johnw

I have just scanned your 33 lessons in 'Zen and the art of poker' I deliberately only read the core of each lesson and all I saw was 'acceptance' Now you may have another name that you prefer, but to me Zen is 'acceptance' in that you accept what is (the reality) and use it to your advantage. To me also, Trading is the same, exactly the same.

I am of the opinion that we don't try to conquer fear ..we simply let it go .. and that I believe comes from acceptance. Anyone who continually buckles under the first bad trade or two should take that as a sign that they do not have a clue what they are doing. This is a good sign as it is just the early part of the creative process ... if however this state of a fearful mind drags on and on, then obviously the Person has not accepted their situation and as such has no chance what so ever of accepting price and becoming a Trader.

This is a very interesting thread and I suppose that like all threads of this subjective nature it tends to draw Posters deeper and deeper into the subject and in doing so the subject responds with the appearance of being a bottom less pit. But what if The Failure of Traders (who bring apparent success from previous business ventures) is not complicated at all. What if left brain versus right brain is not an issue. What if childhood issues are not an issue What if Alpha behaviour is not an issue What if control is not an issue What if self worth is not an issue What if, what if, what if ...... ......................................................... "That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history." Aldous Huxley ..................................................... What if the only thing we need is acceptance .... if we accept that price does what it does and in doing so, it leaves footprints that an open mind can observe and therefore use as the basis of a plan ... then what more do we need ... we have no need of fear because there is no real danger. We enter a trade when the market offers us a portal and if price does not take off we scratch the trade, maybe for a tic or two in profit and we wait for the next portal ... maybe it is for the same price wave or maybe it is for a different wave. All we need to do, is observe and learn from price as DB has clearly pointed out. When we accept this, everything else will begin to take shape... Do not complicate matters by thinking ... just observe and everything will fall into place since you will be employing all your being, not just a very small (overloaded) corner of your brain. Try to remember that focus is not your best friend ... just accept ... you cannot focus on acceptance

Yes that is the principle I work to as well ... our numbers don't quite line up, but our thinking does and that is the key to it. The spread needs to convert into tics in order to show efficiency ... when there is a difference then it indicates a wall of limits ahead especially at a supply/demand zone. This means move with caution. When the price rolls as the spread deepens it means the the limit wall has been broken. I think that Pred calls my limit wall 'Limit Resistance' btw ...Much of my terminology is wrong as it is home grown. I did not come to Retail Trading with trade experience, I just simply brought an attitude with me based on winning, but gradually I am straightening up my terminology. This is a fascinating game and I love it ... and yes I got off to a shaky start just like most other people.

Pred, none of that means anything to me ... the spread has been rising unsteadily all morning which means to me that the buys should outnumber the sell opportunities ... and that is what has happened. All I care about is managing risk ... I do not care what the market is doing.

gm Pred, There has been 4 buys and 2 sells this morning so far plus 1 sell near the open if you are ballsy enough for this kind of play. Entries and exits are fades so there is always someone on the other side. As for a running commentary... I am not clever/motivated enough to provide one.

