tjnoon

Our British Pound Futures Wins 12 out of our last 14 trades! The EC paused today and took a step back, unable to post a winner. But it was bound to take a step back after the run it's been on lately. The BP however, continued its winning ways with a strong 2 out of 3 during a very sleepy market. I've received a bunch of questions regarding the reentry set ups I am using. Here is a video that recaps the past few BP sessions and also walks through the various considerations we make regarding the reentry style set ups. Also, a good look at how we use the UTA to gain further insight into our trading. Check out how a 3% risk profile, beginning with a $15,000 starting account, more than doubled after expenses, in about 4 months, with very minimal trading; anywhere from 30 minutes to 2.5 hours at the most, each morning (US session). Play Video Finally, I notice a lot of people reading our UTA posts. Feel free to join in. Ask questions, post comments. We're here to help. While this forum is designed to help people learn the UTA trade tool, we talk a lot about the trades we are taking and how we use the UTA to continually be self critical and to help us indentify where we need to focus, to improve our results.

Glad you enjoyed it Tio.. Today was a bit tougher though, no? It's not always as easy as yesterday. I can't seem to be able to open up UTA while in my traderoom. There's a bug in the system so I can't show it live. Bummer.. But if you have any specific questions about it, let me know. I'll do my best to answer them here for you.

This is an interesting topic to me so I thought I'd throw my thoughts into the fray. I host a live trade room and have been doing so now for over two years. I'm proud to say that I have a solid winning record across all the markets I have called, mostly eminis and currency futures. That's not my point but I wanted to give a little credibility to my following comments. I also trade my own account but I find it difficult to manage my trades accurately, 100% of the time while maintaining a level of reliability and quality to the trades I am calling live for my membership. I have a hierchial system of priority that dictates my actions. I always put my tradecalls first and that has hurt my own trading about 10 to 15% of the time, which makes a huge difference to my overall personal trade results. All of you make correct assumptions I believe, as to why traders fail. Here is my opinion. I believe that trading is basically a non-human activity yet, we as humans, make very human trade decisions, which tend to be wrong more than they are right. Often we'll put our personal needs ahead of the needs of our trading. Or, we don't even know 'why' we are trading in the first place. It should be 'to make money' but you'd be surprised to learn that most people haven't given that the thought necessary to fully understand that concept and its ramifications. The best trades, I have found, tend to be counter-intuitive and therefore difficult to pull the trigger on. I rely on my trade system (which is objectively non-human) and try to always remind myself that I am trading the 'edge' that my system gives me over time. My winning percentage is high enough to make a living so long as I keep my risk very small (no more than 2% of my overall trade capital) and, I take the trades according to my tradeplan. The wins and losses will come at a random distribution. We can not control that. We can control our risk and, that we execute our trades correctly, according to a well researched plan. Then I can be non-human about my trading realizing that if I trade my plan correctly, I'll put the odds in my favor on every trade and that edge (like the casino's edge only better) is where I will make my money as a trader. Make sense? Think of your trading like a forest. Each tree is a trade. Most traders get lost amongst the trees and lose sight of their forest. Trees fall and they begin to make bad trade decisions. This is very human. The forest is your equity curve though. The line that successful traders cross is when they are at peace with sacrificing about 1/3 of the trees in their forest if it means growing their forest 2/3rds larger as a result. Think about it. A beautiful and realistic equity curve gives you that nice stair stepping line, 45 degrees up and to the right. Right? Two steps forward, one step back. Two steps forward, one step back. 1/3 of the trees fall, allowing for 2/3rds to grow back. A trader needs to take a higher perch and maintain a bird's eye view on their entire forest and not worry about the trees that fall so long as the winning edge remains intact. My results and equity curves prove this idea over and over again, over many thousands of trades, called live over the past two + years. I have attached to this post, recent equity curves to the two currency futures markets I have been recently calling over the past couple months to prove my point. Please notice that on my Euro trades, had I been a normal human being trying to trade this market, chances are I would have quit as my trades actually dipped below zero and produced a negative result to begin with. My backtesting and longer term view though, kept me taking my trades as they set up each day and you can see how the forest then grew like crazy. Same thing with my British Pound trades. In fact, this curve reveals the type of dynamic that kills traders success. Notice around mid March to the first week in May how the results were flat. Yet by taking the trades, we were able to hang out just below our equity highs. Then, the winners began to come again and a breakout to new equity highs occurred. In fact, we hit new highs again today. Many traders quit during that time and went off to chase the "already happened" performance of some other untested market and strategy, but that's another reason traders fail and I'll stop here now, hopefully making points that the readers of this forum will find useful.

