doubletop11

Did you find this on the forums, or somewhere else?

I think you are talking about a retest of those area that are broken. IE support become resistance. I use this theory and concept a lot with APA Zones as it draws out the levels to watch then when it break a new level is formed anew and a flip-flop happens.

That's cute! Thanks NinjaTrader for the laugh.

Yeah, I like it too. It's good for S/R on the small timeframes and supply/demand on the larger ones. The thing that I think is the best is the fact that it gives you the area where the turn is expected. The market is dynamic and we have to be dynamic. Price doesn't always turn on a line but making it an area really turned my trading around. They even have trading plans and videos from other traders then the creator. I just think that's really cool.

I agree with you DbPhoenix. And I would like to also point out that that watching your time of day with supply and demand zones is very important too. Using supply and demand zones with price action confirmation and time confluence is so amazing!

I believe this is an important aspect to all trading not just Forex. Risk management and accepting that you when you loss it won't break the bank but it's just an expense of doing business. We are all wrong at some point during the day in this business even the guys that make six figures in a day!

They just tend to be the inverse of the US indexes. I really wouldn't say there's a leading marketing of them that I know of. If you want to do spreads that's another subject all together. But once you know how to truly trade Price Action and support/resistance(supply/demand) It's pretty much just like trading any other market. Every market has it's little quark but that's how it goes. Futures trading and bonds are wonderful, but no matter what market you chose to watch make sure you have a general idea on what's happening in Forex, futures, and equities(or indexes). Never forget the big picture!

thanks Joshdance I will look into that. Haven't heard of that program before!

Here's the basic idea that I use when looking at trends, as well as if I'm going to do a trend reversal trade or a trend following trade. Knowing which one to use is extremely important. I know a lot of zone traders tend to be just reversal traders. So hopefully these videos help with that a little. [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2cAXvUB4p0]APA Zones Basic Zone Assessment - YouTube[/ame] [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhvXzMGbuwU]APA Zones Assessment 2 - YouTube[/ame]

I will post some videos for you and you are more then welcome to come hang out with all of us Zone traders in the APA Zones community!

Hey Derutrade, The way that I see and trade it is to always look for timeframes of confluence. the 5 min timeframe alone is not enough to hold price. but when we have a 30,15, 5min time frame in confluence and maybe a 377 tick zone or something small to really give you a nice tight stop. That's how you can really "bring home the bacon!" When you have so many time frames in confluence it's what I consider a trend reversal trade. So you are really excepting for price to bounce and give you a good trade! Many zone traders tend to start out as reversal traders which is good and bad. Smaller stops, good RR, but everything seems like a reversal at the beginning. The other way to approach it is to use the zones for trend following. This is where I use the 5min as my highest timeframe with my 377tick and perhaps another small time frames to get me in a trend move. On the ES, watch these trades closely and move your stop up to BE +1 after 10 ticks or so. You want to lock in and at least pay for your trade so that way it's a "free trade" so that no matter what happens you make money and your brain stops stressing out! Another suggestion: Please consider watching the Euro(6E,EC) and the NQ or YM. The ES is the choppiest. Unless you really know what's going on you will get chopped out. Looking at the 5min chart on the ES causes me to see zones everywhere and can really lead to overtrading the zones quickly. Hope this helps to get you profitable from the get go. You can also join a group of zone traders on skype. Let me know if you want in. Here's a little simple video that will hopefully help you a little bit. Yes, trading is completely a probability game! You have to take every setup that matches your rules. Trading will always be hard though. Simple rules help. http://apazones.com/wp-content/uploads/TLQA.mp4

That is very true! No system can account for everything. But zones theory can account for 90% + from my personal experience.

Hey Gabe2004, I would like to help you out a little bit if you would like. Please look me up on Skype and I'll give you an hour of my time. We can go over any zone theory questions or inconsistencies that you would like to have answered. I really believe in zone theory and it works so well and more often then not it will be able to answer the "why" behind the market's movement. It does take some time to understand and get the logic. I have met a lot of OTA people because of my appoach on software and for the newer ones it really can be HARD. Yet, I also trade with OTA/zone people that are making 30k+ a month. Just let me know if you would like to talk and if you would like to be in that live trade room! PM or skype. Trading can be simple, but it is always hard! We all have our own worst enemy inside our head all the time.

Thanks Tradewind for your input. The struggle for me is trend verse counter-trend. I am a counter-trend trader by heart. That's what I love. It works for me. I've been forcing myself a little more to take trend moves more. Buying and selling pullbacks, the rub isn't looking left which I can spot a reversal candle pattern no problem! It's just...... getting to caught up in smaller time frames I think. I also have a few people on my back watching the lower time-frames really hard as I trade live makes me fret. It's personal problem I think being in-front of people. I've been trading live in-front of people now for about a month. It's so much harder! I have no problem hitting a screen record button before a trade goes... but there's something about having people watching me....interacting with me while trading. I think that's my issue. Going to go to my trading psychologist. It's time she earned another check. Sorry for the disjointedness, this post has really made me think about what I am really wrestling with.