gm jd, Well, your post is an example of detachment in that you have removed yourself from any stray feelings, leaving only the desire to succeed and win and do what it requires of you. As for Chartists and Traders .... I think that People assume that as their analytical skills improve it will follow that they become good Traders.... this is not a belief that I hold and I call them Chartists.. To me, Traders bring a highly competitive attitude to this game .... they want to win and they want to win big .... therefore they will do what is required including changing themselves into the Person that they need to become in order to win big. They can feel it in their bodies and even taste it .... that is why it is called 'a burning desire' I imagine Yes they need analytical skills and they will acquire them ... the trick here is to have just the right amount of analysis ... not to little and most certainly not to much. Each piece of information is an added burden to carry (like too much weight on a marathon runner) therefore the Trader only wants to take on board information that he will use all the time It is no good having information on the basis that "sometimes I use it and sometimes I don't depending upon the conditions" because now the Trader has set himself up for failure by adding an extra decision level when it is not required. A Chartist will find acquiring tactical awareness very difficult or maybe impossible. ... (this is what I call it and I see here on TL that it is called Context which must be the Industry term) This is because it is a real time issue and becomes obvious in hindsight to the point of being self serving. As I have mentioned before, it is a tape playing continuously in the back of the Traders mind, guiding him in entry/management/exit of each trade. So a Trader has his mind running tactical awareness continuously with a heightened tape kicking into gear only when it receives the nod that a possible buy/sell zone is coming into play. This is important to grasp, because if the Trader leaves himself in a constant state of alert, looking for buy/sell zones he will stuff up and then burn out ... in short he will become bloody useless to himself and wind up a great big failure until he re-programs his mind. (try thinking of your brain/mind as a muscle that needs training) Now in order to make tactical awareness simple and natural the Trader opens a chart say V25,000 or greater that displays price, horizontal lines (zones) showing supply/demand and cum ask-bid spread or delta as it seems to be called ... this delta needs to be accumulated to infinity or a large number and centred on zero. At a glance the Trader can see price direction and delta direction plus supply/demands zones ... that is all he needs to be tactically aware of the situation. His entry/management/exit screen set at say V2,000 -5,000 is a slight variation in that the delta is coded to zero itself once every 24 hours ...Glbx open, midnight, RTH open ...the choice is his. The Trader now begins to accumulate delta at various times of the day ... for example at 11am ET it may be -7,000 one day or +25,000 another day ... and after the RTH open it may cross the zero line three times one day and on another day it never crosses the zero line. Throw in the corresponding price movement plus the supply/demand zones and our Trader now has an enormous tactical advantage over the market and he is going to exploit it for all it is worth. But wait because it just gets better. By watching the momentum washing in and out of the market, he can time his trades so that they take full advantage of other peoples trades ..... he cares not whether other people are big/small/fat/skinny because he is only watching the momo washing in and out Yes, if the transition of momo from long to short is smooth, he may well speculate that it is the work of big traders and therefore this leg will perform well . Also, the other benefit of waiting for momo is that if the trade does not fire off quickly then the Trader can scratch it for a tic or two profit and re-enter again...then at the end of the day he finds that his scratch trades cover themselves... win/loss melts into the amateurish past to be replaced by win/scratch. Now the odds that the Trader holds over the market are unassailable providing he remains unemotionally detached It is Xmas and that is why I have made this post ... take from it anything or nothing. If any Reader is new to this game I would urge you to focus only on price until you are constantly profitable and then consider adding the spread. I know you willnot/cannot do this because greed will cloud your mind and you will convince yourself that you are not part of the 99.5% who will fail, and you will rush into this and FU ... hopefully you will start over again a much wiser person Frankly I hope everyone succeeds but I know this is not the case and the statistics do not lie good luck, goodbye and merry Xmas

jd, You need to know your tactical situation at all times to be a Trader. Without this awareness a Chartist cannot evolve into a Trader. Yesterday for instance was a day when the ask-bid spread was dropping and price could not breakout to the upside ..... this is an unmistakable short bias to put it into your language.... just plot the cum ask-bid spread for the RTH to see what I am talking about. Charting programs like market delta and Pred's program may be attractive because they appear to hone in on a single tic, but while your attention is being drawn into this detail, the big picture is passing you by. For example, you referred to a trade on the left edge as "not bad not good, small loss" ... well, it was a bad entry because you did not wait until the shorts were washed out and the longs began building.... and you know this!! I know that I bang on about this, but Trading is a competitive sport because all the characteristics are the same ... whether you are concentrating on the next swing in golf or the next point in tennis or the next play in rugby, you must always have a tape playing behind this point of concentration that contains the tactical situation of the game to date and it is constantly updating itself. This sense of focus running over the top of a constantly playing situational tape is what will make you a great Trader ... you must try to enable both at once .. it cannot be an either/or situation otherwise you will wind up on the sideline analysing charts for the rest of your life and telling yourself 'not good, not bad' Detach yourself from what you are trying to do and you are already halfway there. We are meant to be Traders and not Chartists, unless of course we prefer the safety of charting ..... good luck

Thanks Pred, I am learning slowly, however I am unfamiliar with 'inside and outside' levels I guess these are trade terms and I would appreciate an explanation of them and how they apply. thanks

gm Pred, Firstly I admire your tenacity, it is a very good quality to possess. My initial reaction to your new program is that you are producing enough information to drown a moose let alone a would-be Trader .... but really this is not a matter for my concern. However I would be interested in an expansion of your thoughts contained in the two paras above ..... SynchronousVolume imbalance in the book ...how are you measuring it. thank you

Adam Lanza's Mother thought she was offering good parenting when she took Adam to the shooting range for lessons .... Look how that turned out.