We've been trading this dynamic market in our live futures traderoom now for several months using the HVMM strategy. It's proven to be a highly effective and dependable market to trade with lots of action. In this video, we'll take a look at last week's +139 point net result. At $12.50 per point, that's over $1700 on very few trades. Moreover, we'll look at some huge trades that took place with our trailing stop strategy. Unfortunately for us, it happened after we were already finished with our session. The EC has been so active that for those who have 'more trade in them' than our typical and highly controlled 'power of quitting' approach, these set-ups might inspire you to look deeper into the session. And, with our powerful trade analysis tool, the UTA, you could do some specific time of day studies to maybe pinpoint some windows of time when these large moves have a higher likelihood of transpiring. The video also will look at what results would look like by incorporating a very simple fixed fractional money management technique, using a UTA tool. Check it out here

GE, I agree that easier access to the notes would be nice. Barry and I discussed many ideas but in the end, we had to make some compromises. We came up with buttons that open and close various aspects of the UTA. Some want this, some want that. Some want this at times, but not at other times. That sort of thing. It took me a little bit to get used to the notes but now I quickly find them when I need, and jot down what I need to. Then I am happy to reduce it down and get it out of the way. Perhaps we'll rethink it for future revisions. Regarding your question about tracking multiple markets. I did post a video on the UST and HVMM Owner's Club blog suggesting a way to do it. Basically, you would need to select crosses with the same underlying currency and track the same size trades. You can use the Setup Type labels (column I) and name your set up type for each market you are tracking. For example, eurusd and gbpusd could be tracked on one sheet if you labeled each, accordingly. Thenyou could see comparison curves, etc. I agree with Barry though regarding the posting of multiple markets on the same UTA sheet. I believe you would get more useful indepth analysis keeping them on separate sheets. But, it can be done. Finally, for scrreenshots, I downloaded a free tool that I like to use called Screenhunter. I just capture what I need and then keep a well organized folder with my files. The suggestion of linking to the screenshot is an excellent one and I can see that as a nice improvement for a future release. Thanks for your post and questions. Keep up the foundational work. It will payoff for you in a big way.

Oops.. Sorry guys. Somehow I thought I was posting this in our sponsored forum regarding the UTA. My mistake, although it is pertaining to best times of day to trade, it wasn't my intention to post in this section. -- TJ

Interesting posts about time of day results. One of the reasons we began this particular forum was to share results from a variety of markets, and to share research discoveries using our trade tool, the UTA. There are so many markets, timeframes, trade approaches etc., and it seemed that we'd be able to cover a lot more ground collectively, and thus benefit from everyone's findings collectively, as well. This forum is supposed to be educational and a place for us all to learn from one another. The UTA is such a new tool that we felt a forum like this would be very useful for those learning how to use it. It is not a trade strategy (to reiterate) but a tool to use for analyzing one's strategy and trade results. I have posted many crude oil trades into a UTA spreadsheet and have found a similar dynamic as Steve's findings. For example, from 9 am to 9:15, my win rate was a strong 68.25%. But check out the following 15 minutes, 9:15 am to 9:30. All set-ups that occurred during that time with my particular strategy had a 95% win rate, whereas the following 30 minutes the win rate dropped down to about 60%. I've posted some of my UTA time of day results below. I think that Steve brings up an interesting question regarding time of day results AND knowing when to stop. I'm on the West Coast so I'm not interested in pre-NYmarket trades. I gotta sleep a little bit, no? I like a tight tradeplan that enables me to quit as early as possible too, though. For my emini trading, I begin at the NY open and take the trades that my system spits out. If I hit two winners AND a positive result, that is my dynamic stop goal (but I do need at least one of my winners to be a full target, not a parital). It allows me to take what the market wants to give me while quitting positive on most sessions. I couple that with a hard stopping time where if I am not yet positive, I'm not taking new set-ups. So for the Russell emini for example, that hard stop time would be 12 noon, exchange time. Other dynamic quitting goals could be even more effective, depending on your system and available time to trade. I have found for example, with the same Russell strategy I use, that quitting after 3 winners and a positive result (also requiring that one of those winners is a full target and not just a managed partial target) has been far more profitable over time BUT, you may need to trade into the pm session and it does require a longer daily time commitment. Today, for example, I had two winners (one small partial and one full winner) and could have been done within the first 17 minutes and a very nice result. Forcing the 3rd winner would have resulted in a losing trade but then would have caught a very nice 8 point winner on trade #4. On other sessions trade number 4 may have been another loss, giving back the first two gains, and forcing another trade. There's always a trade-off with every trade decision. The important thing is to establish a tradeplan that gives you an edge in the market over time, and then trade that plan. The UTA is a tool designed to help you find that edge by extracting the details out of your raw trade data, like the time of day study on the set of crude trades, shown below.

