TheBramble

A recent research paper showed the majority of profits come from flow trading and trading (making) the spread. Less than 5% came form speculative activity. While most pro traders will be aware of the levels, the use of charts and TA diminishes as you move out into the longer timeframes (daily and wider) where fundamental and macro-economic factors take precedence.

Save yourselves a lot of wasted time, money, effort and aggravation - avoid NLP for trading related 'issues'. NLP is not something you use 'just' for this or that - it is, totally, not just specifically. Software soundtracks and ooh-ahh visuals and all the other hyped up crap based on soemebody's wet dream of a great idea that it can be pressed into service to focus on your weak points and made to return a dividend immediately, with little to no effort on your part is a complete canard and an insult to your intelligence. If you fall for it, you deserve it. Don't be duped. There is no substitute for trading knowledge and experience and no airy-fairy flakey-fairy BS is going to make up for what you don't know - about you - or about the markets. You have time spare? You have money spare? Invest in your education in the markets - not some one-size-fits-all new-age uber-panacea that will only delay your development.

From an academic perspective, yes, you can objectively consider both side of any argumant. But in trading, you can't make any profits taking both views. Untrue. Trading (volume) does move prices. But so too do Market-Makers and Specialists - without 'active' (volume-based) trading. Immaterial. Who cares about sentiment and representation? It's what IS happening and what is most likely to happen that's important. Not a subjective or even roughly objective view of why what is, is. One step ahead of the leaders? How can you be one step ahead of the leaders? They are, by definition, ahead of everyone else - hence, leaders. Following the leaders is absolutely the name of the game. Not cynical at all - just plain smart. It of course makes you a follower, but don't deride that status. So few are really followers. They are miles behind and are affectionately knows as stragglers or 'The Public'. There are enough of them to make it worthwhile for us Traders.

I mean that scalping is no longer a long term viable trading strategy in the current market structure. Nobody who scalps as a primary mode of market operation will remain profitable over the long term.

Nope. The markets not only would and could move without traders. The markets DO move without traders. That's what Market Makers do for a living - they entice traders to trade by moving the market.

Traders trade because markets move. The more a market moves, the more traders trade. And markets most definitely ARE either in a state of bullishness, bearishness or consolidation. There are strategies to use to piggy-back the current mode and to fade the current mode. You can't not look at a chart if you're a TA bod and NOT see which mode your instrument is in. That's the whole point of TA. Which ties in perfectly with your quote of the famous 'trade what you see' mantra. But to suggest markets do not have a mode and traders move markets is erroneous. Market-Makers move markets too and they're not necessarily in trader-mode when they do that.

maildigger, when it comes to trend on virtually any timeframe, you can't really go with anything other than the primary trend as your guide. But scalping is about as far away from main or primary trends as you can get so I'd intuit you'd stand a better chance by being totally counter-primary trend in order to catch the secondary pullbacks/rallies. Actually, it makes even more sense to be counter whatever the 1 min trend is if you're scalping. Trouble is, there aren't any scalpers around who have any money left anymore so it's tough to get decent advice....

thunder, I'm with waveslider on this. Practise - absolutely. Small stakes - no, not for 6 months. If you have absolutely no FA or TA and you're picking FX which has no Volume you're going to be stretching - big time. Work on a couple of setups and perfect them in demo mode. If you can do that without resorting to 'needing' to use real money for 6 months you're probably made of real trader stuff rathen than just dumb gambler material. Then, start real small using the same setups and the same execution patterns. Do not deviate. Stay at that same level of staking for another 6 months using just the two or so setups you have perfected. If after a year you're in consistent profit and sticking to your rules - THEN and only then do you go for your max stake, which in my book would be no more than 1% of max cap per trade at risk. The biggest problem will not be finding the setups that match you style and trading capability (3 hours/day) - it'll be not putting real money on the line for 6 months. And not uping the ante when you do. You think you can do it, but most can't. Good luck.

It sometimes helps, helps a lot actually, to pretend you don't know when you think you do. When you think you know something, you're not in the best state to learn anything new about that 'thing'. So assuming you don't know everything about anything is a pretty useful MO in my view. It also builds real humility rather than false humility. You never get to stop starting to learn.

Interesting insights Soul. Especially so given my current areas of research. I'm using a derivation of MP where instead of just 'time at value' I'm using 'volume at value'. Time is a function of habit, even for traders, is somewhat less fluid than is the 'commitment to trade'. For instance, it costs nobody anything not to trade and a value can be maintained with no buying or selling, simply through inaction. What constitutes commitment is the proactive/reactive pressures which lead to actual trading, and the extent of that pressure as mirrored in the volume traded. It's looking like abetter match for my trading style than does vanilla MP. As for your trader’s ability to ‘see’ MP just by looking at candlesticks, that’s what first alerted me to the volume angle for MP. Looking at the 5 min volume-candles and the equivalent MP in a second window – I could ‘see’ what it was that was missing informationally from the standard MP. Sector analysis is pretty much a part of standard Dow theory. What stays weak in a strong market or strong in a weak market. I’m less into the sectors than into different markets right now. How currencies and commodities relate to bonds and stocks for instance. Murphy’s work in that area is still the best and serves as my template. This isn’t the first time we hear of pro traders being far more (totally?) discretionary then us TA types imagine. But then, the stats on pro traders success rates needs to be more fully qualified before we all head off down that path. Commissions and other related trading services still, AFAIAA count more to their bottom line than do their pure trading activities.

notouch does touch (arf!) on the statistical basis for discounting any bias toward a specific line of action based on a day of the week, week of the year etc. However... In a bull trend, a Monday 'normally' opens strong carries on into into Tuesday morning with a weakening and/or decline setting in Tuesday afternoon through Wednesday. By Thursday we're back into an advance with a close at the high of the week on Friday. 'Normally' being the operative word, not every week in every bull market. Reverse all of the above for a bear trend. There are also monthly shenanigans on the Monday after the week of the options expiration. But that's a little more detailed and quite another topic. Does anyone else use Jenkins' stuff here?

Option 1, but without the "...and wait for a new entry". If you're wrong, you're wrong. Get on with frying other fish. By the same token, just because you called it wrong last time, doesn't mean you stay shy of that stock. It has no memory of you.

Yellowcake is at an all time high (adjusted for inflation) and I've seen estimates of $250 mentioned.

Just finished reviewing the system so I'll jump in if that's OK. You work with the close on the the hourly of the Advancing Issues (NYSE) data with a 7 period (7 trading hours) ROC. It's an 'always on' system in that you're always in the market (which disqualifies it immediately from my toolkit). According to the published details, you review and potentially take a position every hour, which indicates potential pyramiding, but elsewhere it refer to a 'constant number of conteracts' so I guess I'm reading that part incorrectly. Where the RoC on the Advancing issues is greater than a 3 percent increase, you close any short and take a long. Where the RoC on the Advancing Issues is less than a 1 percent increase, you close any open longs and take a short. It is suggested you use the S&P futures to allow the NYSE close Advancing Issues data to be utilized on that day in the futures. It has performed well and it has perfomred badly on my back-test review. Pretty much the same as my randon coin toss system has. YMMV

Absolutely spot on torero. AND...I also take price movements from other sectors and other markets into account when assessing my technical position. So, where is the money flow:Gold, Oil, Stocks, Bonds? And what does that mean short, medium and long term? That's the thing. Where does good old TA finish and FA start? If I'm looking at the flow of money out of Bonds caused by changes in the interest rate or protective moves into oil and I use that price/yield data to make an assessment of my short term bias in stocks in the enrrgy sector for instance - is that TA or FA?