Well there you go DbP ... you dispense good advice and opinion at a rate faster than your ability to retain it.

gm MM, Given that the Indians have resided in North America for thousands of years before the European Colonists arrived, it seems odd that you included them with the French and the English. I would imagine that they would have been perfectly happy to throw the whole lot of you out of their country. When we read the history of the United States it is obvious that the Country was founded on violence and violence has become embedded in the culture. I grant you that US was not alone in it's violent approach to colonisation, but there is no safety in numbers, only shame. There are however lessons from history in abundance .... lessons that just lie about waiting for people to pick them up , learn from them and move on to building a better society. Does this ever happen .... well perhaps sometimes, but usually only when it is expedient. All we need to do is look at the world in 2012 and gauge for ourselves. By nature, Man is a reckless, greedy creation who employs violence and the threat of violence as a principle tool to achieving his 'wants' ... to hell with 'needs' Man principally sees only his wants ... in fact he has blurred wants and needs into one driving force, but they still remain 'wants'. One side of his pitiful brain is dedicated to the advancement of technology reaching right back beyond the wheel even to a time when he 'discovered' the pivot and leverage. So let us fast forward to the .223 Bushmaster. I wiki-ed it. I read that it is the best selling AR weapon in US. I read how it is made and the type of cartridge it was designed around ... in fact the wiki left me with the clear impression that a great deal of thought had gone into it's design and manufacture and I imagine that affordability was a clear intention along with accuracy and the ability to fire continuously with jamming. Nowhere did the article mention the prime purpose of the weapon, and so I will take a guess and say that it is to kill other people. I imagine that the omission of this small piece of information in the wiki article is a complete oversight .... or else perhaps it is so obvious that it is not worth mentioning. I woke up this morning to the news that Obama is placing Biden in charge of a committee to look into preventing this sort of thing happening again ....make of that what you will, I know that I have ... as Zdo wisely points out that murder is already illegal, and so clearly the Sandy Hook shooter broke the law ... just as well sucicide is no longer illegal otherwise that would be two laws broken ... but wait a moment, isn't unlawful discharge of a weapon another broken law. Perhaps we will all breath a collective sigh of relief when the next mass shooting involves only people over the age of eighteen. If you do not like the tone of my writing, so be it.... it is because I am angry. Angry at the fact that it happened Angry that it involved young children Angry because I know that it will happen again and again ... just the when and where remain the mystery. But mostly I am angry because there is no desire intense enough to deal with the nasty realities that are involved ... it is intense desire, a burning desire if you will, that leads us to change ... firstly as individuals and then collectively..... it is this collective burning desire that leads us to the tipping point of change for the greater good. Just as obesity and it's causes has lead to the granting of more lucrative licenses to Pill Companies, so will this tragedy lead to a knee reaction to guard schools with armed guards ... just watch what happens when the next mass shooting occurs. As DbP said that obesity will run it's natural course, and I agree with him .... then perhaps we can reasonably expect that mass shootings will eventually lose favour ... however I for one would not bet on it when I look at the course of history littered as it is with unlearned lessons.

Well I suggest you contact your Oz bank because my card was NZ visa processed in the US. I normally use my NZ card when traveling because I am backed by people who know me in the Auckland Bank and they take care of things rather than me having to cold call Visa. In fact I cannot remember the last time anything went wrong, but I must admit this incident really shocked me ... I mean 'what next'

A bank survey showed that the insistence of an expiry date created a 40% attrition rate to the subscriptions and so there is your answer to 'scam' The best manner of handling the rollover, is to send an automated email in the month of rollover asking you to load the new expiry date. Someone I deal with does this, it might be Amazon or dtn or paypal. My ccard company is a bank I have been associated with for over 40 years and this association helped immensely, but not everyone is so lucky. I could have used another ccard from a bank where I am just a name and that would have been time consuming. Be careful.