Here's a quick recap on the BP trades we took, per the tradeplan described. It was nearly a perfect week. Yesterday it took us three trades to hit our two winners, or it would have been a perfect 2 wins and done the past 5 sessions. We wound up taking 11 trades for the week, winning 10 out of 11. New equity highs were hit again today. For the week, we netted +101 points on 11 trades. UTA stats improved a bit. Our win rate ticked up of course, to 69.7%. Our profit factor ticked up to 1.96. So for every dollar we put at risk, we stand to make 1.96 back. I haven't had time to update the EC which did struggle this week. Today was excellent however and a big trailing move really helped us. I'll be out for the weekend. Hope everyone enjoy's themselves. Looking forward to Monday's session. -- TJ

I'm sorry Siuya, but I'm afraid I don't know what you mean by links that freeze your screen and needing to put in your email address etc. Again, this is just meant as a forum for those who want to share their UTA results or anyone else who wants to learn about this tool. I'm fairly new to Traders Lab and am not sure what you are referring to with your post.

Well, thank you for all your thought provoking dialogue. It's great to see this forum already beginning to take hold. Sneo, I welcome a good healthy dose of skepticism, debate and discourse. Please keep it coming if you feel so inclined. Through conversations like this we can all learn something and improve as traders. As Foxstamp said, the UTA is a tool for analyzing trade systems, backtest, forward test and real trade results. You can use any system and analyze it with this tool. Quite frankly, I do not think there is a tool out there like this. Regarding your observations of the BP and EC trade results I posted, again, I want to reiterate that it is just a starting point to begin conversation. The tradeplan we are employing is a very tight plan. We spend very little time trading it, often finishing quickly in the morning. I'm not saying it is the best plan in the world. Surely it is not. But we are building our accounts steadily and accomplishing our agenda which is " Get in, get out, get done." We take a few trades, take what the market will give us, and we're done. We now can go do whatever else we need to do, outside of trading. The UTA has given us the ability to see inside our trades. Perhaps by looking closer, it might not appeal to you. That's fine. Saves you time and you can begin to turn your attention to other opportunities that are more attractive to you. As you observed, 5 points per trade (these are futures contracts so we think in terms of ticks/points vs pips) was the average gain and a positive expectancy. It may not seem like much but it depends on how you look at it, how you manage it, and what your personal goals are as far as how your trading fits into your broader life agenda. I ran a simple money mgt study (per the UTA Equity and Fixed Fractional Money Mgt Tool) and here is what it teaches us based on three simple examples: Starting with a $10,000 account balance: 1. If we risked 2% of our accnt size on each trade against the average loss based on the 193 trades taken, we would have traded up to a 3 contract position by now and would have a balance of $17,095 in our account, after trade costs. So, Feb 1 thru May 12.. not bad part time income, and sticking with it, one could see how it would steadily keep growning as we scale up, with minimal market exposure and time investment. If you see the equity curve I posted earlier (based on just a single contract position), notice that the system struggled a bit at first and took a while to get its footing. Then it really took off. After a nice climb, the curve began moving sideways, struggling a bit in April but never dropping very far below its equity high. It has since put together a nice win streak and is breaking out again to new equity highs. Our rolling stats are beginning to show signs of stability as the win percentage continues to remain steady. 2. If we increased our risk tolerance to a 3% factor, risking 3% of our accnt balance on any given trade, based on the avg loss per the 193 trades (which by the way was $93.11), we would have traded up to a 7 contract position and an accnt value of $23,022, net of expenses! Meanwhile, we have minimized our risk exposure, and accomplished our goals with a few trades each day. By increasing our risk per trade by just 1% of our accnt value per trade, we've practically doubled our net profit during the same amount of time. I think with a 69% win rate, risking 3% to begin with on a $10,000 starting account is not that unreasonable. And yet, with a mere 5 point avg per trade, we've been able to accomplish something that most traders wish they could achieve on a consistent basis. Continuing down this course, it would be easy to see how one could trade up to a 20 position trade and make a very nice return for their minimal effort in front of their computer screens each morning. 3. For more aggressive trades, lets look at what would happen if we risked 5% per trade. Afterall, we are winnning nearly 70%, right? Chris "Jesus" Fergusen showed us how he turned $1 into $20,000 by risking a disciplined 5% of his bankroll on each poker tournament he entered. He stated with $1 and entered a .05 tournament. He literally entered a tournament that had a nickel buy-in! He assumed that he was good enough to make a money position at least 50% of the time. Not necessarily 1st place, but a paid position. With this system, we are not making full targets all the time and are managing our trades, sometimes taking partial profits instead of letting a trade turn into a loss. We are winning quite a bit more than 50% however. If he could turn $1 into $20,000, then based on the numbers this system is producing, we should be able to do quite a bit better and perhaps it is a good argument for us to risk 5% of our account on the mere 5 point avg per trade. If we risked 5% based on the same 193 trades and the same avg losing trade of $93.11, we would have traded up to a 22 contract position over the 193 trades and our account would have grown to $41,038. That's not the whole story though. At its peak, we would have put on a 27 contract trade and hit an equity high of $53,295 net. That would have been the 119th trade. It went into its drawdown and traded back down to a 14 position trade. April was tough. It has since been back on the upswing and would be currently trading (tomorrow, in fact) with a 22 contract position. If it keeps plugging along at this win rate, we'd reach a point where we couldn't trade any larger and we'd cap out our position size and enjoy 5 net points per trade from now until who knows. I'm not claiming this BP tradeplan is the best thing since sliced bread, it merely presents the results that it presents. From this, perhaps we could find ways to improve our plan but even if we just stuck with this, we could see how over time, it would grow our accounts. The tortoise winds up beating the hare, afterall. The UTA puts this kind of knowledge at our fingertips. Sometimes you can't judge a book by its cover and drilling down a bit deeper reveals things that can be surprising. -- TJ