I totally agree with you and from my observations and trading with zones. Here's what's going on. Sam sees this area as being tested 5+ times. That would be a gray zone on APA zones as well. We really expect that area would be used up if you are looking at that one monthly time frame chart. However, we always have to consider multi-timeframes in our analysis. So you can see that there was still support in that area at the very bottom, and I'm willing to bet that you could even find a zone down there on a daily, 4 hour chart or smaller time frame. So while that zone has been hit a lot. If it goes that far into the zone, and then comes back out. Take the confirmation trade as it comes back out!!!! Or better yet jump into a tend trade by buying a pullback from a smaller timeframe demand zone that it creates as it comes out of the zone. So that way you don't have to put a monthly level worth for a stop loss. That's just how I look at zones that have been retested a lot. No, you don't know what's going to happen in the future but if the zone there why not. Nobody is right 100%. A confirmation trade is also a very strong trade. I think that's why he might not have answered is because the 1st retest is always the best and that's all we can really count on for GREAT small loss/high reward trades. The other thing is he might not have see the R/R ratio there. I like a 5:1 ratio at least. If you don't see it, then pass on the trade. It's always better to stay out then get into some trade that your like "we'll see how this goes". Don't trade those trades. Look at price action; look at support becoming resistance; watch multi-timeframes for confluence. Just my two cents on what happened.

It really hard not to want to move your stops or your profit targets to capture a good sized winner. Even when you have the discipline not to. It still eats at me not to peal off a few contracts before my first target is hit.

I've really tried to "read the tape" ie: time/sale and level 2 data. However, because of the markets that I watch mostly TF and CL. I just see a small spread happen every once in a while and when someone puts down 100 contracts or so. I've head of this before, watched some youtube videos of people "doing it" but I have yet have it help me at all. The zones make so much more sense to me it shows me the imbalance of buyers/sellers. Watching numbers just fly on and off your screen and seeing a ever so small spread doesn't seem to help me at all. Do you have any good reference material? I would really like to understand the merit in this practice, however I have failed to see any to date.

what do you mean by reading the tape? Level II data? Time/sale data?

The software is not disclosed. I do have copyright on any software that draws automatic support/resistance zones or supply/demand zones for the financial markets. I agree with VTK it's about those areas of consolidation! The software just makes it plot on your chart for you. I don't know how geeky you want me to get, but I don't mind sharing zone creation with you in code view C#. So you would have to know how to read that. but if you would like to see that please PM me. Back to VTK really good perpective: I'm going to try to break it down a little on what I have observed with zones through trading and through development. I'm sure VTK can draw theses zone in his sleep. However, in a computer that is a lot more challenging. Which makes zones great in theory yet hard to quantify. Right now, I believe that software does it 90% correctly to the way VTK and I see the zones day in and day out. The other 10% is still a work in progress and why I provide free updates. The zones in the software are adjustable by the user to make sure you can tweak it to how you see it. So here's some logic for you. Swing High: If the pivot bar is red - find the surround bars bars and look for range of those bar set by the strength setting (10% that is lacking in the current release) -compare the 2 bars next to the swing high, find the common range of them. If they open together and close together, then draw the bottom to where that commonality ends. If the bar is green -As as the top except I have found that minor differences on which bar type forms the swing high. So the calculations differ a little. Else If pivot bar is smaller then both bars on either side, Draw whole bar as zone. Then we do the same thing for the swing low. Hopefully that helps to simplify it and make it more clear. Sometime zones are only the wick, sometimes the whole bar. It just depends on price action. I have tried to base it around a lot of testing and pretty much exactly how I believe both VTK and myself draw zones. So far from what you have drawn VTK I completely agree. I also personally try to draw a smaller range of a zone based on testing of me and a group of about 10 beta testers. Please also remember, I'm only looking for 1 bounce off of any zone, anything after that I need confirmation that price is leaving that area before I get in. That's why bounce counts are so important. If you personally would like to see that logic in C#, I'm more then game, I just don't want to get to geeky, or off topic into this thing. On another note, if you guys would like to be apart of the skype community that all draw zones together and the forum there of. go to activetrader.ning.com. It's a free forum community based around what we are talking about. Traders helping traders is our slogan. We have a lot of videos on there and it's a community. We do some of live trading together in webex rooms. And if you guys want to trade with me, just PM or find me on skype, I'll help in anyway that I can. However, I am finding it challenging to trade infront of people because I usually watch so many markets and they have a hard time knowing exactly what time frame my cursor is on. But I'm working through it and it's just going to make a better person and trader. P.S. If you use a screen capture like Jing(from techsmith) and record your trades, you will grow by leaps. I started doing it, wow. Then I thought about posting them, my partner said I can't because I giving away to much. Cheers,