I have just finally managed to have a charge reversed off my credit card. It was for a subscription cancelled a year ago on a card that had subsequently rolled over it's expiry date since the cancellation and so at the time I felt I had little to worry about. When I asked the ccard Company to reverse the charges once they had verified that the expiry date was incorrect, they told me that recurring charges do not require an expiry date. Frankly I was speechless and when I googled "credit card recurring charges" I was confronted with pages of similar comments to mine ....and not everyone succeeded in reversing the charges. Just wondered if people here were aware of this banking scam and if you are not aware then take heed. If you are aware, then how long has it been in play.

gm to you 54, Here is an interesting piece .... As for Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) .. thank God he doesn't have a proper job .... just when you think that Politicians cannot be any more stupid, along comes one who manages to lower the bar even further. Obama has made it clear that the public and especially children will face an increasing risk as the pressure on US society continues to ramp up. 2013 is going to be a very interesting year in a thoroughly dismal way as we continue to de-lever debt and replace jobs with robots. Just watch the number of jobs lost on Wall Street alone as the bots move in. By Petula Dvorak We live in a society that makes it very, very easy to kill kids. Though we want to pretend that isn’t true. Because the kids gunned down in Sandy Hook Elementary School Friday were swaddled in federally-regulated, fire-retardant blankets, rode in elaborate car seats plastered with safety stickers, learned to ride bikes with elbow pads, knee guards and safety helmets and were never left alone with a plastic bag. Some of them may never, ever have had a Twinkie. Cribs, bouncy seats, cough medicine, scooters, sugary snacks — we have no problem regulating the everliving life out of those. But how do we keep them safe in their sweet, little elementary school when we live in a culture that has convinced itself to accept guns? Parents across the nation were undone by this tragedy. The president had to stop and wait, wait until his urge to sob had passed when he spoke of the “beautiful little kids” killed in Newtown, Connecticut Friday morning. All day long, my Facebook feed had parents changing their profile pictures to their little ones. One friend left work early to surprise her kids. Another said she just has “to pause and bow down in prayer…” for those kids. What has happened to our culture that we even have this category — school shootings — by which to measure a horror that should otherwise be inconceivable, immeasurable and unfathomable? Stop and think for a moment what this was. This is worse than “Hunger Games”-level bloodspill. This is the ham-handed massacre that happens in a post-apocalyptic novel, and book clubs discuss whether the author took it too far. Or it’s something that happened in the past, in black-and-white, to urchins in pea coats and knee socks and we can’t even wrap our heads around what it was like back then. But no, this is in full color, 2012. These are kids who just wrote Christmas letters to Santa asking for Mario Wii or American Girl dolls, they are kids who maybe got a remote control car for Hanukkah and grandma wondered if it wasn’t too much. We worry about the hormones in their milk, the violence in Spongebob Squarepants and yet, this same country tolerates the existence of a military-style assault weapon built for no purpose other than killing lots of people on a battlefield — fast. People will continue to say it’s written into our Constitution, and an American right, guns. It’s a sticker on a truck, a political statement swathed in red white and blue, a stand on tradition, individualism and a huge lobby soaked in cash and merciless about winning, winning, winning. “This latest terrible tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School is no fluke,” said Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children’s Defense Fund. “It is a result of the senseless, immoral neglect of all of us as a nation to fail to protect children instead of guns and to speak out against the pervasive culture of violence. It is up to us to stop these preventable tragedies.” President Barack Obama also spoke to this disease in our nation, where mass shootings are now routine. “As a country, we have been through this too many times. Whether it is an elementary school in Newtown, or a shopping mall in Oregon, or a temple in Wisconsin, or a movie theater in Aurora, or a street corner in Chicago, these neighborhoods are our neighborhoods and these children are our children,” he said. “And we’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics. But America already knows how this is going to go. We’re getting scary good at this. There will be school counselors and vigils and maybe some protests. We will all hug our kids extra hard. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to let my kindergartner and third-grader go to their sleepover this weekend, I won’t be able to let them go. There will be great work done by reporters in the next few weeks uncovering how the shooter was able to get his hands on the weapons. We’ll probably learn that he was mentally ill, that there were holes in the safety net and everyone around him saw the signs, but our treatment of mental health issues is lacking, our care incomplete and our system broken. Schools will re-examine safety procedures. It’s going to be even harder for the babysitter to come pick up a child or for mom to drop off a forgotten lunch because of new ID checks put in place and security guards hired by the school district. And somehow, parents are going to agree to this madness because, what else can you do? The drills for surviving during a school shooting will now begin in kindergarten. Preschool board meetings will discuss whether this should be looked into. Board members will nod sagely. What else can you do? Sandy Hook will become a database entry, next to Columbine and Stockton and Virginia Tech. What isn’t going to happen? Nothing will change when it comes to guns in America. That is something rotten and infected in our culture. And it breaks my heart, at least 26 different ways today. Read more here: Connecticut shooting won’t change views on guns | Inside Opinion - The News Tribune