I decided to post up the Euro's cousin, the British Pound/USD Futures. Mainly, because I am trading it live every day and I've been able to put together a reliable and robust tradeplan using UTA. I trade a 144 tick chart and like the Euro, I begin my trading at the start of the US Equity Session, 9:30 est. Also like the Euro, the BP trades on the CME so we'll use exchange times as our time reference. Like the EC, I backtested about 6 weeks of trading, Feb 1 thru Mar 12th. I researched a tight plan with the intention of getting my trading done early each session. Two wins and a positive result meant I was done for the session, or, by 11 am cst if I hadn't yet hit my goal, I'd be done. Over the first 6 weeks I tested 83 trades, 60 winners and 23 losses! Not bad. 72.3% winners and a nifty +505 points. Since then, as of today's date, I've been posting my real trades (the trades I take and call live in the traderoom that I host every day). I now have 191 total trades, including the backtested trades; 132 winners and 59 losses for a respectable 69.1% win rate. April was a tough sideways month, with wins and losses evenly distributed, yet we were able to hang out just below our equity highs and remained poised to break out to new profit levels, which happened last week. Today we hit new equity highs again, and have amassed +819 total points. The stair stepping is forming nicely as you can see from the attached screen shot of our equity curve. I am using HVMM 2010 for this market as well. It's a great compliment to the EC. The different timeframes 144 vs 233, and the different rhythm that each trade in, make them not correlated enough to worry about. Their results do not track too closely day to day, other than the fact that they both seem to be consistent performers. Too much correlation is something to be concerned with but I just don't see it being a real factor in this case. Check out the Trade Distribution Frequency Histogram too. What a beautiful distribution of trades. Notice the strong bias on the positive side with the majority of our winners hitting around 16 to 18 points. Notice also how our tight trade mgt plan has ended up with about 10% of our trades stopping out with just 1 point. Many of those trades would have wound up losing, but we were aggressively eliminating our risk while also covering the cost of our commission. No pip spreads to worry about with futures! Notice also how our longs and shorts were very simimlar in personality. This is the type of thing we like to see. It shows a stable trade system that does equally well going long or short. Feel free to post comments, questions or whatever is on your mind. Start a new thread and share the results that you are discovering on your favorite markets. It's amazing what the UTA reveals to us. Get in the habit of posting your trades to UTA every day and soon you'll build up a valuable history of trade data that will help you improve your trading.