Hey Tradewinds, I can't tell you every time how to identify those pivot high/low areas. It's taken me a lot time and a lot of equations to get it where it is right now. But the basic idea of the zones that I use is to take the wick of the pivot bar. AKA: "bar in control" as I like to call it. Then we will run it down to either the open or the close of that candle. This is all based on a couple of different things and every once in a while you take the whole bar. First: Range: look for other bars that are in the same range as that "bar in control", BIC. Second: If this is a huge bar compared to the preceding or succeeding bar look at just taking the wick. The idea is to get the true essence of the zone. I personally like smaller zones. Yes, you will miss trades, everyone does. The other thing to do is look at multi-time frames to help you determine if your zone is right. A lot of time these zones will have that confluence that I talked about earlier. This help in making sure that zone is the right size. It's all very techie. So if you want to get together and talk on skype or IM. I'm more then game. As far as getting it over to tradestation, good luck! I know several have attempted this feat. So after you get logic down of zone drawing and a way to store them into memory until violated. You still need a way to draw a rectangle from easy language. Easy language isn't so easy. Tradestation won't let you draw rectangle or extend that rectangle into the zone that we would need it to be. Not even mentioning how to calculate the bounce count on a rectangle that doesn't draw. So if you want to program it yourself by all means. I wish you luck. It's taken me a long time to figure that stuff out. As I said before, hit me up and we can talk, after all we are all building on information from others anyways. cheers,

I'm a trader first! Trading is challenging and if my software helps someone see real support and resistance, Great. If not, that's fine too. After you made some good money, the only thing left to do is help someone have success at least that's my thinking. Trading is hard! we all have stuff to learn and I have yet to met the prefect trader. I personally like to help people. I'm very open about what I do and how I do it. I hope it helps. Because I still have a lot to learn and I still have people that I look up to in the trading world.

Personally, as I have traded. I have found that 80% of the trading battle is in your mind. the rest is technicals / fundamentals. There's trade management, money management, etc. So I would agree with you. Having a map and being able to read it is important. Yet all of us need an edge more then just having a map. I guess the real question in this thread is how good is the supply/demand zones, support/resistance map?

I to think it is all relative. However, something that I have found while using the APA Zones is that there's this idea of confluence of zones. IE an ES trade that I just got out of here's how it looks. I use the 15min chart with a bunch of other charts. But I enter on a 377 tick. Reason being is because you can see the intra-zones of the bigger time frames on the tick chart. Therefore the stop loss on this trade was 2 ticks. This works a lot and after 10 mins I pull up my stop loss to +1 or +2 just to play it safe (pending market). Hold until it either comes back on me or I get my targets. This doesn't work all the time, but It does a majority and I have an amazing RR ratio because of it.

Here's a couple things with zone that Sam doesn't explain but I've pick up from other sources on the net like Phil-Newton, consult-fx.com. After you understand how to draw zones things will be easier. This is real support and resistance! There's this thing with APA zones called confluence of zones. IE: multiple time frames have to have the same zone right in the same place. You need at least 3 time frames of the key timeframes for price to stick and start a new trend in a zone for intraday trading. about 95% of the time this will be the daily low/high. Bigger time frames hold more weight than smaller timeframes so unless you can consistently plot and keep track of the zones you may have some trouble with zone trading execution. Secondly, bounce count is extremely important. The more times zones are retested the weaker the zones are. It's like chopping down a tree. Sometimes it hard to identify this when you are manually drawing zones and it goes outside of the zone range that you thought price would stay inside of. APA zones does a great job of this by changing the color of the zones for you after price as for sure left that zone. Zones can be amazing conter-trend and very solid for entries in trend movements to if you miss the reversal. The reason being is they identify the real reason price moves. It's not because some indicator is overbought or over sold. It's all about understand supply and demand at its core. Personally, this stuff has proven its self time and time again. Pivot points, Fibs lines, channels, now all seem inferior to this level of zone theory. The sublime thing is how simple zone theory is. It does really help to know candle bar patterns and reversal bars. If you know strict price action trading, this system just helps make you extremely profitable. It really keeps you out of the market during the chop. and stops you from overtrading. So concludes my dissertation. Here's a quick example of the monthly zones and how it all works. The movement that we have seen in the past several weeks has been totally calculated. If you had subscribed to APA zones we all caught this thing down so far. Here's my monthly charts FreeStockCharts.com - Web's Best Streaming Realtime Stock Charts - Free