential that stirs and upsets you.

Hi Tim, At 50% you are trading the midband of the equivalent bands to your fib setting. [ you may know bands as dochian channels ] Yes, it is a good place to lie in wait and watch for a turn in price or a confirmation, in which case price will mostly run to the other band, but I seriously doubt whether fib has anything to do with things. Mind you, if you are going to use midbands then you need to have done your homework first because if they are a turning point for price, it is highly likely that they were a previous S/ R or Supply/ Demand band It is all about The Bands. The same bands link supply/ demand and support/ resistance and tie the whole game together. Even The Bands are only horizontal lines that we place on the chart. However the basic to this game is that price crabs diagonally across the screen and we lie in wait in horizontal lines. Everything else is just mumbo-jumbo, although volume has some merit providing that you tie it to time. Even the bars we set and look at are synthetic, since price is determined through streaming order/flow at the bid/ask. Basics Basics Basics, that is what I remind myself every morning before I open the charts.