I thought I would start this out by posting up some results I've been getting trading Euro Currency Futures (EC). Everyone is trading EURUSD forex which is great. But so many overlook the fact that you can trade Euro/USD Futures contracts and get great results. I've got a UTA spreadsheet that I started backtesting the EC with. I began my backtest on Jan 25th with a 233 tick chart. I backtested a very tight and concise ruleset. Start time is 8:30 cst (exchange time) I tested a two position strategy. The 1st position gets out at a fixed target and the 2nd position uses a trailing stop. I'm using the HVMM 2010 trade strategy If a trade sets up, while my trailing position is still live, I will take the 'reentry' with the fixed position only. Quitting strategy was 2 fixed target winners and a positive result or, quit by 11 am cst. The strategy is to take what the market will give while quitting positive on most sessions. Trailing stop considered a bonus trade and didn't count towards quitting goals. The only caveat was that one of the trades had to have made more than just 1 tick to qualify for my stopping goal. I began posting my live trades in April. Here are the results after 351 trade entries. Remember, each position is entered as a separate trade, so if you put on two positions as described, you enter each one as a unique trade. So 351 trades is closer to 160 or so actual trades. Wins: 239; Losses: 112; 1 BE 68% win rate Profit Factor: 1.82 Expectation .26 Total Net Points: + 988 @ $12.5 per point Pre Cost Profit: $12,350 You can see by the diagram below that I started with some losses. In fact, January was relatively flat. But by sticking to it, the tradeplan finally took off and put together a great rally for about 2 months. Then a one step back occurred in April. Finally, you can see the two steps forward kicking in as the winners started to come in again. This is what should expect with a solid trade strategy that is winning about 2/3rds of its trades. One step back, two steps forward. Remember, wins and losses come at a random distribution. We can't control that. But, by backtesting and then posting our real trades into the UTA, we can determine a very real EDGE in the market. So long as we stick to the plan, the odds will work out in our favor and we'll get a natural action move to the upside with our equity curve, and then a reaction that flattens out or draws down some, and then a new action move to the upside again. This is the beginnings of your classic stairstepping equity curve, up and to the right. UTA and the vision it has given me, has instilled the confidence in me to show up tomorrow, and take my trades according to this plan.

Hi, this is TJ and Barry – developers of the Ultimate Trade Analyzer (UTA). We have started this forum as a place for the UTA community to learn new things and to exchange ideas and discoveries made from using this powerful new trading tool. Soon there will be several helpful threads about how to use the UTA, and to share results. This is your forum, so please feel free to start your own thread if necessary. Let’s all work to keep this forum organized and useful. But first - what is the UTA? UTA is a power-tool for analyzing your trades. Whether you are back-testing, forward testing, or logging real trades, your trade data contains a wealth of information. But how do you unlock the secrets of your data and make it useful? Imagine if you have a gold mine – what good would it be if you could not get to the gold? Your trade data is that gold mine. And UTA is the tool to mine the gold and unlock the secrets hidden inside your trade data. Never before has there been a tool that presents so much useful information in one easy to use format. What you discover will improve your trade decisions. We understand that questions are popping up in your mind – as they should be. But consider this the first step of a long and fruitful journey. UTA is so new that we are only just beginning to tap into its potential wealth. Together, as a community, we can all drill down deep into our trade data that is our gold mine. Let the journey begin . . . TJ & Barry

I enjoyed your Tick article. Thanks. I'm wondering if you know how to apply a tick chart directly onto the price chart. I'm using Tradestation. I noticed you were using an 800 tick chart with the ER2 and a 1 minute tick chart. I'm curious as to why you chose those time frames. I read about a strategy where you look for a new high to be put in on a price chart but the tick fails to make a new high which would be a short signal. A long set up would be the opposite. The trader traded the es and had made a custom tick chart comprised of the s&p 500 stocks only. I'd love to know how to set this up but after reading your article I wondered if it would be just as effective a strategy and easier to set up with the regular tick and the er2. One other strategy that has always facinated me is to watch for the dow to hit it's major resistance or support on a day or hourly chart usually at a big round number. When the tick fails, and hopefully the es gives some leading indication that a reversal is taking place, then you would load up on OEX at the money put options (or calls if dow is failing at support). The strategy calls for $20,000 in options and you would adjust the quantity of options accordingly on every trade. Option expiration week, when the options are priced low, you could wind up with 100 options on a trade for example. Naturally, one might need to build up to a $20,000 per trade level, but if one is good at reading the tick, I can see this as a way to hit consistant home runs. Any thoughts on those ideas? TJ