Hi Pred, Just as a matter of interest, why have you not rolled yet. H13 is carrying almost 50% more vol, so where do you see the advantage in staying with Z12

Actually I asked this question with serious intent because I think that this is quite a good thread. I am a complete outsider to the trading world and I am home schooled in my trading philosophy .... it is all very different to building up and selling a Company after thirty years, but it is very similar to competitive sport. What I am endeavouring to do at the moment is to bring my home schooled jargon into line with the Industry and compare my approach with that of others to see if I can continue to skew the odds in my favour ... in this regards it is exactly like competitive sport. My approach to this game (and I do believe that it is a game) is to enter and exit at the supply demand zones which makes Steve 46 a person of interest. My zones come from MP and previous zones plus the height of the previous price wave or 50% of it. and so in this respect I read Col B amongst others. The exact timing of the entries /exits come from a very simple analysis of Order Flow which makes Pred a person of interest. This is an approach that I have developed , honed and polished over the last four to five years, but there is always more to be done and more to be appreciated. There is nothing clever in the few simple codes I have written and I refer to a larger TF just to keep the big picture fresh to mind, but that is all. Every thing I do comes off one chart, because there is no higher TF of supply /demand zones since they are horizontal areas relating solely to price ... therefore they are the same on all TFs. Same thing with OF really, we need to watch it develop and unfold. Firstly the Limits need to be destroyed (or not) and then price will go to the opposite side of the s&d zone to it's intended direction ... because the Limits have been killed we observe the ease of movement of the OF .. this is the clue to enter. Of course the Limits may over whelm the Attackers in which case the battle is reversed. The risk to this approach is minimal. I always enter on a bracket and if the trade does not go off as I intend, I just scratch the trade. When I add up the scratched trades at the end of the day they usually have a small positive balance ... well enough to cover coms really and so over the years I have learned to reduce my exposure to risk to a minimum. Back to TL .... I just wanted to say that I enjoy reading some of the posts, many of them actually and particularly those that trigger a thought in my mind. Thank you for posting

The spread and price have been drifting off together since 13:34 and the spread did not relent whilst price was hooked up during B's ramblings. Now they are flattening trapped between the Open and Yes High until a new Alpha Dog appears and away we go again

T4 is a nice piece of software ... I have used it for years along with a couple of other simple ask-bid vols thingys which I apply to supply/demand zones during the day. It is all blindingly simple really ..

hi Pred, Can you please explain who the "arbs" are and how we will know they are at work other than the ask-bid spread and the price will begin to move in harmony again. To me, it is the same thing as "the bots did this and the bots did that" All I can ever see is the cum effect of vol at the ask or bid and the spread and the spread of levels above and below price. I must be too simple for this game because I cannot tell a bot from a human and so I need your help to show me how to spot an "arb" ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Right now, all I see is the cumprice for the session rising faster than the cumdelta and this makes me think that the limits are losing their grip. But I would not know if this is the work of an "arb" or a left handed midget

Never trust Low Life in high places

Hi there, I would still like to know why you selected the 33 area ahead of time if you are willing to share. thanks

hi there, What can you see at 33 that makes you say this. I can see 31.5 being a speed bump or a possible short